An Orlando Sentinel columnist takes apart several bills that Sen. Alan Hays has filed this year in the state legislature:Â Hays files wild bills in Senate. His bill about school instructional materials, which Florida Citizens for Science opposes, gets a mention:
Hays wants parents to be able to inspect all “instructional materials” and to opt their children out of any they don’t happen to like. Talk about a recipe for chaos. The bill also would require districts to adopt “non-inflammatory” books and materials. What does that even mean? The bill is unneeded because the state already has a solution for this problem. It is called home schooling.
On the flip side is a letter to the editor from one of the main authors and supporters of Hays’ bill, Keith Flaugh. Part of his letter says:
Today, materials are laced with revisionist history, religious and political indoctrination, pornography and even math methodologies that boggle common sense.
Parents and grandparents from 11 counties recently went to Tallahassee to urge support for these cleanup bills. We found overwhelming support for “local curriculum control” and repulsion to the age-inappropriate, factually distorted materials being subjected upon our children.
For Florida Citizens for Science’s take on this bill, click on the category in the right column labeled “Instructional Materials bills ’16.”
… and even math methodologies that boggle common sense.
When “common sense” so often translates to “widespread ignorance”, a good boggle might be highly edifying.
Mathematics occupies a strange conceptual niche, absolutely necessary for all branches of science but not, strictly speaking, a science in itself. Does this fall inside or outside of FCS’s remit?