Up the ladder
(Being the ongoing story of a parent responding to non-science in the science classroom. See also Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)
Having given the teacher ample opportunity to put his strange comments in context, and having watched him bob and weave, I moved up the ladder one rung, dropping a note to the principal.
The principal is your ally in this, and s/he will often know that. You both have strong reasons to want non-science kept out of the science classroom. They’re not always the same reasons, and they don’t need to be. I don’t want to transfer my growing irritation at the teacher onto this more receptive set of ears. Instead, I’ll inform the administrator about the situation and be sure he knows why it matters.
Dear Mr. Weatherbee,
I wanted to bring a recent classroom incident to your attention. I was a teacher for 15 years, and my wife still is, so I hesitated before sending this, knowing the aggravation is seldom entirely welcome. But I also know that administrators need to know what’s going on in the classroom, especially when issues of this kind are involved.
Two weeks ago, my son Connor (grade 10) came home puzzled about a portion of the lecture in Harold Taylor’s Physical Science class. Mr. Taylor took the class through a series of overheads, including one that said (in Connor’s words), “Experiments or evidence in the present can’t tell us about the distant past.” Though a paraphrase, this is a common argument of intelligent design advocates.
Connor then quoted Mr. Taylor as saying that this odd claim is “a big problem for the evolutionists,” who have “a lot of little bits of bone but can never really know what they mean.” And so on, at length.
Assuming my son might have misunderstood, I contacted Mr. Taylor for clarification. We had a very polite exchange of emails in which he added another common intelligent design argument: that eyewitness evidence trumps circumstantial evidence, which is quite simply false.
I asked if he might share the overhead in question, and he has not consented to do so.
I am concerned first of all that Mr. Taylor is undercutting Georgia’s excellent science standards, which include clear instructions for the teaching of evolution. I am also unclear why he is addressing a branch of science unrelated to his course and training.
I know that this is a delicate topic. I’m not interested in creating unnecessary difficulties, including for Mr. Taylor — only in helping to ensure that science at Riverdale High is taught in accordance with the carefully crafted state performance standards and the extremely clear mandates of the courts. This includes Kitzmiller v. Dover, which noted that intelligent design serves only a “blatantly religious purpose” and as such does not belong in the science classroom.
Please accept my thanks in advance for your attention to this.
Warm regards,
Dale McGowan
Disinterested in creating unnecessary difficulties, and perfectly willing to create necessary ones. That’s the balance to strike.
My note was sent at 10 pm. Mr. Weatherbee replied at 6:54 the next morning:
Good Morning Mr. McGowan,
Thank you for your email. You are correct that this can be a very sensitive subject but this is something of which I need to be made aware. Please know that my expectation is that RHS maintains its high academic standards and that the state mandated curriculum is being supported in the classroom. Since your email is my first source of this concern, I obviously cannot comment other than to assure you I will investigate this further. If I find that the standards are not being supported, I will implement corrective action to rectify the situation.
Thank you again for sharing this concern.
Sincerely,
Waldo Weatherbee
That’s a very good reply. I thanked him for his prompt response. I plan to give him a reasonable amount of time, then check in to see what he’s found.
We’re not done, but at this point I’ve already achieved most of what I set out to do. Mr. Taylor has surely been shaken out of the complacent belief that he can spin ID-inspired threads in front of a captive audience without consequence. And Mr. Weatherbee now knows who to watch and what to watch for. That’s a win.
While I wait to hear back, I’ll check in with NCSE to bring them up to date and ask a few specific questions. What should I consider an acceptable resolution in this case? What if Taylor flatly denies it to Mr. W? And is it reasonable to insist on seeing the damn overheads that were trotted out in front of my son?
Dear Mr. Taylor (Part 2)
(Continued from Part 1, or start at the beginning)
First, a mea culpa. Richard B. Hoppe of the brilliant Panda’s Thumb blog took me to task for failing to mention (yet) the National Center for Science Education, the premiere organization defending the teaching of evolution in the US. I’ve been a close follower of NCSE’s work for ten years (my funny first meeting with NCSE’s Eugenie Scott is described here) and have a well-thumbed stack of their newsletters and reprinted articles.
My plan was to profile and recommend NCSE at the end of this series. But by leaving it to the end, I give the false impression that my approach comes straight off the top of my head. In fact, it comes from years of absorbing the stories of others and the hard-earned advice of NCSE.
Parents unfamiliar with NCSE should go there FIRST to get tips on responding to challenges to evolution education, suggestions for testifying effectively at a school board meeting, direct advice for a particular situation, and insight into the state of things both nationally and in your own backyard. (Thanks, Richard!)
Previously on MoL: Mr. Taylor, my son’s now-former science teacher, had asked me a common creationist question: wouldn’t you trust the evidence of your eyes more than circumstantial evidence? I answered no, explained why, then asked for a copy of the overhead to which my son had referred.
After three days without a reply, I dropped Mr. Taylor a note:
Dear Mr. Taylor,
I’m guessing my reply to your question about evidence didn’t get through, and I didn’t want you to think I was being rude by not responding. Here it is again (below). Is that the answer you were looking for?
I sure would like to see that overhead when you have a chance so I can show Connor that he misunderstood.
I appended the earlier message.
He answered quickly:
I have been working on a couple of research projects with two chemistry professors at two universities. Like my self they do research but they are both teachers as well. They have not been able to answer my emails to them recently because their school year has started. They are now both extremely busy. As I am.
If you wish to continue this conversation I would like to hear from. Please call me at […] during the evening sometime. Or if you want we could meet some evening in a StarBucks and discuss science and related topics.
Sincerely,
Harold Taylor
I had thought he was unable to effectively respond. I had thought he was unwilling to share his overhead with someone other than a captive high school student — someone who might be able to trace it to the teacher resources available on several creationist websites.
Turns out he’s just busy.
I wasn’t interested in discussing science generally, and certainly not “related topics.” I had made a simple request about something that happened in my son’s science class. I received similar requests from parents when I was teaching, and a prompt provision of context and content was always well-received. Mr. Taylor chose instead to bob and weave, then to faint with busyness.
I am achingly sympathetic to the actual busyness of teachers. Marry one for a while if you doubt that the demands are often impossibly high. But a central part of the job is responding to the reasonable concerns of parents. And despite every opportunity, Mr. Taylor has declined to do that.
I signed off:
That’s very kind of you, Harold. I wouldn’t think of bothering you any further.
If you ever do find the thirty seconds it would take to attach that overhead, I’d be happy for the (pardon the pun) transparency it would provide. Have a good year!
Witty bastard.
So — my son came home with a troubling story of non-science in the science classroom. I responded just as I would if he told me his math teacher called pi controversial or his history teacher insisted that the Holocaust never happened — I asked the teacher to confirm or deny the red flag. By bobbing and weaving, then cutting me off before I could raise the follow-up (about “evolutionists”) that he surely knew was coming, Mr. Taylor essentially confirmed Connor’s account and my suspicions.
Having shown him the courtesy of hearing from me first, I can move on to the next step — getting the principal in the loop. And again, I pause for a minute to wince.
I’ve watched and admired school principals for years. They are busy on a level that would wake Mr. Taylor from his dreams of research in a cold sweat. And a big part of that busyness is a constant stream of outrage from parents on every imaginable issue. I hate to add to that barrage.
But I also know that by speaking up, I am doing the administration an immense favor. Feedback from parents and students is often the only way the administration can learn about malpractice in the classroom. And this particular brand has cost school districts millions in litigation. No sane administrator wants or needs that expensive distraction from the task of educating our kids, so they tend to be extremely responsive to this kind of heads-up — especially since the Kitzmiller decision.
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If you haven’t read the Kitzmiller decision, I’ll have to insist. It’s an incredible document. In clear, gripping, and often frankly pissed-off language, Judge Jones’s decision recounts the legal history of the debate, lays out the stark imbalance between the two sides, and deals an unprecedented blow to future attempts to insert “intelligent design” into the public school science classroom as an alternative to evolution.
Judge Jones — a Lutheran and a Republican, btw — went far beyond the narrow confines of the case. He wanted to give the rest of us somewhere to stand and to rob ID of its time-wasting toehold in the courts. And he did.
No time for 139 pages? Start on page 136, letter H. You’ll suddenly find time for the rest.
Watch the NOVA documentary JUDGMENT DAY: Intelligent Design on Trial
(Next time: Up the ladder.)
Dear Mr. Taylor (Part 1)
(Continued from “Science, interrupted“)
There are a few good ground rules for approaching a classroom issue. The first is to start with the teacher. Going straight to the principal or superintendent instantly escalates things. This is especially important if there’s any doubt about what happened — and there almost always is.
I don’t usually suggest email, since tone is hard to convey, but I used it this time to have a record of the exchange and took care that my tone didn’t become the issue. I’m trying to ensure that kids in our community are getting science in the science classroom. For that I need information, period. Is this teacher undercutting our state’s excellent science standards by tub-thumping against evolutionary theory in his (unrelated) class…or not? Is he inserting “intelligent design,” which the judge in Kitzmiller v. Dover said serves only a “blatantly religious purpose,” into a public school science class…or not? That’s what I need to know.
If he is, I want to use the information not just to spank him (which changes too little), but to make it less likely to happen again in any science classroom in the district.
It’s best to focus on a single question. His rant about “evolutionists” can’t be explained away, so there’s no need to give him an opportunity to muddy it. I stuck that one in the file for later. First, I wanted to check on that other red flag.
“Dear Mr. Taylor,” I wrote:
I was so pleased to see that my son Connor is taking science this year. He’s always had a great interest in the subject, and we often discuss what he learns in class each day.
Last Tuesday he came home a bit puzzled over something from the lecture, and I’m hoping you can clarify it. I’m puzzled as well, so perhaps something was lost in the translation.
He recalled you saying something like this: “Experiments (or evidence) today can’t tell us anything about what happened in the distant past. Since no one was there to see it, we can only guess.”
I’m not a science educator myself, just a fan, so I’d appreciate your clarification. It seems to me that much of science is devoted to examining the present for clues about the past. I remember learning about the 19th century debate between catastrophism and uniformitarianism, for example, two theories that attempted to understand Earth’s past by examining present clues. A strong consensus eventually converged on uniformitarianism, which is now the cornerstone of modern geology.
Can you point me to a citation or two so I can further explore this idea that we can’t use evidence in the present to understand the past? Or, if he misheard, I’d appreciate knowing that.
Best,
Dale McGowan
I Googled him for kicks that night (as I’m sure he Googled me). Found him on a social networking site of a sort. “I love God,” said the first sentence of his self-description. “He is the center of my life.” Of course this alone is not the slightest problem. I had a dozen colleagues and friends in my teaching days who were Christians and brilliant science educators. But combined with the odd evidentiary notion and the anti-evolution rant, I was starting to get the picture about Mr. T — a probably decent, hardworking man who is letting his private views compromise his professional responsibility to the kids in this community.
He replied the next day:
You can most definitely use evidence found in the present to understand some things that have happened in the past. Just like in law evidence found in the present can help prove a crime that occurred in the past. That would be nonsense to think otherwise. Let me ask you this question. Which would be considered more reliable evidence to you, you personally seeing something happen in front of you over and over again or you not seeing this event happen but you find circumstantial evidence indicating the event happened?
Mr. Taylor
Even without citations to the Institute for Creation Research, there’s our smoking gun. This is a hamfisted set-up for a creationist punchline: Evolution relies on “mere” circumstantial evidence, while God witnessed creation and wrote about it in his Book.
I replied, answering his question but quickly returning to mine:
Dear Mr. Taylor,
Oh good, thank you. I suppose he misheard. One way to be sure — he said it was on an overhead. Perhaps you can share that to help clear it up?
Your question is an interesting one. First, I’d note that what seems reliable to me is often not, including the apparent evidence of my eyes. That’s why eyewitness testimony is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in the U.S. Circumstantial evidence is often misrepresented in popular culture to mean “weak” when it actually means “indirect.” DNA is circumstantial, yet one of the strongest types of evidence.
To answer your question: If my eyes told me Mary entered an apartment over and over, but the DNA indicated it was Susan, I would certainly go with the circumstantial evidence, as would the legal system.
Another example: my son witnessed your statement about our inability to know the past from the present, but I’d like to see the circumstantial evidence of the overhead — when you have a minute.
I do appreciate your time and help.
No answer for three days. Apparently I spoiled his punchline.
(Continued.)
Science, interrupted
Connor (15) came home on the second day of school and collapsed on the sofa with a defeated look I’ve come to recognize.
“Uh…good day?”
“No.” He looked up at me. “Science.”
He had enrolled for physical science and was looking forward to it, thinking it was physics. Turns out it’s actually basic mechanics and other concepts he’s already had. But it was the teacher himself who had made the biggest impression — and not a good one.
“He did this whole thing with overheads, and a bunch of it just didn’t make any sense,” he said. “This one overhead said something like…” Connor paused to remember the wording. “‘Experiments and evidence in the present can’t tell us anything about the distant past.'”
I’m not sure how much time passed as the wind-up monkey in my head banged his little cymbals. That my son’s high school science teacher was almost directly quoting the favorite trope of young earth creationist point man Ken “Were You There?” Ham was not encouraging.
“Then he goes off on this thing about ‘If no one was there to witness something, we can only guess about it. This is a big problem for the evolutionists…’ And he goes on and on about how they’ve got all these little bits of bones but how they can never really know what they mean.”
Hello.
I began to consider my options, the first of which is always “Let it go.” It’s taken me years to learn that accepting a certain base level of facepalming human malpractice is one of the keys to passing my short vivre with some degree of joie. But there are also options that involve me getting out of my chair. Just a few things to weigh first.
I’m serious about not using my kids as pawns in my personal and professional quests. I would do nothing without Connor’s permission. I also have to consider the possibility that he misunderstood somehow, or that this might have been a momentary lapse in an otherwise stellar career for this teacher.
Then there’s the question of outcomes. If I did pursue this, what would the goal be?
Well that’s easy. The goal in this case is to see that the long, patient slog of science, our astonishing attempt to see the world and ourselves more clearly, doesn’t proceed through centuries of observation and experimentation and debate, crawling uphill through the morass of our ancient fears and biases, inching toward tentative answers, finding them, testing them, discarding bad answers and reinforcing sound ones, weaving isolated facts into theory, strengthening the theory, building consensus, then finally, wearily carrying the hard-won knowledge up the steps of our schools — only to be smacked to the floor with a flyswatter, just inches from the ears of our kids, by a “science teacher” who wonders how that icky, sciency thing ever found its way into his classroom.
Let’s call him Mr. Taylor.
Becca and I talked it over at dinner, and she was much more decisive. “I’m sorry, that’s just crazy,” she said. “You have GOT to do something.”
I knew she was right. And on reflection, I found a solid reason to do something, and to do it effectively and well — my daughter Delaney (8).
Last year, Delaney’s second grade teacher shared something with me at conferences. “I asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grow up,” he said. “We went around the room, and it was football player, firefighter, teacher, the usual things. Delaney was the only one who wanted to be a scientist. But she said she isn’t sure yet whether she wants to be an astronomer or a paleontologist or a marine biologist. Isn’t that great?”
Yes it is. A year later, her heart and mind are still set on science.
If she wanted to be a mathematician and I discovered that the middle school math teachers were presenting 4 as a prime number and pi as “just a theory,” I’d do something — NOT just to spank the offenders and make myself feel big and strong and right, but to fix the problem. If she loved history and the high school history teachers were hamfistedly rewriting history to suit their political preferences, I’d dig in to correct that.
So is it really too much for Laney to expect that three years from now, when she reaches her first actual class in the subject she loves most of all, she’ll be able to learn about science, the real thing, from a science educator who is motivated not by fear, or conflict avoidance, or ignorance, or the pursuit of a religious agenda, but by a love of and respect for science itself?
So I would look into this Taylor thing, not for a quick fix, but to do some lasting good.
(Continued.)
Added: An incredible story of an inspiring Georgia science teacher
A tale of two (Southern) teachers
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The teacher was young, hip, and hugely popular with the kids in her Georgia public middle school, a talented teacher in many ways. Everybody wanted Miss Reynolds for seventh grade science.
“You may have noticed in your syllabus that we’re talking about evolution today,” she began one day, a few weeks in. “Now,” she said — I picture the palms out, eyes closed, head cocked, the posture of assured commiseration — “I know this is a controversial thing. But I want you to understand that this is just a theory. There are lots of other theories too. This is just one guy’s idea. M’kay?”
M’kay.
My son Connor was in the class. He was raised on the wonder of natural selection and sees the implications of it everywhere. He felt a bit betrayed to hear a teacher he really liked giving evolution the “just a theory” treatment.
It wasn’t for long. Within days, she was on to something else.
This, it turns out, is standard operating procedure in US classrooms. A NYT article written around the time of the Kitzmiller trial noted that even if evolution is in the curriculum, science teachers nationwide generally downplay, gloss over, or completely ignore it.
Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Alabama recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.
“She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she’d get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it,” he recalled. “She told me other teachers were doing the same thing.”
Dr. Gerald Wheeler, a physicist who heads the National Science Teachers Association, said many members of his organization “fly under the radar” of fundamentalists by introducing evolution as controversial, which scientifically it is not, or by noting that many people do not accept it, caveats not normally offered for other parts of the science curriculum.
It isn’t usually the beliefs of the teacher that screw things up but a desire to sidestep a firestorm from parents. And though opposition is almost entirely religious parents, not all religious parents are opposed. In fact, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education has observed that it’s a non-issue in Catholic schools — at least since John Paul II gave the infallible okie-doke in 1996.
Last year Connor was a freshman in high school and hit Life Sciences and evolution again. Once again it was a teacher he really liked, an affable coach who taught science brilliantly as well. But once again, Connor knew the odds of a strong presentation were not good.
Sure enough, on the first day of the evolution unit, Coach Davis strode to the front of the room, cleared his throat, and said: “Today we’re starting the unit on evolution. Evolution, as you know, is just a theory.”
I can just picture my boy’s eyes, the only part of his face that betrays his feelings when he’s holding the lid on tight.
The teacher paused. “Now,” he continued, “let me tell you what the word ‘theory’ actually means.”
Booyah!
Connor described it to me with obvious relief. “He said a theory is something that explains what facts mean, and that ‘theory’ doesn’t mean something is just a guess. He said there are strong theories and weak theories, and that evolution is one of the strongest in science. He said that gravity is a theory, but it doesn’t mean we’re not sure about gravity. It was awesome.”
According to the ongoing Fordham Foundation studies of science education, it’s not strictly a North/South thing:
But even that map reflects only the quality of state science standards. What happens in the classroom is anybody’s guess. Miss Reynolds and Coach Davis are three miles apart in a state with the highest grade in science standards, yet one of them is hitting it out of the park while the other settles for a bunt. One thing is for sure — by presenting evolution intelligently and in depth, my son’s more recent Southern science teacher is doing better than many of his counterparts, even at the higher latitudes.
It’s not about the defense of the concept for Connor. It mostly just pains him to hear people he likes and respects, and who should know better, saying dumb things. I’ve seen him flash the same disappointed face at me. And half the time he’s right.
Hopefully we’ll both carry away another lesson, something Kurt Vonnegut once said. Considering what a mess of nonsense and bad wiring we are, I don’t get too depressed anymore by the dumb things we say and do. That’s normal. Instead, I’m mostly gratified that we ever get ANYTHING right.
And we do, despite ourselves. Despite the fact that evolution so decisively dethrones us, that it so deflates our mighty self-importance, we still figured it out, and we’re still passing it on. Incompletely and inelegantly, yes. But given the sorry way evolution actually threw us together, I say woohoo.
Give Phil Plait 31 minutes
Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there’s got to be an act of persuasion there as well. Persuasion isn’t always, “Here are the facts — you’re an idiot or you are not,” but, “Here are the facts and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind,” and it’s the facts plus the sensitivity, which convolved together, create impact. — Neil deGrasse Tyson to Richard Dawkins, 2006
You’re a busy person. But Phil Plait needs 31 minutes of your time.
Phil (of Bad Astronomy) gave a talk at TAM8 in July that is one of the most important and resonant messages I’ve heard in ages. It’s about being heard.
It’s an obsession of mine lately, this topic. I tried to write a simple blog post about it last year and ended up instead writing 11,000 words in an eight-month series of posts called “Can You Hear Me Now?” The thrust of that series, and of Phil’s talk, is that content is all well and good, and argument is lovely, but it’s all for nothing if we don’t think about how to get ourselves heard. And when it matters most, we’d better think not just about how tight our arguments are, but how to stand any chance of having them received on the other end.
This isn’t just about religion. It’s also about politics, social issues, alternative medicine, the paranormal — everything people get hot and bothered about. Discourse is nothing more than shouting down a well if we merely compose zingers for the applause of our stablemates and fail to create a receptive mind in the listeners we hope to persuade.
Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke to this in a rebuke to Richard Dawkins at Beyond Belief in 2006 (which Dawkins accepted with grace and good humor):
Tyson’s precise point is well-taken: “I felt you more than I heard you.” (Many other critiques of Dawkins, et al. are not, as I noted in 2007.)
Now Phil Plait has made a magnificent, deeply personal, effective and well-titled plea along the same lines. Please set aside 31 minutes at the end of your busy day to hear what he says.
But also note what he does NOT say. He doesn’t say that being heard requires us to respect the unrespectable, or bury our passion, or deny our convictions. He’s not calling for a moratorium on religious satire or political outrage, or I’d tell him to bugger off. I intend to continue treating ideas themselves with whatever respect or contempt they earn. But when it comes to discourse with our fellow mammals, the Tyson Equation nails it: facts plus sensitivity equals impact.
I’ve said too much. Take it Phil.
Phil Plait – Don’t Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.
Progress on corporal punishment?
The possibility of a comprehensive ban on corporal punishment in U.S. schools has the issue back in the spotlight where it belongs.
I wrote about corporal punishment quite a bit in 2007 and 2008, noting among other things that I once spanked my kids. Though seldom and long ago, I’m still aghast and ashamed in the face of the evidence against it — evidence that made me stop on a dime.
A quick rehash of those thoughts before we look at the new developments:
Every time a parent raises a hand to a child, that parent is saying You cannot be reasoned with. In the process, the child learns that force is an acceptable substitute for reason, and that Mom and Dad have more confidence in the former than in the latter.
A second failure is equally damning. Spanking doesn’t work. In fact, it makes things worse. A meta-analysis of 88 corporal punishment studies compiled by Elizabeth Gershoff at Columbia found that ten negative outcomes are strongly correlated with spanking, including a damaged parent-child relationship, increased antisocial and aggressive behaviors, and the increased likelihood that the spanked child will physically abuse her/his own children. The study revealed just one positive correlation: immediate compliance. That’s all. So if you need your kids to behave in the moment but don’t care much about the rest of the moments in their lives–hey, don’t spare the rod!
(From “Reason vs. the Rod,” Humanist Parenting column, Oct 17, 2007)
I later addressed the well-meaning but false claim that the Bible’s reference to using “the rod” is about guidance, not beatings, and linked to a very nice piece by a Christian parent who decided not to spank her children and gave the reasons why.
Still, influential Christian parenting author James Dobson is one of several voices on the religious right continuing to applaud the practice. In his book The New Dare to Discipline, Dobson writes that “Spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause genuine tears” (p. 35). He recommends painful squeezing of the trapezius muscle on the neck to obtain “instant obedience” (36) and using paddles to hit children as young as 18 months old. He advises parents to hit a toddler whenever he “hits his friends” (66), and if a child cries more than a few minutes after being spanked, Dobson says, hit him again (70). “When a youngster tries this kind of stiff-necked rebellion,” he adds, “you had better take it out of him, and pain is a marvelous purifier” (6).
His advice frequently lapses into sneering contempt for the child. “You have drawn a line in the dirt, and the child has deliberately flopped his bony little toe across it,” he says (p. 21). “Who is going to win? Who has the most courage? Who is in charge here http://levitrastore.net/? If you do not conclusively answer these questions for your strong-willed children, they will precipitate other battles designed to ask them again and again.”
Carefully avoiding reference to actual research, Dobson prefers to blame the media for the growing consensus against corporal punishment. “The American media has worked to convince the public that all spanking is tantamount to child abuse, and therefore, should be outlawed. If that occurs, it will be a sad day for families . . . and especially for children!”
We now return to the sane(r) world, currently in progress.
In Spring 2008, I was asked to draft a resolution on corporal punishment for the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). On June 8, 2008, the resolution was passed unanimously by the General Assembly of the World Humanist Congress in Washington DC. Humanism now has a formal consensus position on this important issue, and I am honored to have been a part of that.
This year, on the heels of new research suggesting that regular spanking has a measurable negative affect on IQ, Congress is due to consider the Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act this year. The proposal would “prohibit the Secretary of Education from providing education funding to any educational agency or institution that allows school personnel to inflict corporal punishment upon a student as a form of punishment or to modify undesirable behavior.”
Thirty states currently ban corporal punishment in public schools. Only two of those ban the practice in private schools. Over 220,000 kids were subject to violent punishment in U.S. schools during the 2006-07 school year, with three states managing to do more than half of the total damage: Texas (49,100), Mississippi (38,100), and Alabama (33,700).
The federal act would ban the practice in all public and private schools that receive federal funds of any kind, which is virtually all.
The big news is the inclusion of religious schools in the ban. But despite recent warnings of pushback from that direction, there’s been very little. Though the practice was common just a generation ago, many religious schools have voluntarily joined public schools in abandoning corporal punishment abandoned hitting as a punishment. “Whether you believe it’s right or wrong, it’s just too big of a liability or legal issue,” said Tom Cathey, a legislative analyst for the Association of Christian Schools International, in a recent RNS article.
So we can and should oppose the undue influence of Dobson et al in the debate. At the same time, we should notice the quiet progress of the mainstream, both religious and secular, toward the obvious. It’s how most social progress happens.
[Hat tip to Secular Coalition for America for great work on this issue!]
-My Nov 2007 interview with Elizabeth Gershoff
-Learn about the Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act, contact your representative
-Resources from Center for Effective Discipline (incl. alternatives to corp. punishment in schools)
-Dobson’s views fascinatingly juxtaposed with those of actual experts in the field
Pretty memes never die
I remember it like it was yesterday. April 2007. Fox News announced that a sociologist in Mississippi had come out with a study on the benefits of religion for kids… (harp music and waaaavy lines…)
“Religion Is Good for Kids” said the headline. I scanned the story for anything that might temper the triumphant certainty of that headline. The source was Fox News, whose fairness and balance are legendary, so I breathed a relieved sigh at the guaranteed absence of spin. “Religion” (everything from voodoo to Unitarianism, presumably) had been confirmed as “good” for “kids.”
Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be less clear-cut.
I expected the study, authored by sociologist John Bartkowski, to show a correlation between membership in a religious community and certain positive outcomes for children. Other studies have explored this (though even the best studies are oversimplified in the media). The correlation has nothing to do with Jehovah, of course, but simply and unsurprisingly points to the benefits of raising kids in a cohesive and supportive community.
Takes a village, and all that.
Religious communities are just one way of achieving this, but they are indeed one way. I could easily see a well-conceived study coming to such a conclusion, then carefully defining what is meant by “religion, “good” and “kids,” noting that this is just one type of supportive community, that more research is needed, and all the other common earmarks of rigor and prudence.
Bartkowski (author of The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men and Remaking the Godly Marriage) opens his article on the study with three admirable caveats: (1) The benefit is defined primarily by how well-behaved children are, (2) the data, based on parent and teacher interviews, are entirely subjective, and (3) the data were gathered from a survey conducted for a different purpose and from a cohort consisting almost entirely of first graders.
I consider the first to be the most damning. I want my kids to behave, but that’s sixth or seventh on the list behind many, many other qualities on my list of constituents of the good.
Having acknowledged these three caveats, Bartkowski largely disregards them. By the middle of the paper, he has declared that “the findings that emerge from the present investigation are robust and quite clear.”
In fact, the data are a bit too robust. The study’s data tables indicate that many variables other than religion show significant effects — some even greater than religion — but those go undiscussed in the study. Bartkowski cherry-picked religion and declared it the cause of the child’s “goodness” — a classic example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.
Parenting Beyond Belief contributor Dr. Jean Mercer wrote a response to the Bartkowski piece at the time for the Institute for Humanist Studies. “Bartkowski acknowledged that the direction of causality (if any) was unclear… A study of this type is severely handicapped with respect to interpretation, making it impossible to conclude that one of the measured factors caused another.”
An argument could just as easily be made that cause and effect have been reversed — that the intention to raise compliant kids can lead to church attendance, not the other way around.
Dr. Mercer also considers the subjective data problematic. “It appears that there were no objective measures of child development employed. Instead, parental and teacher assessments of children’s emotional characteristics and ‘approaches to learning’ were analyzed.” Add to this the third element — that a cohort of first-graders represents all kids — and the study’s credibility falls to pieces.
“Membership in a religious group…may have functions similar to those of membership in secular groups such as the Sierra Club or a bowling team,” Mercer concludes. “The appropriate comparison may not involve religion, but the organization of family life around shared interests.”
Given the fatal flaws in the Bartkowski study, I’d suggest the evangelical leanings of the researcher colored his research design and skewed his conclusions, which were then lapped up by an eager Fox. At the very least, the headline should be reworded:
Study: Religion May Make Some First Graders Marginally Easier to Manage
Waaaavy lines…and we’re back in 2010, awakened by the sound of an email hitting the bottom of my inbox (“Have you seen this?”) with a link to an article from the Christian News Wire: “Religious Families Raise Better Children.”
Another study? Well, no. A gentleman by the name of David Beato has written a book testifying to the power of religion in his own life. Religion helped him through personal setbacks and tragedies (among them “deceptive family members who tried to ruin him”), and he suggests it will do the same for others. Fair enough. But to support his case, Beato dredged up none other than the weak Bartkowski study and sent press releases to the usual suspects declaring that “religious families raise better children.”
Hundreds of religious news outlets and church websites have now posted the claim.
“What the research suggests is what many of us have known all along,” Beato says in another release. And there’s the problem. Pretty memes never die. Most people most of the time will pass on claims that reinforce what they want to believe, no matter how weak the foundation. We are ALL prone to this. In most cases, once preference has spoken, no argumentative stake penetrates the heart of a pretty idea.
I usually accept this kind of unkillable thing without retort, and increasingly so as I age and become ever-less-convinced of the ability of argument to pierce the armor of confirmation bias. I know that the most effective response to (for example) the idea that you can’t be good without gods is not to whang on about the Euthyphro dilemma, but to be good without gods.
In this case, the resurrected idea that religion is an essential good for families goes too directly to the heart of Parenting Beyond Belief for me to sit quietly by. I don’t harbor delusions about killing the pretty misconception, but it’s worth making this message available for those who care enough to look for it: Not only is it possible to raise ethical, caring, confident and well-adjusted children without religion, but millions of us are doing so already. The perfect reply. Onward.
Let ’em drive!
Ventured into the backwoods of upstate NY last week for a quick visit to Camp Inquiry, a fabulous science-and-wonder-based summer camp run by the Center for Inquiry. Fifty-two sharp and curious kids and a terrific staff under the direction of the energetic and talented Angie McQuaig.
About 30 parents stuck around on Sunday evening for a parent chat around the campfire. These unscripted discussions are my favorites. And as it usually does, one of my key messages came up over and over — the importance of letting kids drive their own decisionmaking as much as we can, even when we disagree. It’s vital to let them take the wheel as often as possible if we want them to develop the long-term ability to think ethically and well on their own. Obviously there are many times when we have to assert our own judgment. But letting go when we can has some great long-term benefits.
This mostly nonreligious crowd was focused on questions of raising kids in a culture dominated by religion. The Pledge of Allegiance, the proselytizing neighbor, Grandma’s insistence on taking the kids to her church, pressure from religious peers — in every case, the best thing a secular parent can do is help the child assess options and weigh consequences, then let the child make his or her own decision about what to do, even if the parent thinks it’s a mistake. They’ll learn more from the experience than from any pre-emptive lecture we can give. (Not to mention the possibility that our advice would have been wrong.)
I blogged about one such situation in 2008. Erin (then 10) asked if she could wear a pink beaded cross necklace to school. She’d bought it on vacation at the dollar store, but now she said, “I feel weird wearing it when I don’t really believe in god. Like I’m not being honest. But I just like to wear it.”
“It’s fine, sweetie. It’s a pretty necklace.”
She paused. There was more, I could tell. “It makes me feel good to wear it.”
Uhhh, okay, there’s at least one unfortunate way to read that sentence. “You mean it makes you feel like a good person to wear a cross?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It just…” She smiled sheepishly. “It makes me feel good to rub it.”
I’d been ready for that sentence for years, but the context was all wrong.
“When I’m worried, I rub it with my fingers and it makes the worry go away.”
It was a simple talisman to her. And Erin does spend more time worrying than she ought to. I told her about the jade worry stone I carried in my pocket throughout middle school. Same deal. It did make me feel better. Her cross had no more connection to God than my worry stone. In fact, her concern was that people might think it did when it didn’t. But even if it did have that significance, I was fully prepared to let her drive the decision.
As it happens, she wore it for a week, then told me she didn’t want to wear it anymore because of the dishonest feeling it gave her. And because she had made the decision herself, there’s a much greater chance that she gained something more valuable than if I had simply issued a ruling.
I returned home from Camp Inquiry to a message from Elizabeth, a parent I’d met. Her son Alex (13) is on a baseball team that has started praying before each game. From her email (reprinted with permission):
Bill, the gentleman who initiated the prayer ritual, is a close friend to our family, and my husband Jason is one of the assistant coaches. Our families have get-togethers at each other’s houses. Bill and Jason have shared many “religious” talks through the years, so we know their family’s belief system and they know ours, and it has never been an issue.
When Bill first started praying before the game, Jason had a private talk with him and explained why he did not feel that it was an appropriate thing to do. Jason explained to Bill that he has no idea what the belief systems of all the kids on the team are, and that it was presumptuous of him to think that all the kids came from religious households. And even if ‘most’ of the kids are religious, he would have no way of knowing what faith they practiced. He also reminded Bill that our own family was not religious. Bill was not persuaded and continued the team prayer before each game.
Nicely done, Jason — especially the choice to frame it in terms of all kids on the team, not just one.
At this point Jason asked Alex how he felt about the prayer before each game. Alex said that he thought it was silly. Jason asked Alex what (if anything) Alex wanted to do about it and gave him a few options. They could “sit out” the prayer, Jason could try talking to Bill again, or they could just “go with the flow” and wink at each other while the prayer was taking place. 🙂
At that point Alex said something that just made our hearts swell with pride -– he said, “I think it is kind of stupid, but Coach Bill means more to me than a prayer. If it makes him happy to say a prayer before the game, then that’s OK with me.” I wish more adults would act like our son did at that moment.
Alex is choosing his battles, and his parents are letting him. The more they do that, the better and more nuanced his decisionmaking will become.
Maybe after a few games, Alex will change his mind, or maybe not. Maybe he’ll just reflect further on the very odd concept of the God-bothering sports team. Maybe Bill will do some reflection of his own. But if Alex’s parents had forced another conclusion — if Jason, for example, had pushed harder in his talk with Bill — Alex would have lost an opportunity to make his own choice, live with it, and learn from it. But they recognized that this was Alex’s situation, first and foremost, and they let him take the wheel.
Kudos to all three.
Embiggening humanism
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. — Jebediah Springfield
I’m alternately enjoying and “D’oh!”-ing my way through a controversy of my own creation at Foundation Beyond Belief. The following are my personal thoughts on the matter, btw, not an official statement of the Foundation (which is why they are found here, on my blog, not there, on its).
After repeatedly noting that this secular humanist foundation would consider supporting charities based in any worldview so long as they do not proselytize, we’ve put our commitment to the test. This quarter, FBB is featuring a religiously-based charity as one of our ten options for member support.
The category is Peace, the religion is Quakerism, and the organization is Quaker Peace and Social Witness. And the reaction is pretty much what I expected — a mix of bravos, surprise, outrage, enthusiasm, and revealed (shall we say, and gently) knowledge gaps in some of my beloved fellow nontheists. More on the “gaps” later.
Some blogs ask why on Earth we would do such a thing. “I’m an atheist. I don’t support religious groups,” said one, as if the second sentence follows obviously and necessarily from the first.
So the first reason to do it is to show that it is indeed possible for nontheists to see good work being done in a religious context and to support and encourage it. Far from a contradiction, some of us think that’s humanism at its best.
The second reason is that many of our members want to express their humanism in that way. And since the Foundation exists to allow individual humanists a means of expressing their worldview positively and doing good in the name of that worldview, it seems fitting to occasionally feature a carefully-screened, non-dogmatic, non-proselytizing, effective organization based in a sane and progressive denomination as one of our choices.
“Well,” one commenter said, “if you HAVE TO support a religious group, I mean absolutely HAVE to, I suppose the Quakers would be the ones.”
A glimmer of light there. But we didn’t have to do this. My word, it would have been much easier not to. We wanted to do it. We see value in doing it.
In a way, this should be a non-issue. Individual members have full control over the distribution of their donations and can zero out any category any time. Some members, disinterested in supporting a religiously-based organization no matter how progressive, have made perfect and appropriate use of this flexible system by shifting their funds elsewhere this quarter. Others — including such strong atheist voices as Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism — have actually increased their Peace donation in support of this idea. That’s freethought in action.
Not all religious expressions are benign, of course. The more a religious tradition insists on conformity to a received set of ideas, the more harm it does. The more it allows people to challenge ideas and think independently, the more good it does. Religion will always be with us in some form. It’s too hand-in-glove with human aspirations and failings to ever vanish at the touch of argument or example. So I think one of the best ways for humanists to confront the malignant is to support and encourage the benign, the non-dogmatic, the progressive.
Speaking of whom.
Liberal Quakers are utterly non-dogmatic, include many nontheists in their ranks, and hold that no individual can tell any other what to believe. That’s a religious organization embracing the essence of freethought. It’s no coincidence that they also have a brilliant history of social justice work. While Southern Baptists fronted biblical arguments in support of slavery, Quakers were among the most courageous abolitionists (along with Northern Baptists). While the Catholic Church vigorously opposed women’s voting rights, Quakers were often leading the movement and getting themselves arrested and imprisoned in the process (along with many Catholic individuals who recognized bad dogma when they saw it). And while multiple denominations rend themselves in twain over gay rights, Liberal Quakers were among the first to openly support gay rights and gay marriage. (This last is not so much the case with Orthodox Quakers, who differ from the Liberals in several respects.)
In the area of peace and nonviolence advocacy, Quakers are second to none. Continuing a centuries-old tradition, Quaker Peace & Social Witness is at work in the Ugandan conflict, supporting and training groups working on peacemaking and peacebuilding; facilitating truth and reconciliation work to deal with the past in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia; managing teams of human rights observers in Palestine and Israel; working to strengthen nonviolent movements in South Asia; and advocating at the UN for refugees and for disarmament policies. In 1947, QPSW shared the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Maybe you can see why we’re proud to support them.
Making discernments is difficult, but it’s worth doing. That’s why the (don’t say ignorance, don’t say ignorance) misinformedness of some atheists about the spectrum of religion has troubled me.
“I am NOT giving money to somebody who’s going to hit me over the head with a bible or say my kids are going to hell,” said one. Fair enough. Of course there’s as much chance of a bluefooted booby doing either of those as a Liberal Quaker.
Others who probably recognize a slippery slope fallacy if someone else uses it (“You can’t let gays marry. Next thing you know, farmers will be marrying their tractors!”) went ahead and employed one themselves. “It’s a slippery slope,” said one email. “A year from now, you’ll be paying for Catholic missionaries!” (I especially enjoy it when someone calls a fallacy by name, then pulls the ripcord anyhow.)
And on it goes. This is what siloing will do to good and smart people. It makes them sloppy, myself included. And we talk nonsense, and end up looking silly to anyone outside of our silo.
One atheist friend predicted we would lose a third of our members overnight. In the two weeks since we announced the decision, two members have closed their accounts (neither mentioning the Quaker choice) and 24 have joined.
The weakness of the arguments against our choice has reassured me, and the majority of responses I’ve heard have been strongly supportive of the idea of providing members with this option. “I’m so proud to be a part of this,” said one member. “Honestly, it’s like the free thought movement is growing up all at once. Thank you for showing vision beyond the usual sounding of alarms and building of barricades.”
Can’t you just feel the embiggening?
