Culture: Libertarian take on Intelligent Design and Public Education

Intelligent design is in the news these days.

Interestingly, there were three links on the main page of the Cato Institute.

Each one was written at a different point in the recent legal developments regarding Intelligent Design and Public Education.

This one was written after a court ruled the stickers in Georgia were unconstitutional. Here is an excerpt:

Lynn Hogue, a Georgia State University constitutional law professor, made clear that the issue is bigger than just a "critical thinking" controversy. "Anti-evolutionists can take their case to the pulpit, but they have no business making it in public school classrooms through stickers in textbooks paid for by taxpayer dollars."

Of course, a very large percentage of the people living and paying taxes in Cobb County are Christians. Why is it acceptable to force them to use their tax dollars to teach their children something to which they strenuously object, but unacceptable to place a sticker on textbooks that asks other people to consider, even for a moment, beliefs contrary to their own?

That question gets to the crux of the problem: No matter how divergent their views and values, all Americans are forced to pay for public schools, no matter what the educators teach.

But how can millions of people get what they want out of a one-size-fits-all-so-deal-with-it system? The answer is that they cannot. And the fight over evolution is just one of numerous struggles precipitated by a system for which all must pay, but only a select few control.

In another essay probably written around the time of the Dover Pennsylvania case, Cato's position is the following:

We're fighting because the institution of public schooling forces us to, by permitting only one government-sanctioned explanation of human origins. The only way for one side to have its views reflected in the official curriculum is at the expense of the other side.

This manufactured conflict serves no public good. After all, does it really matter if some Americans believe intelligent design is a valid scientific theory while others see it as a Lamb of God in sheep's clothing? Surely not. While there are certainly issues on which consensus is key - respect for the rule of law and the rights of fellow citizens, tolerance of differing viewpoints, etc. - the origin of species is not one of them.

The sad truth is that state-run schooling has created a multitude of similarly pointless battles. Nothing is gained, for instance, by compelling conformity on school prayer, random drug testing, the set of religious holidays that are worth observing, or the most appropriate forms of sex education.

Not only are these conflicts unnecessary, they are socially corrosive. Every time we fight over the official government curriculum, it breeds more resentment and animosity within our communities. These public-schooling-induced battles have done much to inflame tensions between Red and Blue America.

But while Americans bicker incessantly over pedagogical teachings, we seldom fight over theological ones. The difference, of course, is that the Bill of Rights precludes the establishment of an official religion. Our founding fathers were prescient in calling for the separation of church and state, but failed to foresee the dire social consequences of entangling education and state. Those consequences are now all too apparent.

The third link is a press release just after the Dover ruling was announced. Cato said:

"Today's Intelligent Design ruling by the U.S. District Court in Harrisburg will be perceived as a victory for supporters of evolutionary theory and a defeat for I.D. advocates and creationists," says Coulson. "Such perceptions are shortsighted. The Pennsylvania ruling will do nothing to end the battle over the teaching of human origins that has plagued public schools since the Scopes trial of 1925. It, and all the other cultural and religious 'school wars' that divide our nation, will rage on unless we do something about their root cause: our one-size-fits-all government school system.

As a matter of First Amendment religious establishment clause legal analysis, have these judges taken a hyper sensitive view?

The rules appear to be: does it establish religion? might it coerce the participants? is there endorsement of religion? is it a breech of neutrality?

In my view: no, only if one is hypersensitive, no, maybe.

Seems to me that ID advocates do raise some of the scientific problems to evolutionary thought. In particular, I have found the problems in chemical evolution (abiogenesis) to be quite substantial. Also, the Cambrian explosion, the dramatic increase in the diversity of living things in a relatively short period of time, seems difficult to explain with the evolutionary model.

I wonder if the pro-evolution side objects to teaching those details?

However, I have found the attempts to quantify and apply to biology the design inference concepts (irreducible and specified complexity) to be somewhat weak at this point. On this front, I think the ID side hasn't been able to counter-punch the evolution side very well.

But I suppose Cato's statements really aren't concerned about whether the cases were rightly decided. Or for that matter much concerned with the scientific validity of the ID critique of evolution. Rather, their interest is in public policy and they feel the hot button debate would all go away if education were privatized.

Here in Los Angeles, there is tremendous frustration with the public school system.

Teacher burn out is very common. And the ones who stick it out often feel the system is so out of control.

I wonder how many percent of children are in private schools or are home schooled?

Families who opt out of the public school system still pay taxes to support the public system so they are "double paying" for education.

Seems to me that some kind of voucher system would make sense so parents have the option of opting out without going broke. Or perhaps public school systems could have some kind of sliding scale tuition where those who are poorer pay much less and those who are wealthier pay more.

I really admire the teachers I know who are trying their very best to teach kids.

But perhaps it is time to re-examine how we do education at a big picture strategic level.