Some interesting items of note happened recently:
Stifling Science: La. Legislators Vote To Retain Creationist Legislation.
In what must have been a surreal moment, Sen. Elbert Guillory (D-Opelousas) told a story about how he found relief from an unspecified ailment, apparently by visiting some type of voodoo practitioner. Guillory said that experience makes him reluctant to “lock the door on being able to view ideas from many places, concepts from many cultures.â€
According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Guillory said, “Yet if I closed my mind when I saw this man – in the dust, throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed – if I had closed him off and just said, ‘That’s not science. I’m not going to see this doctor,’ I would have shut off a very good experience for myself.â€
By all accounts, Kiera Wilmot’s science experiment gone wrong triggered just a tiny pop and a small amount of smoke at Bartow High School last week — but her tale is certifiably blowing up the Internet today. Thanks to Reddit and Reason, thousands of people have commented on Wilmot’s story, many asking the same question: How could an otherwise model student be expelled and charged with a felony over an experiment that didn’t hurt anyone?
New Science Standards Draw Some Criticism
“One doesn’t need to be a global-warming skeptic to be appalled by a new set of national K-12 science standards,” said Heather Mac Donald, who writes on a wide range of issues for the National Review Online, and is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. She argues that the standards “put the study of global warming and other ways that humans are destroying life as we know it at at the very core of science education. This is a political choice, not a scientific one. But the standards are equally troubling in their embrace of the nostrums of progressive pedagogy. … The standards drearily mimic progressive education’s enthusiasm for ‘critical-thinking skills.’ “
