In the midst of deconstructing Michael Behe’s latest channeling of Bishop Paley, Ron Bailey agrees with moi about the Intelligent Design controversy (not surprisingly), and identifies the real problem:

It is not the role of public schools to confirm the religious beliefs of their students. Parents who want their children to benefit from the latest findings of science would reasonably be irked if evolutionary biology were expunged from the public school curriculum. There is another way around this conundrum. Get rid of public schools. Give parents vouchers and let them choose the schools to which to send their children. Fundamentalists can send their kids to schools that teach that the earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. Science geeks can send their kids to technoschools that teach them how to splice genes to make purple mice. This proposal lowers political and social conflict, and eventually those made fitter in the struggle for life by better education will win.

My comment was:

if science is a religion (in the sense of a belief system, which I think it is), then is it a legitimate subject for public schools? As I’ve said previously, this is largely a symptom of a much larger problem–the fact that we have public schools, in which the “public” will always be at loggerheads about what subjects should be taught and how. But given the utility of learning science (something that I employ every day, whenever I troubleshoot my computer network, or figure out what kinds of foods are good or bad for me), I think that it is an important subject to which everyone should be exposed. But if I were teaching evolution, I would offer it as the scientific explanation for how life on earth developed, not a “fact” or “the truth.”

The problem arises when some scientists, blind to their own faith and its tenets, come to believe that their beliefs represent Truth, and that those who disagree are fools and slack-jawed yokels. And with that, I come full circle in once again agreeing with Hugh that the media does a disservice to the debate when it doesn’t respect the beliefs of those who feel that their children are being indoctrinated away from their faith.

We will never resolve this conflict as long as so many continue to insist on a “one-size-fits-all” school system.

[Update a few minutes later]

Along those lines, here’s a pretty scary story (though not a new one, to anyone who’s been paying attention), or at least it should be for parents with kids in public schools:

According to benchmarks for middle school education, the top objective for the district’s math teachers is to teach “respect for human differences.” The objective is for students to “live out the system-wide core value of ‘respect for human differences’ by demonstrating anti-racist/anti-bias behaviors.”

Priority No. 2 is where the basics come in, which is “problem solving and representation