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One of the hardest jobs I have is throwing cold water on young person’s dreams. The Simpsons: Lisa Simpson, This Isn’t Your Life
Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation. Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1999
People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers. Neil deGrasse Tyson
I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it’s the people who are curious who change the world. Neil deGrasse Tyson
An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth – scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books – might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope? Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Scene. In the fastnesses of Tennessee, the quiet of dawn is split asunder by wailing screams from a steam siren. It is the Dayton sawmill, waking up villagers and farmers for miles around. From 5 until 6:30 the blasts continue. The hamlet and the fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war that is in progress there come slowly to life ...
Jury. A jury was sworn – ten farmers, a shipping clerk and a farmer-teacher, none of whom had ever read a book on Evolution or admitted a prejudice for or against it; all of whom, with the exception of one illiterate, had read the Bible.
Trial [Scopes]: Lawyer Bryan, palm leaf fan in hand, collarless, led the prosecution forces into Court shortly before 9 o’clock. A few of the more courageous clung to their coats, but the heat soon overcame their vanity, with the exception of foppish, double-breasted-coated Dudley Field Malone.
… Lawyer Darrow then began his long argument for the defense, basing it on the diversion of the caption of the act from the act itself and on the ambiguity of the indictment. ‘I am going to argue it [the case] as if it was serious … The Book of Genesis, written when everybody thought the world was flat … Religious ignorance and bigotry as any that justified the Spanish Inquisition or the hanging of witches in New England … The State of Tennessee has no more right to teach the Bible as the Divine Book than it has the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Confucius, the Buddha or the Essays of Emerson ... Who is the Chief Mogul that can tell us what the Bible means?’ Time magazine article 20th July 1925 ‘Education: The Great Trial’
‘We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts,’ Professor Skinner states. ‘Our lawyers think a friendly test can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job. Distinguished counsel have volunteered their services. All we need now is a willing client.’ ACLU advert in all Tennessee newspapers
In 1925 the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act which made it a misdemeanour to teach the evolution of only one species – mankind – in the public schools. The evolution of 99.9999% of all other plant and animal life (about two million other species), or the evolution of the earth or the solar system, could all be taught as either compelling theory or proven fact without violating the Butler Act …
John Scopes, a high school football coach and mathematics teacher who only substituted for Dayton’s regular biology teacher, never taught evolution to anybody. As he confided to acclaimed newspaper reporter, William K Hutchinson, ‘I didn’t violate the law ... I never taught that evolution lesson. Those kids they put on the stand couldn’t remember what I taught them three months ago. They were coached by the lawyers.’ TheMonkeyTrial online
Dayton, Tennessee, July 10th 1925: It was the day a twenty-four- year-old teacher named John Thomas Scopes went on trial for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in a public school classroom. The Monkey Trial, PBS 2002
The new law made it a crime ... Teachers who violated the law could be fined. ibid.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers ... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more ... After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. Clarence Darrow, address to Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom – that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust. John Thomas Scopes, cited World’s Most Famous Court Trial p313
If you can take something like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in a public school, then tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in a private school. And next year you can make it a crime to read about it. And then maybe you can start banning books and newspapers. If you can do one, you can do another. Inherit the Wind 1960 starring Spencer Tracy & Gene Kelly & Fredric March & Dick York & Donna Anderson & Harry Morgan et al, director Stanley Kramer
The proper place for the study of religious beliefs is in a church or temple, at home, or in a course on comparative religions, but not in a biology class. There is no place in our world for an ideology that seeks to close minds, force obedience, and return the world to a paradise that never was. Students should learn that the universe can be confronted and understood, that ideas and authority should be questioned, that an open mind is a good thing. Education does not exist to confirm people’s superstitions, and children do not learn to think when they are fed only dogma. Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism
Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people! Mary Shelley, re son’s education
Those who know how to think need no teachers. Mahatma Gandhi
Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Oscar Wilde
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching. Oscar Wilde
The only thing I’ve ever been interested in teaching anyone in life is cricket. Peter O’Toole
Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn. Cicero