NewsWatch

Complete Overhaul of the Education System

IntellectualTakeout.org, 2/1/23, “Parents Want a Complete Overhaul of the Education System” [Excerpts]: In the wake of COVID-19, people now overwhelmingly believe that the system’s broader purpose needs to be rethought.

A new Purpose of Education Index survey released by the Massachusetts-based national think tank Populace found a radical shift in the way most of us view education and what our children should [gain].

Parents, often working in the same room where their children were being educated over Zoom, began to gain a more complete understanding of what and how their children were being taught—and they did not like what they saw.

An awakening took place as parents soon learned the power teachers unions had, not just over curriculum but also over whether schools would even open.

That disruption has been devastating. Test scores shared with the Associated Press showed that the average student lost over half a year of learning in math and a quarter of a school year in reading. But students in some public-school districts lost twice that in learning. The overall rate of parents choosing to home-school grew from 5.4% to 11.1%, according to data from the Census Bureau.

http://bit.ly/3HDxNtF

“Open Hostility” to Religious Freedom Club

TheCollegeFix.com, 12/28/22, “University of New Hampshire accused of ‘open hostility’ toward religious freedom club” [Excerpts]: University of New Hampshire administrators need to step in and correct the “open hostility” toward Christian and conservative students by January 3, a demand letter from a legal nonprofit stated.

First Liberty Institute sent the demand letter to law school Dean Shane Cooper after UNH’s Student Bar Association (SBA) refused to recognize the Free Exercise Coalition, a student organization...despite the club’s adherence to all the school’s criteria for official club membership.

First Liberty accused the SBA of acting as an “inquisitor” when examining the club’s application, instead of providing its “routine, administrative approval.” The Christian Legal Society, approved two months prior, faced similar issues in obtaining official recognition, First Liberty wrote, showing a pattern of bias.

The SBA “viewed with suspicion” the Free Exercise Coalition’s “mission.” The SBA also “fomented public discussion that labeled the group as bigoted, subversive, oppressive, and a general ‘problem’ for UNH,” First Liberty wrote in its letter.

“Further, this shocking, knives-out inquisition of the Free Exercise Coalition’s religious beliefs by the SBA led the Free Exercise Coalition’s faculty advisor to withdraw,” according to the letter.

http://bit.ly/3wwLaGQ

Yet Another Living Fossil Found 

ICR.org, 12/12/22, “Yet Another Living Fossil Found” [Excerpts]: Evolutionary philosophy states the fossil record is a record of the gradual and slow evolution of life forms that all came from a single common ancestor impossibly long ago. Yet, the fossils don’t document this. It has long been known [that] strange life forms appear abruptly and undergo either stasis (no change) or extinction.

 Living fossils are those living creatures—plant or animal—that are almost identical to those in the fossil record and were thought to be extinct. Sometimes called “Lazarus taxa,” they appear alive in populations today. Examples are legion: the horseshoe crab, damselfly, coelacanth and gar fish, lobsters, Andean tapir, magnolia flowers, Wollemi pine, and many others. The living counterpart looks so much like its fossilized predecessors that identification down to the species level is often possible.

Recently, “a small clam, previously known only from fossils, has recently been found living at Naples Point, near Santa Barbara, [CA].”

Jeff Goddard, a research associate at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute said, “[Our clam species] doesn’t go back anywhere near as far as the famous Coelacanth or the deep-water mollusk Neopilina galatheae—representing an entire class of animals thought to have disappeared 400 million years ago—but it does go back to the time of all those wondrous animals captured by the La Brea Tar Pits.” This is more proof that clams have always been clams.

If confirmed, this would mean that Goddard had found not a new species, but a sort of living fossil. It has been confirmed. This is yet one more example of a very long list of living fossils. Their very existence challenges Darwin’s theory and the long ages associated with it.

http://bit.ly/3wvl2fO