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We already did state-run education and it resulted in varying degrees of intelligence across the countries as one state taught that the Earth was 6000 years old and dinosaurs are fake and another taught that vaccines are evil.
Did switching to a central system change those results?
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Can you tell me which states (not individual teachers or schools, but states, as a matter of state policy) taught that the Earth was 6000 years old and dinosaurs are fake, and which ones taught that vaccines are evil?
Tennessee's Butler Act, which was the instigation for the Scopes Monkey Trial, made it illegal to teach evolution or to contradict the Biblical origin story, but even among creationists, Young Earth Creationism is a minority view (maybe not in 1925; I don't know) and I don't think even 1925 creationists claimed that dinosaurs were fake.
Also, can you point to evidence that creationists are, on average, less intelligent than atheists?
Here's the thing: I see your point and somewhat agree with it (national standards for education are probably a good thing), but when you phrase it with this kind of sneering millenium-era atheism, you don't seem to be making an argument, just looking for a chance to demonstrate iamverysmart.
And relevant to our discussion elsewhere, if I really wanted to I could mod this comment as "inflammatory claim without evidence" or "boo outgroup." Which I'm not going to do, despite all the reports and downvotes it got, because I don't think it really is, it's just making your argument in an unpleasant and sneering way. But do you perhaps begin to perceive why we have to make judgment calls about modding posts? You want to make people upset and express your contempt for your outgroup, but you'd undoubtedly find it very unfair and mean if I modded you for this comment.
I am an atheist and I think creationism is stupid, btw. So none of this is coming from a place of personal bias.
This depends on what you count as creationism. YEC is definitely more common in the US than true old earth creationism but intelligent design is probably more common than either and the median 'God created the world and we know this because the bible says so' type couldn't tell you which of the three he believes.
Is it? I guess you're right, it does depend on how broadly you define creationism. (Some Christians say they believe evolution happened but God guided it, which is close to intelligent design but not quite, IMO.) But my impression at least from more intellectual and scientifically-educated creationists is that most of them don't necessarily believe the world is literally 6000 years old.
I can't speak to the rest of the country, but in Texas the use of scientific and intellectual arguments generally points to more commitment to the Usher Chronology(what people usually mean by 6000 years old), not less, because the Usher Chronology needs more epicycles than old earth creationism.
I mean it is true that if you count intelligent design(which in its heyday was popular enough to receive official endorsement from the Catholic church in addition to the usual protestant churches) as old earth creationism it's more popular than young earth creationism- and probably evolution as well. But I think it's probably best to see intelligent design as a middle ground between creationism and evolution; it quite explicitly allows for non-theistic mechanisms the way true creationism doesn't.
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I never understood this take that evolution is the demarcation of a good education. It was amusing back in the 2000 when dunking on creationists was cool but I would assert it was much more to do with signaling then general intelligence.
General scientific literacy is awful among the general pupation.
Even among those with scientific literacy "Macro" Evolution has to rank very low on the usefulness scale.
Evolution at the high school level takes a few hours for a smart kid to wrap their head around.
IIRC committed YEC's have a better understanding of evolution than committed evolution believers because YEC can't function without lots of defined microevolution mechanisms(eg baraminology). Of course otherwise educated YEC's mostly do have complex scientific-ish mechanisms they point to which give the exact same results as evolutionary science. Epicycles happen because they work.
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Given the simplicity and elegance of the concept, rejection of evolution is a litmus test for capture of education by people who use motivated reasoning to ignore important truths about the world. This was a big deal back in the '90s and '00s, when the Christian right was a major force in education policy.
Now that the left is dominant, one might propose similar litmus tests for capture of educational institutions by people who use motivated reasoning on the left, but most of the "skeptic" associations that fought against evolution in schools have been captured by the left.
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Varying degrees of scientific accuracy, you mean?
My mom was very into Creationism. Her college degree was in biology. She got As on a bunch of evolutionary biology courses, and liked to go to Creationist conferences, debates, read books about it, and so on. None of the many Creationists I interacted with tried to argue that dinosaurs are fake. One didn't like vaccines, and was homeschooling. That's kind of a weird homeschooler position. Aside from Covid, ate-vax codes kind of crunch liberal to me, with kids in oatmeal colored overalls going to forest school until they're eight.
It did. Homeschoolers were trending vaccine skeptic ever since the HPV vaccine controversies but after covid...
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What else do you think might contribute to different levels of average intelligence between states? Have you considered that it might track substantially with the different demographics of those states?
Every time some progressive online shows a map of “average level of college completion” or “average literacy rates” or “average IQ” and the Deep South is a great big splotch of unfavorable results, I have to wonder whether it has occurred to this person that the *percent of the population who are black” is far, far higher in that part of the country than it is in places like California, which is only 6% black, less than half the national average. That difference alone accounts for the lion’s share of the IQ differences between states. Yes, there are some states, such as West Virginia, which are both very white and do very poorly on measures of average intelligence and education, but those are quite few and far between. Alabama’s educational deficiencies would flip in a heartbeat if the state were not 26% black.
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This comment isn't very charitably phrased, but even if one looks past that: so what? You haven't made an argument that I should care why people in some other state teach their children to believe different things, or even things that are objectively false. It is their business, not mine, what they teach their children. It doesn't hurt me. So why, exactly, should I mind what they do or don't teach?
They vote.
In practice, I encourage you to look into what otherwise educated YEC's actually believe. It has enough epicycles to not really matter if the mechanism is inaccurate.
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Are you against universal suffrage? If not why not?
I actually think I might be, although not for ideological alignment purposes. I have warmed up to the idea that we should bring back the requirement to own property, or something like it. That way the voters have skin in the game. Currently many people don't and I do think it negatively influences the way they vote.
I also don't think Heinlein was too far off the mark in Startup Troopers. You get to vote once you prove that you are willing to act selflessly in service of your fellow countrymen. In general I think we have too much focus on rights in America, and not enough on social obligations. Rights are great! But at the same time rights should go hand in hand with responsibility, and I feel like American culture has dropped the ball on that count.
This leaves you with no rights. "You have the right to free speech. You have the responsibility to use that speech in a pro-social manner" means you don't have the right to free speech.
Though anarcho-tyranny and socialism have left us with rights and responsibilities... just some people get the rights and others get the responsibilities. I get to use my taxes to (indirectly) pay for the gun the Camden gangbanger uses, a gun I'm not permitted to have.
What, exactly, is the mechanism by which this happens? I'm genuinely curious as to how this "also my tax dollars somehow" thing works, as you allege.
Money is fungible. If you give a Camden gangbanger $300 in food stamps, that's an extra $300 he has for a Saturday Night Special.
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The Camden gangbanger is almost certainly receiving welfare of some sort. Probably fraudulently.
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And? They are entitled to their opinions and to vote on what they wish. That isn't a reason to control what education they can receive.
To be blunt: I consider progressive ideas (identity politics, belief in equity rather than equality, etc etc) far more harmful than the notion that the earth is 6000 years old, or that people shouldn't take vaccines. So if I were to support controlling education so as to shape future voters, I would be trying to stamp those ideas out, not the ones @justawoman mentioned. I'm sure that would give her no great comfort if I was to have my way. Which is of course why it benefits us all to support more local governance of teaching standards in the first place: when the government can dictate what is and is not appropriate to teach in a top-down fashion, it can be used to control ideas you find repugnant just as easily as those you find desirable. So it's best to not give that power to the government in the first place, or if you must give it over (which we probably must), then do your best to make sure that the damage it can do is limited. By letting these decisions be made as locally as possible, we make it difficult for a bad actor (whatever that means to you) to hijack the education of all the children in this country.
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And now we have every state teaching that women are undefinable enigmas.
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Creationism seems like a good target because it codes very low intelligence, but what were the negative societal consequences of believing creationism? Creationists don't believe in climate change enough to reduce carbon emissions before the world ends in 2012? They think God made man and woman and are harder to convince to self sterilise?
Also which state taught that vaccines were evil?
Creationists definitionally don't believe that global warming can be catastrophic because God promised no repeats of the flood. But their views on eg biology, geology, etc line up pretty well with scientific consensus even if it takes epicycles to get there.
Interestingly, the YEC alt-academia consensus on Covid-19 was more accurate than the societal elite consensus because it made the prediction that Covid would microevolve(their term) to trade lethality for contagion until it was just a cold. This is basically what happened.
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