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From the Discovery Institute:

Turning Darwin Day into Academic Freedom Day

Next year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. As you can imagine, Darwinists have a full year of celebrations planned, and February 12th, Darwin’s birthday, is likely to be the high water mark for most of those celebrations. Every year Darwin Day celebrations get more and more elaborate and outrageous. Celebrants decorate evolution trees, sing Darwin carols and odes to natural selection, and eat from the tree of life.Academic Freedom Day.

Naturally, we don’t want you to miss out on the fun. On Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (Feb. 12, 2009), we want students everywhere to speak out against censorship and stand up for free speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution and turn “Darwin Day” into

Actually, the Darwin cult has become so ridiculous that it would be hard to parody. Just look at this ridiculous hagiography. And if they force it down school kids throats, some of it might wind up coming back again, too.

Video and Essay Contest: Grand Prize $500

All the details are here:

Who Is Eligible

Students currently enrolled in high school (grades 9-12) or as a college undergraduate may enter the contest. (High school students include those attending private, public, or home schools.) Essays must be submitted by an individual student, but videos may be submitted by a group of up to 5 students.The PrizesOne grand-prize winner will be announced and have his or her entry officially unveiled at academicfreedomday.com on Academic Freedom Day, February 12th 2009. The grand-prize winner will be awarded $500, and one essay runner-up and one video runner-up will receive $250. Up to 10 finalists will receive their choice of a free book or DVD.

The Deadline
Entries must be submitted to the YouTube Group “Academic Freedom Day Video Contest” here, by the end of business on January 23, 2009.

Here’s Ben Stein introducing the idea:

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Will Toronto Life to be the next “human rights”media victim?

We are 98 percent chimpanzee? Scratch that.

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Civil rights on the agenda at Conservative Party Convention?

Painting with an undirected brush

Comments
Really, I don't know. The problem is that all the ID sites I know of presume the user has working knowledge of the subject material and is probably way above the level of younger students. It's possible we might end up reworking the OE site to be more kid-friendly once again. But I think we'd have to find a writer who can regularly contribute articles targeted at that demographic.Patrick
November 24, 2008
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Oh, sorry, thank you for the update Patrick. I only remember recommending it to my kids a while back. Where should they go now for ID sites. I don't think they have them at their schools, plus I don't think I want them to have to put up with being martyred like Poor Gonzalez was.JackInhofe
November 24, 2008
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OE's purpose changed quite a while back, becoming open to non-students. More recently Bill is trying to figure out what to do with the site, or at least the domain name. I'm currently heading up OE but I don't have any personal plans for it other than continuing to moderate.Patrick
November 24, 2008
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Shouldn't this be cross-posted to Overwhelming Evidence? Wasn't OE created, and designed to appeal to High school and college kids? If you put this post over there, I bet that there would be lots of responses.JackInhofe
November 24, 2008
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... if this flops as badly as I suspect it will as then it’ll be obvious the classroom has no interest in ID.
Academic freedom is the issue, and the right to debate an unproven theory, not teaching ID as curriculum.
Will ID give up it’s interest in the classroom if this flops [?] ...
Again, not the issue. Based on an unfounded fear of religious teaching in science classes, and more specifically, the challenges to the 'natural causation' hypothesis in evolutionary theory, academic and scientific freedoms have been under attack. That is the central theme of Expelled, and not the teaching of ID or religion. And I doubt it will 'flop'. I'd bet that students are open to the cause for academic freedom.LeeBowman
November 15, 2008
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"On Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday (Feb. 12, 2009), we want students everywhere to speak out against censorship and stand up for free speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution" That is a great idea for a contest! What teenager wouldn't want a chance to stand up for free speech and against censorship? Here's one example, a girl in Chicago who found out just how tolerant her school was when she wore a "McCain" T-shirt: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-kass-13-nov13,0,2881384.columnfeebish
November 14, 2008
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If the topic is winning Ben Stein's money, here's a funny video where it may be that some people won a _lot_ of Ben Stein's money: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/cassandra_was_right/Jaz
November 14, 2008
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