someday we'll live on venus / men will walk on mars / but we will still be monkeys / down deep inside

Oh, my.

Still, as has been pointed out, Bush didn't exactly endorse Intelligent Design Theory; he just said ID should be taught because "people ought to be exposed to different ideas". All right, y'all there in the back of the classroom- Prodigal Son and Demophoenix is it?– stop giggling. What's that? Doesn't read newspapers? "People on [his] staff" tell him "what's happening in the world"?

That's enough of that.

Listen: I know I'm screaming into the void, but sometimes you just gotta. And right now I'm screaming as a high school teacher.

When we teach core subjects to teenagers, we're not teaching specific information so much as a kind of "muscle memory" of the mind. We're practicing abilities more than teaching knowledge. For example, I teach junior and senior English. When we read Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn or Walt Whitman's poetry, I don't delude myself that students will remember these classics, hold them in their hearts, and quote them to their army buddies like Charles Winchester on M*A*S*H.

Instead, we practice reading these books together in the hope that kids will learn how to read the classics; that they will begin to understand how to enjoy a production of Shakespeare or approach a classic American novelist; that they will at some point be able to sit down by a roaring fire and dig a poem.

Lookit, there are two schools of thought regarding what comprises an educated person.

The first school is that of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Hirsch's book Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know induced major parental guilt throughout North America as we entered the final decade of the twentieth century. Hirsch listed vast itemized pages of data that he claimed we all should know. According to Hirsch, every adult American should know approximately 5,000 things. Not so bad, you think? Surely you know 5,000 bits of data?

Problem is, you gotta know what Hirsch thinks is important. For example, by the first grade you should be able to recite the Iroquois myth "Why the Owl Has Big Eyes".

Don't know the Iroquois myth? Oh, dear. But perhaps you know "Puss-in-Boots" or "The Princess and the Pea" or the other 20 stories, 42 rhymes, 13 sayings, and 13 myths and fables Hirsch recommends Americans know before second grade?

Albert Einstein's view of intelligence was apprently slightly easier to achieve. Einstein is reputed to have had trouble remembering his own phone number. When asked about this he supposedly said "I never memorize something that I can look up."

This story may well be apocryphal, but it makes a good point, especially in our information age. I can easily google Iroquois myths. What I can't google is the ability to read, to critique, to evaluate, to induce and deduce.

Which is where the "muscle memory" comes in. The muscle memory of my discipline involves understanding concepts like plot, audience, dramatic irony, metaphors, and symbolism. The muscle memory of science classes involves the scientific method.

And that's why Intelligent Design is not appropriately taught in science classes. It didn't arise from the scientific method. A scientific theory can always be tested. It can be falsified. Accordingly, it must make testable predictions. What is the scientific theory of ID? What are the testable predictions of ID? What observations could falsify it?

Einstein gave us the twentieth century; E.D. Hirsch gave us a best-selling book. The scientific method gave us microwave ovens, modern medicine, the moon landing, and computers. Religion gave us Dante, some wild music, and some killer art. Both have fantastic track records, but they shouldn't be taught in the same class.

Look, you want Creationism in the schools? Fine. Bring the myth of Adam and Eve to me; I'll gladly teach it in literature class alongside the story of the Great Green Arkleseizure.

But it ain't science.

SPACEDARK