This is a story about a charter school in my town of Chico, CA that had its charter revoked last night by the school board. I used to serve on that board, and I would have voted to pull the charter too. Of course, I never would have voted for it in the first place since the premise wasn’t sound to begin with. When a “green school” can’t make it in liberally thinking California, you know it had to be bad.
Excerpts from the Chico Enterprise Record:
As of this morning, there is no more Chico Green School.
On Wednesday night, after hearing impassioned pleas to give the charter school one more chance to prove its worth, the Chico Unified School District board of trustees, on a split vote, decided to revoke the school’s charter effective immediately.
…
Chico Green School received its charter in 2009, and opened its doors to students on Sept. 7, 2010.
Two days later, Chico Green received its first demand it fix things from the CUSD.
Through the following months, the school was accused of failing to produce a curriculum that met state standards, and failing to provide coursework that met the admissions requirements for the University of California or the California State University system.
The Chico Green School’s board of directors was also accused of various violations of the state’s open meeting law, the Brown Act.
In June, the school was also denied accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the agency that accredits schools.
Full story at the Chico Enterprise Record
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Intelligent design? You’re kidding, right? Talk to any woman, and see if she thinks her reproductive system was designed intelligently. Or the knee joint. No engineer would ever design something that awful. Religion = end of science, as rather than investigate things we don’t understand it all gets thrown in the box marked “God did it”. And yes, I am an atheist, and unashamedly so. In fact, I suppose I might more accurately be called areligious as I am opposed to all forms of religion based on god or gods.
Anyway…
kim;
to be precise, agnosticism is not simply uncertainty, or doubt. It holds that it is impossible to know whether God exists, etc. I.e., it holds that there are no classes of available data that can settle the matter.
A few videos and multiple, numerous, contemporary first-person testimonies of a Voice from a hovering Thundercloud might qualify, but none are extant.
_____
Which brings up the tale of Jock, the Scotsman. It’s very long and shaggy, but in short, after many cycles of accumulating disasters reducing him from a wealthy family man with his own thriving business to a ragged divorced bum in the alley (despite praying after each tumble for a big lottery win), he is finally answered by a Talking Thundercloud: “Jock, Jock — you’re going to have to meet Me half-way on this. You’ll have to buy a ticket!”
😉
To be more explicit about agnosticism, it is also a belief system. Its belief is that neither science nor philosophy can decide the Question.
I “believe” in Intelligently Self-Designed Evolution.
If once a DNA/RNA code arose which effectively “trimmed the tree” of possible random mutations in response to survival or environmental pressures, it would have conveyed an immense selection advantage. Accumulation of such meta-codes would be inevitable, and would shape evolution in a highly non-random manner, thus undercutting the “impossible numbers” objection.
IMO, there is no other reasonable explanation for the strong conservation of huge amounts of “silent” DNA; the energy cost of protecting useless coding from alteration prohibits it. Further, similar “layered” shaping of neural nets is the basis of all learning and intelligent behaviour at the physiological level. The principle involved applies, a fortiori, to species-level “design”.
As for the first “cells”, here’s a suggestive video by a maverick tenured biophysicist: Water’s Exclusion Zones. It even includes a game-changing explanation for lightning!
H2O rulz —
Interesting comments so far. We don’t understand the “politics” or “religion” behind the rescision of the charter, but the article clearly states that 1) the school does not meet entrance standards for CSU and UC, and 2) the school could not be accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. These facts suggest that the curriculum may have been deficient, and/or the credentials of (some) teachers may have been insufficient. Thus, it might be a great place of learning (no, really, I’m trying to get my tongue out of my cheek), just not if you want to graduate and go to a California institution of higher learning. That tells me not to send my grandkids there….
And why are we arguing about “who” may have been present overseeing the moments before the Big Bang (oops, there weren’t any such moments–well, you get what I mean). I think that is an area where we are all free to construct or adopt fantasies (or theories!) at will without affecting anything relating to Natural History On This Plane. If one professes faith in the Christian God and the Gospel, that is a very different proposition from professing faith in the current understanding of the Scientific Method. I do not see how a Christian’s insistence on “living the faith” in any way should affect discourse in matters scientific. So, I might suggest we do a little self-editing before we bash a faith group (i.e. the ID crowd), even unintentionally, mentioning this group or another when their beliefs may be entirely irrelevant to the present discussion.
Last, what about giving the charter school the benefit of the doubt. What if, even if their curriculum didn’t meet state standards, they offered sound conservationist ideas in conjunction with scholastic subjects. For example, I can’t see how an emphasis on how to be a good neighbor in an urban environment, including 1) don’t litter, 2) recycle if you can reasonably (can’t at my complex), etc. Thus, aside from the suggestive word “Green” in the name of the school, we don’t know from the facts presented in the article, whether the school had even been founded by radical environmentalists. Heck, even I think that is probably the case, but I though these were supposed to be comments and discussion about the article.
coaldust says:
August 19, 2011 at 10:41 am
Keith says:
August 18, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Personally, I see the null hypothesis as being that there isn’t a sentient being or God as creator, and see the alternative hypothesis as unproven and unproveable. I fully respect the right of others to see it very differently, faith being an utterly personal experience. Because of this, I just want ID to be framed in appropriate manner.
…
You cannot assume there is no God, make some observations, and then prove there is no God. That is circular reasoning. You would first have to assume there is a God and then find a contradiction. Try that one on for size.
Exactly. A lot of people go around saying “You can’t disprove a negative”, but we all, who have studied geometry, trigonometry, and propositional calculus (Boolean algebra) know quite well that your sentence, “You would first have to assume there is a God and then find a contradiction.”, perfectly describes just the opposite. How many times have we disproven hypothetical propositions exactly through reductio ad absurdum? And the hypotheticals can be positive or negative. Rather than assuming that the task is impossible, as it appears you do, why not frame an example of at least the start of a hypothetical syllogism that might lead to
Let God = True.
….
Ergo, God = False
Actually, if you do this, you can” assume there is no god, make some observations (further entries in the syllogism), and then prove there is no God.”
Try that one on for size. 🙂
While I am very wary of the People’s State of California’s educational “standards”, I am not surprised that a Greenie school was not well run.
Same thing happened with religious schools a few decades ago, especially as home schooling became popular.
Besides confused epistemology coming from ideology, many people setting up schools or home schooling do not have the ability to organize and teach, nor the discipline to stick to the task. Even managing two children taking an official “correspondence” school program at home proved to much for one person.
The scary aspect is children who don’t get the right learning early, but that is the case with the public school system too – bullying is still a major problem in Canada despite costly programs, and many students aren’t learning. Some are excelling, others will grow up to be louts and the rioters fomented by leftists.
Meanwhile there is the lack of knowledge of people like Brad S at 12:02 on August 18, 2011, who in pointing to the performance of many religious schools smears “athiests”. Both religious people and those who are not vary widely in their sense of life.
Look at what Islamic Totalitarians teach, for example – garbage such as that Jews drink people’s blood. It is correct to say that only being against religion is not a philosophy of life – Madalline Murray O’hair of American Athiests, for example, was bitter though by the statement of she and her son they were “Marxist determinists”. But Objectivists for example have an integrated philosophy of life, don’t try to control others, and run good schools. OTOH, many environmentalists are quite religious (check what the leader of the Green Party of Canada is studying for). “Faith” is by definition believing without proof.