Editorial: Stop monkeying around

Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005 | 7:23 a.m.

Voters in a small Pennsylvania town dropped the hammer last week on school board members who required that intelligent design be added to the science curriculum. They voted all of them out.

In deciding that the intelligent design concept is not all that smart, the electorate voted in a slate of Democrats and ousted eight Republicans who in October 2004 required that all Dover public school biology classes include an up-front disclaimer saying Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is "not a fact." Teachers also were to tell students that intelligent design provided an alternative theory and point them to a book in the library on the topic.

The policy ignited a federal lawsuit, now before a judge, that was filed by eight families who say it violates the separation of church and state. A decision is expected in January.

The Dover School Board members elected Tuesday take office Dec. 5, replacing eight of its nine members. They have rightly said that science class is not the appropriate forum for teaching intelligent design, a concept that says the complexity of the universe suggests it was created by some kind of higher power or intelligence.

Hopefully, Kansas voters will follow Dover's lead next year and oust members of the Kansas Board of Education who recently approved a new science curriculum that adds intelligent design as an explanation for natural processes.

It is the second time Kansas school officials have monkeyed around with the state's science curriculum. Six years ago the state board ditched the Big Bang theory and also the teaching of evolution as an explanation for how humanity developed. The ridiculous policy was reversed a year later after voters purged the measure's conservative proponents.

But current Kansas State Board of Education members have now approved, by a narrow margin, science standards that allow schools to teach evolution but also encourage teachers to criticize the concept. Such criticisms are to include changing the definition of science so that it is not limited to natural explanations for nature's phenomena.

These standards don't take effect until 2007, by which time voters could once again clean out board members and strip from public classrooms these ideas that belong in Sunday school rather than science class.