Not sure how this wording/language gets to creationism…??  Anyone??

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@RayThaw He is not promoting teaching creationism in our schools. He is trying to introduce what is called ironically called “Teaching the controversy.” (Ironic because there is no controversy lol.) I suggest you goggle this and read up on it. This is their latest tatic in the war on science.

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It opens the door to creationism…thats the problem

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seems reasonable to me:

“thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution”

as long as there is also:

“thorough presentation and critical analysis of Creationism”

Evolution stands up to scrutiny where Creationism does not.

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The idea that you can teach young impressionable people through the rather ironic ‘teach the controversy’ is a bit like saying let’s teach reason through the vehicle of sarcasm….. Let’s teach the kids the world is flat and maybe they will all have their own gallileo moment… Or maybe we should just give the facts.
What would happen if we opened the door to the discredit of scientific reason to legal issues…. ‘your honour, the reported time of death, as confirmed by the coroner places x at the scene of the crime, but since x is a creationist, he chooses to reject the scientific facts and prefers to believe he could not have been the murder, therefore he cannot be found guilty…

It is a sad world

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The whole “teach the controversy”-thing has always been bogus. We don’t do that about anything else. The validity of scientific theories is not decided by 12 year olds in the classroom, or even by high school students or university students who have taken an introductory biology course.

That’s just the way things are - teachers are to give them the facts and the best explanation that science currently has to offer, not ask students what they want to believe. Teachers are also supposed to encourage curiosity and scientific thinking in students, so that some of them can go forth to become real scientists in the future - at which point those students can have the necessary knowledge to make informed criticism of theories in their field.

The theory of evolution does not absolutely perfectly explain everything about the development of life, any more than any other theory perfectly explains anything else. That’s just a fact of science - there’s always more to be discovered and the theory will continue being tweaked as we dig up more fossils, sequence more DNA, study more generations of laboratory bacteria and fruit flies, et cetera.

But the broad strokes of evolution, the basis of the theory, is beyond questioning. Unless there is a prankster God giving us mountains of falsified evidence, there is no way we could be mistaken about the basic facts about things evolving and the general mechanisms behind evolution. But the typical “teach the controversy”-language aims to throw even that into doubt in the minds of impressionable young children.

Tell a kid about the wonders of something like the theory of relativity, and then make a small mention about “but recent physics calls some of that into question and more work remains to be done before we know the whole truth” and you haven’t lied. But for many children that will sound like “Yeah, it all sounds cool, but in reality we don’t really know anything, Einstein had no idea what he was talking about and we’re constantly changing our mind about what’s true.”

Much of “critical analysis” should be saved until students have the necessary knowledge about science and the scientific method to understand that a theory being “challenged” doesn’t mean that it’s false or faked or some guess that has just been left to stand until now.

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If they pass this. This is how you teach the “controversy”:
1) you critically lay out all of the evidence for evolution, painstakingly, and how all of biology is based on it
2) you critically lay out all of the lack of evidence for creationism and the lack of evidence for the existence of any supernatural phenomenon like gods.
3) You show that based on all of the evidence, there really is no controversy.
QED

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