Curriculum Design

I never denied my outrage at what the KS Education Department is doing–agree with everything you say about it.

In both instances, however, we see elected bodies attempting to change HS curricula for political rather than pedagogical reasons. Is there any evidence at all that the African-American experience is under-represented in the US history curriculum in NY State?

The Irish famine mandate (which I vaguely recall) doesn’t strike me as a germane comparison. The ideological agenda (I suspect) of the Irish-Am legislators was probably very different than the ideological agenda of historians. Here, it’s very unlikely there will be any ideological gap.

Moreover, as I noted at Cliopatria, there’s a fundamental, and dangerous, difference between the NYS and KS programs. As bad as it is, at least the KS program isn’t making any attempt to influence college teaching of biology. By including “teacher training programs” among its provisions, the NYS program could veer into college curricula as well.

It must be wonderful to know what one thinks of everything without the grubby necessity of finding out what’s so and what isn’t. Of course, it’s often a safe bet, on general principles or wide-ranging, non-partisan cynicism, that such projects will turn out badly, but waiting to see the results before trying to score rhetorical points seems to be too much to ask.

Just to pile on, I think Mr. Johnson is right, although he fails to really explain his argument in detail.

There are, in fact, two things wrong with the nonsense in Kansas. The first is the substantive issue that Intelligent Design is flat out bunk and should not be taught. The second is a question of process: they are tinkering with the curriculum for obviously political reasons. It isn’t as if they have given careful consideration to ID vs. evolution and simply decided incorrectly. No, they are playing there hand in the culture war. This isn’t particularly surprising, making political decisions is what politicians do, and that is why such decisions should generally be kept out of the politicians. This isn’t always possible, because there obviously needs to be someone there to intervene if a school decides to make Mein Kampf the focus of its curriculum, but for the most part they should be kept out of it because politicians are entirely ill-suited to making these kinds of substantive, factual decisions.

The New York case doesn’t have the first problem. African-American history is (presumably) not total bunk like ID. It does, however, have the second issue. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the legislator, who is behind this, as in your Irish example, didn’t make a detailed inquiry into the state of the curriculum when he proposed this. It is a political move to please ideological allies. The fact that it may have good results, whereas ID is unquestionably toxic to education, is irrelevant, at least as pertains to Mr. Johnson’s argument.

Contrary to my last name, I have ancestors who came over on the Mayflower but none who experienced the famine (to call it nothing worse) of the 1840’s in Ireland. That said, may I say that, not for the first time on this usually admirable site, I find something unseemly in the final sentence of this post? Just what is this “Irish American” experience you’re talking about in such a snotty tone?

I recall hearing from my father that in order to get through his officer training in World War II he had to be subjected to near-Klan levels of anti-Catholic bigotry in the classroom. And I recall from my own undergraduate days the Irish being perpetually set up as straw man racists in the Civil War era (they may have been treated worse than slaves but at least they were “free”) in a college that managed to avoid Catholic (and Jewish) students until after 1900 — in Massachusetts, no less.

Oops. That’s bugmenot.com.

What’s at issue in Kansas is whether or not a pseudo-scientific set of rhetorical claims that were consciously designed to create a wedge in the heart of science are given equal standing to a well established and tested scientific theory.

You’ve pretty much summarised why the PC left is so disgraceful when it is demonstrated that humans evolved, too, and so we can learn things about human motivations and actions from this. What’s at issue in evolutionary psychology is whether or not a pseudo-scientific set of rhetorical claims that were consciously designed to create a wedge in the heart of science are given equal standing to a well established and tested scientific theory.

If the science teachers of Kansas decided to teach Intelligent Design, I would say: maybe you folks should think about hiring better science teachers, but you have to let the ones you’ve hired teach as they see fit.

I think this is wrong, and I think it comes from framing the issue in the wrong way. The issue with regard to ID shouldn’t be who decides (thus I think it’s confusing rather than illuminating to compare it to the NY example). The issue is teaching sectarian religious views in the public schools. The problem with ID isn’t (simply) that it’s bunk; it’s that it is religion dressed up as science. David Velleman’s comment implies that a legal ‘solution’ to the Kansas situation would be to fire all the science teachers in Kansas and replace them with creationist ones — then creationism could be properly taught in biology classes. Whereas this would clearly be a horrendous exacerbation of the problem — which is, at its root, incipient theocracy. It may well be that Kansas would have a problem if its school boards were meddling in school curricula; but it has a problem of a different sort if its school boards are requiring that teachers teach religious views in public schools.

I’m not convinced by Glenn’s suggestion for what’s allegedly common between the two cases: “legislators are intervening without really understanding the issues, and their motivations are shabbily political”. I mean, that’s what politicians do, and just about anything they do is tainted by it. Sure, this is a bad thing; sure, we should object; but it doesn’t make for an interesting similarity between the two cases because you could say the same about any two pieces of (actual or proposed) legislation.

There is an important parallel between the cases: both involve legislators seeking to influence the curriculum. I don’t think that’s enough to he very interesting, though. I’d guess almost everyone agrees that legislators should have some influence over state-run education: shouldn’t they be allowed to stop it if the schools start teaching geocentrism or Holocaust denial? And I’d guess that almost everyone agrees that their influence should be limited. So the question is how limited, and it seems entirely possible to answer that in a way that says no to ID (hmm, haven’t I heard that slogan before?) and yes to Armistad.

The only way to fend off legislative interference with school curricula is put one’s foot down at the very beginning, on purely procedural grounds: legislators have no business meddling with the curriculum, full stop.

Legislators sure do have business meddling with the curriculum. The issue is not procedural, but of the substance of their meddling.

whoa, evolutionary psychology does not have the status of a ‘well established and tested scientific theory’. Evopsych accounts of human behaviour do not properly control for, nor understand the effects of social and cultural forces that shape human behavior.

Dude, what a straw man. No, they don’t “control for” environmental contributions to ontogenesis, because the interaction of factors right from the womb is so massively complex as to render the very concept far outside our limits of conception. (We could, of course, do experiments on twins where we control for as many factors as possible — but I believe you know where the nearest examples to that methodology came from.) But if evolutionary psychology is an academic field without clinical trials, it’s just in the same boat with much of political science, economics, anthropology, historical linguistics, and, well, uh, evolutionary theory in general.

Peter’s point stands, that there are powerful forces against the teaching of evolutionary psychology, and that these are politically rather than scientifically motivated (in much the same way as ID-vs-evolution). Why can’t we thoroughly investigate how sexual orientation develops? Because certain factors might offend certain groups. Why can’t we consider all of the knowledge available to us in asking why sexual assault exists and how it might be reduced? Because a bunch of people might see some factors as sanctioning the practice. Et cetera. Such important questions about who we are are rarely subjected to the best theoretic tools we have available, because they interfere with ideological goals of people who start off with all the answers.

I’m an atheist myself, but it sure does seem to me that many people find evolutionary theory acceptable only insofar as it dispenses with the big G, but not insofar as it challenges Enlightenment sacred cows.

Pedro,

All reasonable points. Depending upon what is meant by “science”, evolutionary psychology is either a proto-scientific set of theories, or a young science which (like much of, e.g., economics, linguistics, or anthropology) cannot typically use clinical, double-blind methodology, nor typically draw conclusions with as great a degree of certainty as in those sciences that can.

You focus on the issue of race and intelligence, and I agree with you that historically the methodology in this area has been poor. But by the same token, the last half century’s predominant theories of gender, sexual orientation, violent behavior, racism/xenophobia, and the like, seem motivated much more by political negotiations (between people who had already made up their minds) than by consideration of the most plausible theories concerning why we are the way we are. The parallel between such paradigms among the New Left and intelligent design theory abong the Evangelical Right is, I believe, the major thrust of the comment to which you originally responded.

The question is who gets to determine the curriculum, and the answer is: the educators, not the legislators.

David. Why? Educators do not strike me as particularly qualified for determing what should go in the curriculum. How are they meant to have special knowledge about, e.g.:
1. what sort of knowledge citizens need to participate in the political system.
2. the mathematics and science knowledge that must be acquired at school in order to be able to study and, later on practice, medicine, engineering, physics, chemistry, surveying, etc.
3. what parts of history are the most relevant to understanding the current world.
4. what artistic knowledge will bring life-long benefits.
5. what level of literacy is required as a minimum by employers.

Let us say that educators determined the curriculum, and got at least one of these wrong, and, e.g., kids started showing up at uni not having studied calculus. If direct approaches didn’t work, you’d pretty soon see people trying to pressure politicians to intervene. And in that particular example, I’d be on their side.

The curriculum in public schools is inherently a political matter.

j. goard,

thanks for your charitable reading. I’m not sure what you think is wrong with social theories of gender, racism/xenophobia, etc., but I’m looking forward to reading Ian Hacking’s “The Social Construction of What?” Perhaps that will help.