Re: [asa] Culture Wars Come to New Zealand

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 12:35 PM, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Both of those seem to be cast as efforts to protect individual teachers
> from overzealous school boards. Without getting into the empirical question
> of whether there really are very many overzealous school boards, these raise
> some interesting and difficult questions, IMHO, that are hard to suss out.
> A public school teacher doesn't forfeit her religious freedom and freedom of
> speech by taking a public school teaching job, and it would be bad public
> policy (IMHO) to require teachers to suppress their religious convictions or
> other personal views entirely. OTOH, a public school teacher is in some
> sense an agent of the State, which implicates the establishment clause, and
> the state has a legitimate interest in educating children with respect to
> the prevailing consensus of the scientific community on matters such as
> evolution and the environment. A very difficult balance to reach in the
> abstract.

It strikes me that it would be less problematic if this was targeted at the
university level where the issue of academic freedom is more germane and
less constitutionally encumbered. Another thing that struck me was the text
of the Florida bill specifically defined scientific information as
"peer-reviewed" and as defined by the Florida state standards. So, would the
teacher that presented non-peer-reviewed "information" not be protected
here? Or to put it another way, you can deviate from the standards only when
you don't. :-)

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Mon Jun 30 14:49:57 2008