Ohio column

[Sean and Mary Obrien <sobrien@COLUMBUS.RR.COM>]

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'Intelligent design' not self-evident in public schools

Monday, March 4, 2002
Steve Stephens
Dispatch Metro Columnist

Those who claim the universe was designed by Jehovah, aliens or a rogue
Apple PowerBook from the future might be on to something.

How else to explain the existence of such perfect creations as great white
sharks, Golden Delicious apples or Britney Spears' fashion designer?

However, other less successful organisms would seem to argue for the messy,
often dead-end process of evolution: the dodo, Bill Moss, Bob Taft's speech
writers. 

Certainly, the public schools show little sign of intelligent design.

American children are committed each day to institutions that are the
bureaucratic equivalent of the platypus. Public schools have the brains of a
Midwestern state senator, the heart of an IRS agent and the guts of a
school-board member. And they often lay eggs.

Now the Ohio legislature is considering a law to give "intelligent design''
equal status with the theory of evolution in public schools. Well, why not?

I have a theory myself. Democrats descended, not too far, from banana slugs.
Republicans sprang, fully formed, from the forehead of Strom Thurmond. I'm
preparing texts, study aids, charts. My grant request will soon arrive at
the U.S. Department of Education. In times like these, our children deserve
no less. 

None of this would matter if schools would actually educate, if teachers
would instill the ability and desire to question authority and seek truth.

Everyone is confronted by heaping portions of stupidity each day, dished out
by popes and presidents, bureaucrats and newspaper columnists.

A student who learns to separate wisdom from idiocy faces no great danger
from creationism, State of the Union addresses or The Dispatch editorial
page. 

But by their very nature, public schools are political, not academic,
institutions. They seek consensus and conformity, not truth.

They have not changed much since the days of 19th-century English
philosopher John Stuart Mill, who noted, "A general state education is a
mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and the
mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in
government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy or the
majority of the existing generation.''

In my collection of antique atlases are several elementary geography books
that were used in public schools. They confidently proclaim the superiority
of the white race over the black, brown, red and yellow.

Public schools will, in a democracy, teach any idiocy embraced or tolerated
by 50.0001 percent of the public. When the popular idiocies change, so do
the lessons. The only unchanging principle is obedience to state and school
authority. 

Recently one of my nephews was suspended from his rural high school -- not
for academic misconduct, disrupting class or drug abuse, but for being a
wiseacre. 

My nephew is very smart but carries the insubordination gene found in the
Stephens family. I advised my sister to seek redress under the Americans
with Disabilities Act. She was unsuccessful.

During his banishment, my nephew picketed outside his school with a sign
proclaiming, "I want to learn but they won't let me.''

I was proud. However, I would have thought that, by now, "they'' would have
taught my nephew that learning is not one of the goals of a public
education. (Maybe "they'' need more tax dollars.)

As my nephew discovered, the primary purpose of American public schools is
to churn out good, docile citizens -- that is, to ready the sheep for
shearing -- and, not coincidentally, to perpetuate public schooling.

Whether through design or natural selection, public schools have become
quite adept at filling this ecological niche, a fact that makes the battle
between creationism and evolution seem trivial.

Steve Stephens is a Dispatch Metro columnist. He can be reached at
614-461-5201 or by e-mail.


         

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