Lessons for Texas Schoolkids: Loch Ness Monster Proves Evolution Is Wrong

If you’re sending your kids to a charter school in Texas, you might want to take a close look at the lessons they’re teaching in some of them. Things like, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution led to Hitler’s Third Reich. And that science is fallible because past theories have been proved wrong, and that Hitler got his theories from Darwin.

Those are the lessons offered through the ResponsiveEd curriculum developed by creationist Donald R. Howard, who is also the former owner of Accelerated Christian Education, according to Salon. Through ResponsiveEd, fundamentalist Christian beliefs have been incorporated as fact in charter school curriculums in Texas and Arkansas, and could expand to Indiana. From Salon:

ResponsiveEd is the latest in a long line of concerns raised over the religious affiliations of charter schools. Civil libertarians have raised concerns over Jewish schools converting to charter status. In 2010, more than 20 percent of Texas charter schools reportedly had a religious affiliation. And ResponsiveEd aims to expand further.

After Howard left ACE in the 1990s, he founded Eagle Project charter schools, which became Responsive Education Solutions, or ResponsiveEd, in 2007. ACE’s selling point was that it integrated Bible lessons into every academic subject. ResponsiveEd planned to do the same, but without the explicitly religious basis. Howard told the Wall Street Journal in 1998: “Take the Ten Commandments ­– you can rework those as a success principle by rewording them. We will call it truth, we will call it principles, we will call it values. We will not call it religion.”

Thousands of students are being taught religious doctrine as fact in taxpayer-funded schools. Last year, ACE was called out for textbooks it was using in Louisiana Christian schools that included some rather idiotic lessons, according to AlterNet:

This 2012-2013 school year, thanks to a bill pushed through by governor Bobby Jindal, thousands of students in Louisiana will receive state voucher money, transferred from public school funding, to attend private religious schools, some of which teach from a Christian curriculum that suggests the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution and states that the alleged creature, which has never been demonstrated to even exist, has been tracked by submarine and is probably a plesiosaur. The curriculum also claims that a Japanese fishing boat caught a dinosaur.

The silver lining? The textbooks are used in England as well, so we won’t be alone as we lead the next generations deeper into ignorance.

—Posted by Scott Martelle.