… due to dumping some Darwin lobby-enforced errors from textbooks.
Cry, crocodiles, cry. Cry us a swamp. Who wants to compete with you anyway?
From “Creationists In South Korea Force Removal Of Evolution From High-School Textbooks” (Huffington Post, 06/14/2012), we learn:
South Korean publishers will soon be removing examples of evolution from many high-school textbooks. The decision was taken after government officials sent the Society’s petition to publishers, reports the New York Daily News.
The group petitioned to remove specific examples of how animals have evolved, including the horse and Archaeopteryx bird, along with any reference to human evolution and Charles Darwin’s theory of human origin. The Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MEST) has confirmed that publishers are working on revised editions.
What HuffPo doesn’t tell us is that many of these topics have been plagued with errors passed on from edition to edition of textbooks for many years. There is no lineal horse series, for example. And Archaeopteryx, a flying reptile, is probably not an ancestor of birds (though it provides some useful ideas about bird development).
As for human evolution, the topic is so laden with speculation that it isn’t worth the name science. We just don’t know what happened 100,000 years ago, except for fragmentary finds. No use indulging nonsense by pretending otherwise.
In general, in the United States, the Darwin lobby has fought against correcting errors ( even Haeckel’s known fake embryo drawings , probably because correcting errors underlines the fact that it is possible for them to be mistaken.
US Darwin lobbyist Josh Rosenau is concerned:
South Korea is increasingly becoming a “scientific powerhouse,” Josh Rosenau, programs and policy director at the National Center for Science Education told the Daily News. But Rosenau worries that South Korea will not be able to compete internationally if it doesn’t continue teaching evolution in schools.
“Evolution is the core of modern biological science,” he said. “When something like this comes to fruition, the scientific community can be caught flat-footed.”
South Korea will succeed because it expects students to learn facts and thinking skills, not indulge in self-exploration, self-realization, self-esteem, or awareness of one’s own victimhood, which seems to be a great part of the curriculum in US schools, and it shows.
Famously, US students feel better about themselves than Korean students, but do worse.
A friend points to one useful model for reform in the United States, here.
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