{"id":1277,"date":"2005-09-01T08:42:29","date_gmt":"2005-09-01T12:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1277"},"modified":"2005-09-01T08:42:29","modified_gmt":"2005-09-01T12:42:29","slug":"progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1277","title":{"rendered":"Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth.<\/a> Perhaps the most frightening thing about this statistic is that the NYT <\/span>felt obliged to end the sentence “… an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century” as if this, too, were something its readers might not have known.<\/p>\n\n

It seems to me that one of the positions that progressives simply cannot abandon is that teachers know better than parents what should be taught to children. And when that position goes, usually in the name of democracy, there is no limit to the folly that ensues. Creationism is only the beginning.<\/p>\n\n

Of course, it’s not just science which is the victim of this sort of thing, but history, geograhy, languages, and so on. We take for granted American ignorance of anything that happened more than three years ago, or off-camera anywhere; very probably Europe is approaching similar levels of ignorance. Sing all together now, with uncle Hamish<\/a>: “We are here to compete in a global, knowledge-based economy”<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth. Perhaps the most frightening thing about this statistic is that the NYT <\/span>felt obliged to end the sentence “… an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century” … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1277"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}