August 13, 2005
Bush's Intelligently Designed Plan
Bush, all of my leftist friends are complaining these days, has said recently that intelligent design ought to be taught alongside evolution in schools.
If he is in fact claiming this (which I don't know because I haven't read what he said and the context directly yet; and with people quoting Bush, you always have to watch out), then maybe - just maybe - it's not as ridiculous as an idea as it sounds. Here's one plausible argument for doing so:
Clearly one of the principle reasons why our pre-college education is so poor is because the government controls the vast majority of the schools; no competition and control from distant (government!) authorities is the formula for mediocrity. The converse of this is of course why our college education is so good.
Public education is bad--but it's just good enough so that the people don't revolt and start forming their own (thus, private!) schools en masse. It's not--yet--bad enough to be worth our energy to change it.
Therefore, what is the best way to seriously get people to start forming their own schools, thus taking the role of education largely out of the government's hands and allowing each person to make their own educational choices (and the inevitable huge improvement in quality as a result)? Make the education as ridiculous as possible. And by teaching intelligent design on equal footing to evolution does that.
This is similar to Marx's opposition to labor reform laws, that supposedly helped improve the condition of the working class that Marx loved so much. Marx opposed it because he knew that, with only marginal gains in comfort, the people would be satisfied enough to stop fighting for the revolution he wanted so much. He would rather the workers be more oppressed so that they made the revolution happen, rather than a bit less oppressed so that they would remain content with the current system.
Teaching intelligent design, therefore, accomplishes three key goals:
- It makes the fundamentalist Christian constituency happy (insofar as it exists: See Alex for more details)
- It drives the middle class towards creating their own private schools (which is only a great thing for the future of the country that drastically needs to be done!)
- It gets the right people angry--and it does so over an issue that, ultimately, is entirely unimportant. It's like the school prayer debate a few years ago: Bush's opponents, rather than concentrating their energies to fight Bush on the issues that matter, will waste more energy fighting him on something almost entirely symbolic and nothing more.
Posted by Morgan at 09:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.spareink.com/mt-tb.cgi/92
Comments
This is more or less the Ralph Nader approach back in 2000: better to help Bush win, thereby galvanizing the left and moving it toward his vision, than to let Gore win, thereby continuing the rightward drift of the American left (albeit while still in power). If it worked so well for Gore and the American left, maybe it'll work just as well for Bush.
Posted by: Palaverist at August 16, 2005 05:24 PM
Intelligent design, although wrong, isn't dangerous. If everyone in America believed that God created the world in seven days, nothing would change. At best it's irrelevant. We should be worrying about stuff that schools are teaching that are wrong but actually matter -- and sadly, there's quite a lot of it.
Posted by: Dan at August 19, 2005 05:58 PM
Post a comment
E-mail this entry to a friend!
