Friday, September 30, 2005

Educational standards?

Somehow I managed to miss the news that a graduate student at Ohio State was about to defend a dissertation looking at the effects of teaching ID creationism and evolution to high school students.
The first question one should raise in such a situation is how is it ethical for the university to be involved in teaching students something that is scientifically unsupported. What sort of lapse was made by the human subjects oversight committee?

The second question is more subtle. Two of the student's committee members were the only two OSU facility to have come out in favour of ID. Ok, fair enough - people can constitute their own committees. But, the School of Teaching and Learning requires that two committee members must come from the science education programme, and that the committee members should reflect the expertise needed for the dissertation. Neither of these were true - none of the committee members met either criterion.

It makes you wonder - was it an underhand scheme by the student, or was it a cynical ploy by the committee members? You see this more and more - dishonest actions by ID'ers to try to claim scientific credentials. They (mostly) claim to be Christians, but they turn out to be using lies and deceit to further their agenda. Makes you wonder what side they're really on.

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