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<<Problem to next confront: Resolution of Dorothy, Toto, and
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>From www.intellectualcapital.com
> Evolution Devolution
> by George B. Pyle
> Thursday, August 19, 1999
> Comments: 306 posts
>
>
> The theory that last week motivated the
> Kansas State Board of Education to leave Darwin out of its
> science standards was not evolution, but devolution -- the
> devolution of power to the local level.
>
> With the 27 experts on their own curriculum panel, six university
> presidents and one governor all opposing equal educational
> standing for creationism and evolution, the best the five
> conservative members of the 10-person board could do was craft a
> "compromise" that left the matter to local school boards. Or
> maybe that is what the conservatives wanted all along.
>
> The theory that the religious right can win fights at the local
> level that it could not possibly win on the national, or even a
> state, stage is the real theory being tested in Kansas and,
> perhaps depending on what else happens here, in many other states
> as well.
>
> A vote with little practical effect
>
> Despite all the headlines and hoopla Kansas received from the
> vote, the immediate impact of the state school board's 6-4
> approval of science standards sanitized of virtually all mention
> of evolution probably will be nil.
>
> The state board only decides what subjects will be covered on
> state assessment tests. Local school boards still control
> curricula and textbooks, and so far, not one local school
> superintendent or school board member has indicated any interest
> in dropping evolution from their schools.
>
> <Picture: Is it smart to leave out evolution?>
> Is it smart to leave
> out evolution?
> Still, the experiment is whether, as liberals fear and
> conservatives sort of deny, the abandonment of evolution on the
> state level is intended to move the fight to individual
> communities, where media attention will be less and Christian
> Coalition-like organizations have more of a chance to carry the
> day.
>
> The conservatives who pushed the compromise, and the one moderate
> who gave it the deciding vote, were talking little this month
> about evolution and less about creationism. Instead, they
> stressed the beauty of local control of schools, and how big-city
> liberals think small-town Kansans are too stupid to manage their
> own affairs. Unaddressed by that faction is why, if local control
> is so wonderful, we need state standards -- or a state school
> board -- at all.
>
> These Kansas conservatives indeed oppose the teaching of
> evolution, or at least the teaching of evolution without equal
> time given to a Genesis-based view of the world's origins. But
> their argument that their decision was less about the origins of
> life than about the locus of power has much truth in it.
>
> Local control of schools is an idea with a long tradition in
> America. It certainly is something that candidates for national
> office have promoted, if only to avoid having to answer questions
> about education. It allows Republicans to call for the
> abolishment of the federal Education Department without being
> thought anti-school.
>
> After the recent vote in Kansas, Republican presidential
> candidate Elizabeth Dole, perhaps because of her
> Kansan-by-marriage status, was peppered with questions about her
> stand on evolution and creationism in schools. She took the
> traditional stand of affirming herself as a "person of strong
> faith," ducked the question of what that strong faith told her
> about the origin of life, and insisted that education is a state
> issue.
>
> Publisher Steve Forbes -- whose campaign is based on trying to
> prove to the Republican religious right that a rich man not only
> can enter the Kingdom of Heaven but also can be elected president
> of it -- echoed Dole's view of education as a state issue.
>
> A vast right-wing conspiracy?
>
> Last year, Steve Abrams, a member of the state school board, said
> he was going to challenge Republican Gov. Bill Graves' bid for
> re-nomination because Graves was not fiscally or socially
> conservative enough. Abrams later stepped aside to let David
> Miller, who had been state Republican chairman, be the sole
> religious-conservative challenger to the business-moderate
> Graves.
>
> Graves thumped Miller in the Republican primary, pulling 73% of
> the vote, then beat the Democrats' sacrificial lamb by an
> identical percentage. And Graves' moderate wing recaptured the
> state party apparatus from grassroots conservative activists who
> had won it four years before.
>
> But Abrams' wing of the party still held half the seats on the
> little-noticed state school board, an office for which there are
> always few candidates and less public interest. And it was there
> that they could accomplish something.
>
> Abrams started by complaining that science curriculum standards
> drafted by a panel of scientists and educators were too friendly
> to evolution and too dismissive of his worldview of creationism
> or, as he preferred to describe it, intelligent design. Abrams
> proposed language that would have students learn about the flaws
> in evolution theory and the way intelligent design fills the
> gaps.
>
> But, deadlocked in a 5-5 tie and pressured by the state's press
> and educational establishment, the board consistently refused to
> adopt such standards. After months of fussing, language that
> ignored the controversy won over the single vote needed to
> approve new curriculum standards.
>
> Graves, characteristically a calm consensus-builder, blasted the
> state board vote as an embarrassment and its members as being
> "out of sync with reality." His aides publicly complained that
> the resulting damage to the state's reputation would undermine
> the administration's top goal: expanding the state economy by
> attracting new business.
>
> When moderates on the board, in the Legislature and in the state
> educational establishment complained that it was all a grand
> conspiracy to move the question of evolution to the local level,
> where the anti-evolutionists had a better chance to win,
> conservatives said moderates (whom they labeled "liberals") were
> paranoid and predicted they would soon start complaining about
> "black helicopters."
>
> Recasting the debate
>
> Certainly, if conservatives are planning a stealth campaign to
> get creationism into, or simply to get evolution out of, public
> schools district by district, they must lie low for awhile. The
> national media heat is still on, and moderate Republicans are
> steamed enough to threaten the abolition of the state school
> board.
>
> But, of course, that may be just what the conservatives want. As
> the recent blitz of media attention demonstrates, even the state
> school board -- even the Kansas state school board -- may be too
> visible to the media and educational establishment to be a safe
> target for the religious right.
>
> The lesson for both sides is that talking about evolution and
> creationism makes too tempting a target for the mainstream media
> and makes it too easy to dismiss religious conservatives as
> retrograde nuts who are setting American education back to
> pre-"Inherit the Wind" standards. Portraying the argument as one
> of local control was the winner for the conservatives in Kansas,
> and it will be the approach that conservatives heartened by the
> success, and moderates appalled by it, will be watching.
>
> George B. Pyle is a columnist for the Salina Journal in Kansas.
> His e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
A<>E<>R
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