The Education of an Alienated Wannabe

The alienated wannabe is one of the few local bloggers in favor the voucher proposal. The reason for his position is that public schools teach evolution as fact instead of theory.

There are two ways to interpret his post. Most people seem to read into his post that he is a right wing nut job who favors creationism creationism to science. I take the guy at his word. It seems to me that the real gist of his argument is simply that the public school system does not teach logic.

Science is dependent on logic. When you remove logic from the curriculum, science becomes a religion. It is possible that the Alienated Wannabe is more interested in protecting his faith than in the well being of kids.

I am more fond of science than religion. I think that modern efforts to transform science into a religion does more harm to science than the existence of a bunch of silly religions.

It is clear that the Alienated Wannabe feels that something was missing from his education. My guess is that he has never encountered a logic text. Without logic, we are unable to explain our ideas.

Like many, my first encounter with logic came in the form of a graduate level class.

The Classical Curriculum taught informal logic in primary school.

If the curriculum included logic, then this silly debate between the creationists and evolutionists would be muted as people would realize that both ideas are theories. Evolution appears to be a better explanation to the make up of this planet. Logic does not pit evolution in opposition to Christianity. After all, evolution is a process of creation.

Now, it is possible that the alienated wannabe is upset simply because his group does not have the hegemony in public education, and that he would be happy if his group had power. If this is the case, then it is true, the alienated wannabe is really not in favor of an open education market. There is a large number of people who only see value in freedom when they are not in power.

When you have a monopoly system in education, you will always find that there is one group or another cout out of the picture. If the lunatic right removed evolution theory from the class room, a different group of alienated people would be wanting to pull their students from the school.

The fundamental argument here is that both the left and right are full of ideas that they want to dictate to others. The right would as abusive with hegemony in the public education as the left currently is. The current monopolistic structure of education has the culture war take place in shrill screaming matches behind closed doors in teaching schools or in the legislature. The market allows for issues to work their way through in open public discourse and with parents finding the school that best suits their needs.

BTW, if you look at the curriculum of most private schools, they teach evolution and actually do a better a more thorough job of teaching the subject than public schools which still handle this important theory as a hot button political issue. When you have an open market of ideas, the best ideas tend to come forward.

Someday explorers might find a large black obelisk that spontaneously generates animals of different species. Were we to find such a device I would change my opinions about evolution in a heart beat, because the creationist argument would have more merit. Were our first interstellar voyage to bounce off a large black curtain encircling the solar system, I would abandon my believe in the large universe theory and readopt the helio centric view. In the market place of ideas, people tend toward the strongest ideas. There is also a long history of brilliant scientists who thought they got it right, but got it wrong.

It is precisely because people will veer toward the best explanation that an open market, open minded system of education would produce produce better results than a top heavy, monopolistic, bureaucratic system.