Saturday, October 22, 2005

Let's be honest

Governor Bredesen was recently in Japan. Thankfully someone was honest.

“In almost every meeting I go too, I ask what are the impediments to your expanding of this site and what can we do about it?” Bredesen said. “In one of them that I remember well and I won’t quote the company, they just said we can hire lots of good workers. We cannot find management.” Hearing that from a Japanese company “very much got my attention,” Bredesen said,...
And it should have. It's not about Pre-K or lottery scholarships it's about getting back to basics and accomodating real learning.

We have full pages in our newspapers with faulty logic being utilized to prevent our students from utilizing the thinking skills they should have learned to evalute the legitimacy of arguments about such things as what is science. It's all well and good to say you want a diverse and thinking student body that results in quality managerial employees but when you won't allow them the resources and opportunity to actually think diversely and come to their own conclusions, to utilize the skills managers must have, what do you expect?

Nashville school board member Lisa Hunt wrote: "Teaching intelligent design in public schools reaches beyond these bounds, narrowing our sense of both knowledge and truth." I don't understand how she cannot see, or even allow, that the exercise of discussing the topic is vital to create a thinking population. It's like saying we shouldn't discuss communism in America because we're a republic. Getting to know the other side's argument tests your own foundation and allows you to own your point of view in a way that no droaning lecture from anyone can accomplish.

The Governor bemoans the lack of real scientists coming out of Tennessee schools. Perhaps it's because no one has taught them that real scientists question everything in their quest for truth--including the established science.

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