Early Warning Sign of Educational System Collapse

I can hardly think of a more explicit statement that an educational system has abdicated its responsibility to produce an informed citizenry than the following quote from this story from Casper, Wyoming:

“I am very pleased with the openness of the evolution panelists and their willingness to discuss other ideas,” Wallace said. “In the play ‘Inherit the Wind,’ the creationists are looked at as ignorant…but not here.”

I’m willing to discuss creationist evolution denial, all right; I’ve spent long enough studying it and talking about it. What I’m not prepared to do is recognize it as a legitime scientific concept without sufficient empirical work that convinces the scientific community, or as a legitime field of intellectual inquiry. It is a form of error, one unfortunately embraced and promulgated despite its manifest failings. Its transmogrification from “creation science” to “intelligent design” in 1987 most clearly shows the morally corrosive nature of this error as the entire pretense of “ID” was demonstrably nothing more than a dodge to get around an inconvenient Supreme Court ruling. Lying about what you are up to is not a value that Christians should accept.

The Clergy Letter Project nailed it when they said,

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.