The Pedagogical Equivalent Of Child Abuse

A note of full disclosure at the outset:  My late father, who taught political science at Johns Hopkins University, was also part of a government committee that successfully promoted an expansion of public higher education in Maryland.  That was just one of many ways in which he devoted his life to the promotion of education.  He had experienced in his own life the power of education to transform and elevate an individual from the circumstances into which he was born.  He very much wanted others to experience that same transforming power.  It is his greatest legacy, and one that I, in whatever way I can, am happy to honor and promote.

Which is why a story like this one, pardon my French in advance, pisses me off royally.

I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with religion being taught as religion, whether at a religious or secular school.  But I have an enormous, Mount St. Helens size problem with religion being taught as science.  The school referenced in the article and, sadly, hundreds of others like it are setting up a conflict in the heads of their students that will in many cases carry over into every area of their adult lives, one in which science--true science--is seen as something sinister and dishonest.

That view could easily cost them not only their health and lives, but the health and lives of their families and even whole communities.  One need look no further than the anti-vaccination movement, which is threatening to bring deadly diseases back to life, to see evidence of this happening already.  At the very least, these schools are giving their students a mistrust of science that will set them back professionally, if not personally, in a global economy where Darwin has been a fact of life for decades.

So, when I call this form of teaching the pedagogical equivalent of child abuse, I'm not being melodramatic.  I am, in the words of the late, underappreciated Howard Cosell, telling it like it is.  There is no room for pulling punches which the minds and lives of our children's future--indeed, our future--is at stake.  No school with this sort of instruction should be licensed.  And, regardless of religion, no parent worthy of the label should send their children to one.