Like a lot of people living in Kansas, I’ve been thinking about the theory of evolution quite a bit lately. It’s hard not to think about it, what with the media coverage and late-night talk show hosts’ jokes about our Board of Educations recent hearings over the issue of teaching the “flawed” theory of education in our schools.

When I haven’t been thinking about the Board’s mentally masturbatory machinations, I’ve been thinking that lately it seems like every day brings another news story about a child who’s been murdered, abducted, molested or raped. I can’t fathom the horrid evil lurking within that could lead a person to commit such despicable acts. I know that such people exist, that they come in all guises, from all walks of life, and that there’s no way to tell at a glance the difference between the good guys and the bad.

As a parent, I’m terrified by those stories and try to push them out of my mind. But I can’t. Part of my responsibility as a parent is to remember those perils and to both protect my son from them as well as educate him about them. But part of my parental responsibilities also include teaching my son to be outgoing, socially confident, and polite to others.

It’s such a fine line, teaching kids to simultaneously acknowledge something while also doubting it. But just because it’s a fine line doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. The thing is, we underestimate children when we don’t.

When I was a kid, our neighborhood consisted of white, upper middle-class suburbanites. Period. The overwhelming majority of those homes consisted of two parents, and usually the mother stayed home while the father worked. Anyone whose family structure didn’t fit within that mold was “different,” as some of our neighbors discovered when they divorced and found themselves no longer included at the Thursday night Bridge games that rotated between the married folks’ homes. All of us kids understood that divorced people were considered somehow dangerous, and that was enough for us to begin shying away from the children of divorced parents, too.

Then divorce became much more common — so common that my parents got one, too. The adults in my life no longer seemed to care whether their friends were married or single… as long as the person was heterosexual. Being gay was too ‘different’, and those divorced people who began same-sex dating were considered too threatening to be around… and so were their kids. Since I grew up in California’s Bay Area, it wasn’t long before there were enough gay couples in our neighborhood that they no longer seemed so ‘different.’ As long as they were white, that is.

When the Tech boom hit and our area became known as Silicon Valley, the racial and religious composition of our neighborhood began to rapidly change. An Hispanic couple moved in across the street while a recently-immigrated Vietnamese family moved in next door. My best friend moved (after her father decided he was gay and filed for divorce), and an African-American family bought their home. Suddenly, “different” was no longer something that anyone could really define anymore.

Throughout my childhood, I never once paused to wonder why “different” meant bad but only until we knew and liked someone we’d once considered different. Then, because we saw that we had some things in common with them despite our differences, they weren’t so “different” anymore. That someone’s family structure didn’t mirror our own, that our accents or skin colors varied, that we didn’t attend the same church or even believe in the same God was not nearly as important as whether we shared the same values of honesty, respectfulness, and goodness to others.

These changes didn’t take place just in my neighborhood. The “politically correct” language born in the 1980s; the self-esteem and diversity programs cultivated in the American school system over the past thirty years; the EEOC legislation affecting workplaces throughout the nation and their “hate crimes” counterparts outside the workplace; even the post 9/11 uproar over racial profiling all bear witness to the transformation that has taken place throughout our society. “Different” is no longer wrong. One would think these advances would mean that we’d socially evolved.

And yet, in the state of Kansas where I live, we keep hashing the Scopes Monkey Trial of 80 years ago because people have different guesses as to the origins of the human race.

Here, where the court nearly shut down our state’s school system due to such poor funding that it was unconstitutional, we spent thousands of dollars on hearings because the theory of evolution is different from what 6 out of 10 Board of Education members believe to be true.

The theory of evolution, they claim, is “too flawed” to be taught in our schools. In its place, the Board wants to teach our children about “Intelligent Design” — which presupposes the existence of an intelligent agent or agents who set about the workings of the universe. And, while both sides of the argument can point to physical evidence in support of their theory, neither can prove theirs with unassailable empirical evidence.

How sad that the very people responsible for determining the curricula studied by children throughout our State have forgotten one remarkable, uncontrovertable fact: children learn what to believe by watching adults. Here in Kansas with our underfunded schools and out-dated textbooks, the main lesson we’re teaching our kids is that something is true only when the majority of people in power believe that it is.

What’s next? Pontius Pilate for School Board President?

UPDATE: Submitted to OTB’s Traffic Jam.

Sunday, July 24th, 2005, 1:04 pm   |   Idiots Bite  |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.