Turkey's new school year: Evolution out, jihadism in for elementary school kids

[RFayette]

Sad to see that Erdogan is turning one of the only secular powers in the Middle East/North Africa region to another Islamist hell hole.

[RFayette]

Your latter point is exactly the kind of malarkey I'm talking about. This sort of reasoning could be applied to all sorts of authoritarian stuff. Your great great grandparents were probably hopelessly ignorant of eugenics. I don't think they would have done their kids a disservice if they didn't want it taught to them in state schools.

I agree that not believing evolution is hardly a handicap in real life, but is eugenics really a fair comparison to evolution?  Eugenics is all about how things ought to be whereas evolution is simply a scientific theory about the origins of life - if one were promoting social Darwinism in economics courses (which is obviously highly related to eugenics), it would seem to be a more apt comparison, and that would be obviously inappropriate.  I think the strongest argument for teaching evolution is that if you think students ought to learn the basics of biology in high school (which seems reasonable), then it would make sense that they should be exposed to what the majority of biologists consider to be the foundational concept of the discipline.  I'll fully concede to being biased here - I love science and shudder at the thought of such an exciting subject being off-limits to people, but I do think there is nothing wrong with teaching what is an extremely well-supported theory accepted by the vast majority of biologists and banning it from the classroom seems unreasonable. 

[RFayette]

The context of this was about public school curriculum.  Are you saying that all public schools should not teach anything that might be seen as controversial by parents?  I think that allowing parents to "opt out" and study an alternative subject during that time would be a reasonable compromise, I suppose, but banning a cornerstone concept of biology from public schools to assuage the concerns of some parents a bridge too far.  

In any case, there is a bit of a slippery slope here  - if the majority of parents in a country deny the Holocaust, does that mean that the Holocaust should not be taught in history classes, important as they are?  You can be a well-functioning adult without being taught about the Holocaust, which is why it seems tougher to draw a line here than it might seem over what is an essential interest of the state.  If we agree that teaching biology is important (or history, or math, or any subject), then it would seem that the basis for deciding the curriculum - whether it be at the local, state, or national level - should be what is actually true according to the methods of the discipline (at an appropriate conceptual level for the age of the students - obviously teaching relativistic corrections or the like to middle schoolers when teaching kinematics would be silly).  If we remove evolution based on parental concerns as opposed to factual ones, where do we draw the line when it comes to deciding a curriculum?  

Also, this is more related to the idea of parental opt-outs as opposed to what should be part of the standard curriculum, but I think it raises some interesting questions.  I haven't fully thought about the issue so I can't say I have a definite opinion on it, but one argument against opt-outs is that giving kids an exposure to all scientific disciplines would enable them to pursue that field in the future.  If a child's parents do not want their kids exposed to a scientific theory, does that necessarily mean the kid shouldn't be taught it, especially when he or she is in high school?  The idea of education is to have a common body of knowledge that all citizens should know, including exposure of students to various scientific fields that they can then explore deeper in college if they wish, perhaps becoming experts in the field?  As you alluded to earlier (how important is it for society that kids know evolution?), I think that while one can contest the importance of evolution specifically, the principle that citizens ought to be scientifically informed seems uncontroversial, and parental rights that hinder such may be a step too far.