"Teach the Controversy"

Whether you find OxBlog worthwhile or not, I guess, depends largely on whether you find David Adesnik’s apparently sincere belief that the contemporary Republican Party is controlled by principled Burkeans charming or pathetic. Kevin Drum finds a post that reminds me why I generally fall in the latter camp:

You might say that when it comes to Intelligent Design, I prefer a Darwinian approach. Let the better theory survive. In fact, I’m even willing to let local school boards in Pennsylvania and Kansas mandate that I.D. get a fair hearing in the classroom. Let the kids read books and essays by Michael Behe and William Dembski, alongside criticism of their work. (After all, getting kids to read books about anything would be an important accomplishment for many of our public schools.)

Some of the kids who read these books will be persuaded by what they read. I’m guessing that most of them won’t. And that might even be besides the point, since the moment any of these kids steps onto a college campus they will be thoroughly indoctrinated by Darwin’s heirs. (I was. I don’t regret it.)

But here’s the real silver lining for all of those liberals who are concerned about Christian fundamentalism invading our schools in the guise of Intelligent Design. If conservatives are serious about “teaching the controversy”, then perhaps they will also be willing to teach the controversy when it comes to liberal add-ons to the public school curriculum, such as birth control and homosexuality.

When it comes to education, I like to think of myself as a true liberal: let the kids sample everything, instead of waging culture wars designed to deny them access to controversial ideas.

As Kevin says, the boldfaced passage is self-refuting in the classic Adesnik manner; the idea that political operatives are (either in theory or practice) committed to rigorous consistency in their jufiscatory rhetoric is transparently ridiculous. Another problem, though, is that he seems to think that the liberal position in the “birth control controversy” is analogous to a wingnut belief in Intelligent Design. This, of course, turns the truth on its head. There is, in fact, overwhelming evidence that the rational sex education preferred by liberals is more successful at reducing teen pregnancies and STDs than “abstinence-only” programs, the latter of which aren’t even successful at promoting abstinence, and as a bonus tend to be generously larded with nonsensical claims. It is the conservative position on birth control that requires educators to ignore the evidence.

Most importantly, though, Adesnik’s claim that teaching both science and non-science in science classes represents the “liberal” position is a vulgar misreading of the theoretical tradition he claims to represent. It would be different if the state was trying to suppress Michael Behe’s writings, but you will search On Liberty in vain for a claim that principles of free speech require educators to teach robust scientific theories and crackpot pseudo-science as being equivalent. To say that the state should not declare winners in competitions of ideas doesn’t mean that all ideas are equally valid, and there’s nothing “liberal” about requiring biology teachers to teach creationism, any more than it would be “liberal” for American government professors to be forced to teach that there’s debate about whether Congress is unicameral or bicameral.