John G. West at National Review Online explains why the recently passed Louisiana law protecting teachers who try to promote critical analysis of ideas in their classrooms is a good step for Louisiana and the nation. If you haven't been following this act as it has been buffeted and battered along its way through the state legislature suffice it to say that it has been opposed by the usual enemies of free speech and academic freedom among the Darwinists and other secularists, but in the end only three legislators voted against it.
Here's West's introduction:
To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life.
Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is "anti-science." In reality, the opposition's efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific inquiry. Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests. They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren't well explained by existing theories.
Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the "scientific" view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.
You can read the rest of West's article at the above link. To read more about LSEA you can go here.
RLC
