Antiscience bill in Tennessee

[LongTomH]

This is from Phil Plait's marvelous Bad Astronomy website: Antiscience bill passes Tennessee House. This is truly ghastly for anyone who cares about America's place in the world!

The language of the bill reads in part:

This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.

Phil comments:

On the surface this sounds like legit science; after all, science thrives on understanding the weaknesses in ideas so they can be improved. But if you read that last part, conservative antiscience rears its head: the two specific cases mentioned are evolution and global warming.

That doesn’t sound like real science is the motivation behind this bill — and reading quotes by its supporters confirms it. What this really means is that if a teacher wants to declare the Earth is 6000 years old (or make some other clearly wrong ideologically-based claim), that teacher cannot be stopped.

<snip>

So this bill passed the House, but it still has to pass the Tennessee Senate. They have their own version up for vote targeted for April 20. If you live in Tennessee, I urge you to go to the NCSE website, read up on this, and then write your local representative.

Phil's image for this:



may as well speak for the U.S. in the mid-21st century unless we stand up to these extremists! How can we maintain any sort of world leadership with a population of total science illiterates?