Louisiana now has an Academic Freedom Act in the works. Academic Freedom Acts are right wing ploys to force specific issues ... or more commonly, specific politically or religiously motivated version of issues ... into the classroom at various levels. Academic Freedom Acts also typically are designed to silence faculty who teach things that conservatives, evangelicals, global warming deniers, and so on do not want to hear.
From a commentary in The Daily Advertiser:
Gov. Bobby Jindal's first regular-session legislative plan is designed to help Louisiana schools train a better work-force. So why does Sen. Ben Nevers seem hell-bent on taking our schools back to the Dark Ages?Nevers, D-Bogalusa, has introduced the Louisiana Academic Freedom Act. (See also Patriot Act, Freedom to Farm Act.) The legislation's innocent-sounding purpose is to prohibit anyone who runs a public elementary or secondary school from preventing the teaching of "certain scientific evidence." It forbids "content-based censorship."
Innocent, that is, until you stumble across Paragraph 4(a), which outlines the "certain scientific evidence." That would be, among other things, intelligent design.
There's nothing stupid about believing that God created everything - at least not to me, since that's what I believe. But intelligent design is an affront to both religion and science. And, in a way, it got its start here.
Read the rest of the commentary, buy Bill Decker, here.
Comments
here is an article about it I found on NOLA.com
http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1206854413135090.xml&coll=1
Posted by: kevin | April 7, 2008 10:32 AM
Casey Luskin comments, and I blog about it. Note my frustration as I try to explain what is wrong with it to one of my friends.
Posted by: Mike Haubrich, FCD | April 7, 2008 7:39 PM
Will they never realize that the unavoidable use of words like "evidence", "scientific", and "content-based" in such legislation leads inevitably to crushing court losses when a teacher or district tries to inject nonevidential, unscientific, content-free bronze-age myths into the classroom?
Posted by: Jason Failes | April 7, 2008 9:05 PM