The Jesus-rode-dinosaurs folks are at it again; tweaking education in an ongoing crusade to bury our children’s heads in the sand. This time, it’s the Florida’s Department of Education, opening its Pandora’s box of educational horrors and pulling out a proposal for what students should be taught about science.
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Are we surprised that evolution and climate change took it on the chin?
How am I supposed to teach about fossils? a frustrated science teacher asked.
Easy! In Florida, we all get to decide what’s science. Ocean heating up? It has a fever. Thirty-one degrees in Palm Beach? It caught a cold. Is that a saddle ridden by a woman in China 2,700 years ago? Not unless there were brontosaurus bones nearby.
Florida students’ climate studies are slowly and steadily vanishing in reverse sync with the Atlantic Ocean, which is slowly and steadily showing up on their parents’ South Florida doorstep. As for evolution, the standards all but erase the Great Leap from simian to the upright and opposable thumb brigade. Clearly, someone in Tallahassee took a page from a student witness in the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial on teaching evolution. “I believe in part of evolution,” he said, “but I don’t believe in the monkey business.”
We’d like to see a little less of that, too. No such luck. “Science begins in wonder, not in ideology,” FDOE Commissioner Henry Mack announced. It certainly does. I wonder, for instance, who exactly Mack was talking about when he proclaimed it was wrong for children to be talked out of that scientific wonder by “leftist zealots.” I wonder, too, whether he can dial back the self-righteousness before every Florida college freshman is automatically enrolled in Remedial Everything.
We should have seen it coming. In 2024, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced climate change would be erased from most state laws. It was a fine day for it. NPR reported the heat index hit 115 degrees in Key West. Wildfire smoke from Mexico was making its way over our little piece of the peninsula.
FDOE instructed schoolbook publishers to do some climate editing of their own. Among the dropped wording was this wild and crazy statement found by WUSF and The Hechinger Report: “Reliance on fossil fuels is widespread among consumers and businesses.”
It’s the kind of “Well, Duh!” even a Homer Simpson could get behind. But FDOE, armed with fewer brain cells than a cartoon character who famously lodged a crayon in his head, found it too inflammatory. Children should not know their parents put gas in cars on the way to soccer practice. Or that those cars have tailpipes.
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Let’s not spring the news on the kids until they are older and able to handle it. Let’s wait until they are grown, living in a beachfront home without insurance (because Florida). Let’s put it off until they are watching a beautiful full moon lighting up the Cat 6 heading for landfall on their new sofa.
Let it be a surprise.
Or it could be another kind of surprise at Thanksgiving dinner, when Uncle Joe lets slip why humans don’t have feathers, or when the SAT scores arrive and the kids finally find out that even though Florida told them they were getting all the stuff, they were only getting a slice of the stuff, and they, not Florida, will pay the price for not enough stuff.
Charmingly, FDOE is taking public input on the proposed standards. I am sure they will give it the same serious consideration they gave for protests over banned school library books from Carl Hiaasen, barred for writing about the bulldozing of Florida (“Skink — No Surrender”) and Stephen King, barred for writing about the kind of bozos who would let that happen (“It“).
Perhaps I am being too hard on the agency. After all, evolution makes mistakes, too. The Gastric Brooding Frog. The Red-Lipped Batfish. The Average Florida Legislator.
And there’s always the evolutionary danger of adapting badly to rapid environmental shifts, like dinosaurs failing to even consider comet-proof bomb shelters, or the spurned volcano alarmists of Pompeii, or sitting out low tide in a Florida foyer with only a mop and a bottle of tequila.
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Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.