The purpose of education is the dissemination of fact and training in techniques of math, art, and scholarship.
That's only half of it. The other half is to enable people to use those facts and techniques. That's why you get assignments, do presentations, etc.
There's also alternative teaching techniques to classic lectures; more interactive classes. It's not necessary to lecture and "disseminate information"; that's just often the way people do it.
you teach somebody that critical thinking means not taking someone's word for something, and then you proceed to expect your students to take your word on the fact that ID is wrong, what do you expect that you're going to get?
I would never have such a silly expectation. The point is to use the facts in an applied setting. How you do that is up to you. As I mentioned in my post, you can try to do it in a lecture-style, or you can do it in an interactive-style. The takeaway isn't "ID is wrong"; it's the methodology for applying the biological information they learned in class. It's also learning what is science and what is not, and what the purpose is of doing science. Those are all huge, huge lessons.
And how on Earth do you expect a high school student to draw the distinction between refuting ID and refuting God?
Because nobody's refuting ID. The point is to show that it's not necessary. That doesn't say it's right or wrong, only that it doesn't need to be postulated. Furthermore, it's not scientific. There's nothing that can be done or said from an ID base theory.
People should learn the difference between religion / beliefs and science from as early as possible. The theme is implicit in all the science courses already; not making it explicit is like playing with fire anyway.
isn't that way too close to a "scientific" argument for atheism for every single student to be able to tell the difference?
It's a good point. It's implicit in the system as it is right now, but because it's implicit people can just ignore the problem. If you make it explicit (and this whole ID thing would), it's going to be hard to deal with.
So maybe it's not viable on this ground. But...
I would love to see people learn in school how to deal with this implicit issue of how to reconcile scientific knowledge with religion / beliefs. As long as we're teaching science in schools, we're implicitly teaching some forms of atheism (i.e. we're teaching against any religion which conflicts with the facts we teach in class). Look at this board--it's clear that there's a real failure to address this in our culture.
So I'm all for teaching about what science really is--a set of observables, and useful theories for describing the observations and predicting new ones. Stop playing with the line between science as agnostic and science as atheism, and show people exactly how agnostic science can be. Because by leaving the interpretation of "is science agnostic or atheistic?" up to individuals, you get a real mess.
But that makes things much more difficult, and much less implementable. It doesn't make it less important, just more "ideal" and thus less practically doable. So, I think your last point is a good one, and may be a killer.
Teaching an agnostic science is something I think is worth working towards, though.
Ben
™ Version 4.2
