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Originally posted by sigma:

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Originally posted by Antonio Wright:

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Originally posted by sigma:

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Originally posted by Corbett:

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Originally posted by Antonio Wright:

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I am going to have to disagree. I personally believe that both should taught in the classroom because both are theories. It is not fair to only hear one side of the argument.

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Awesome Ant! I totally agree about equal time in public schools.

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Simple fact is that if students had to be taught every side of every argument, no one would ever leave school. If we make it so that you have to give equal time to both those theories I want you to give equal time to my theory too, and some other kid's parents will want you to give equal time to their belief. And then I want you to do it for every single subject you cover. It'd make for a GREAT education, but an endless one. You could go on forever on a single subject.

School curiculum is focused on teaching the leading belief of the expert community on the subject at that time. As soon as a majority of the scientific community subscribes to Creationism then we can require that it be taught in school. Granted, that's a Catch-22, getting a significant number of scientists to subscribe to a theological theory, but you have to set up some sort of standards for curriculum if you're going to start requiring things like equal time for alternative theories.

For the record, I don't necessarily have a problem with it being taught as an alternative theory, just not a required one, and a teacher who chooses to fit it into their lesson plan should be prepared to deal with the flak they'll get)

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It would not take a whole school year. The teacher could just say that not every believes in evolution and present the other theory. I see nothing wrong or even hard to do.

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There's lots of "other" theories regarding how we got here. Where do you stop? You want to stop at the point where you're satisfied. What about other people who believe other things? What about other subjects? If we require equal time to alternative theories on creation then we should equally require the same thing for why World War 2 began, or what the Battle at the Alamo really was about.

In grade school you simply get the prevailing scientific theory of the time. Whatever it may be. In later years you teach alternate theories when you can take an entire course on that one subject. It's be great if we had all the time in the world to do that early on, but we don't. We used to teach kids the Four Food Groups, then we taught them the Food Pyramid, now we teach them the new Food Pyramid; but we leave the nuances of nutrition for later years in education when you can take an entire course just devoted to nothing but that.

For example, I hope everyone in here could tell me that 2+2=4. We were all taught that, right? But you probably weren't taught that 2+2 is also equal to 100, 11, and 10. Or that the solution to 19+5 is 24, 22, 20, 1B, 14, 120, or 11000, among several other answers. Those are all correct answers. 19+5 has at least 18 solutions actually, we only teach children one of them. But 19+5=24, a base-10 standard, is the prevailing scientific thought on what grade-school students should learn in school. When you get older you might learn the other ways. Base-10 caught on for everyday use because it's really easy to use your fingers to count. Should we require that all students learn all the other ways too? It's only fair to give equal time to all possible answers, right?

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