Dark sarcasm in the classroom

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In Colorado -- home to many of America's most dangerous purveyors of darkness, America's anti-Enlightenment -- a sixth-grade class has put global warming on "trial" and found humans not guilty of causing it. The teacher, Ken Poppe, is a global warming denier (and he says he doesn't "believe" in Darwinism). His son was the "lead prosecutor".

There's so much wrong here, so much wrong with the "trial" itself and so much wrong even with holding one as an allegedly educational exercise, but see Pharyngula's PZ Myers for a sensible debunking.

Poppe claims to have done this in the name of neutrality -- which is why, he says, he didn't just show An Inconvenient Truth -- but, as Myers puts it, "'[n]eutrality' is not a desirable characteristic in a science teacher," not when, as in this case, neutrality is a justification to present alternative theories on an equal plane even when there is overwhelming consensus in support of one of the theories:

When the two positions are a) supported by the evidence, and b) not supported by the evidence, you are not doing your job to claim that a and b are equal. To do so is to unfairly promote the status of the unsupported premise…which is exactly what Ken Poppe is doing. He is lying to promote crackpottery in the science classroom.

As with global warming denial so, too, with so-called intelligent design. Both the deniers of global warming and the opponents of evolution -- that is, in both cases, the opponents of science and enemies of truth -- have taken to advancing "anything-might-be-true" relativism as a cover for their moralistic crusades.

In Poppe's classroom, as in so many others, the victims are the children. Beyond that, such thought control affects us all.

We certainly don't need this sort of "education".