Surprise: the educational system sucks Since we're beating one of my favorite dead horses, the creationism/evolution debate (you guys are going to be so sick of me): Reader Allen Thorpe writes regarding my posts on the slowly withering Science Fair about the Santorum Amendment, i.e., the creationists' latest weapon:

I wouldn't worry. Most kids don't learn anything in school anyway. With all the other indoctrination they get in political correctness, it's amazing if any of them come through with any critical thinking skills at all.

Oh, but Allen, that's precisely why I'm worried. The beautiful (ugly) thing about creationism/intelligent design is that you don't have to learn critical thinking to get it. In fact, critical thinking is the enemy of creationism/ID, in which you simply have to believe what you're told -- either that things are the way they are because God made them that way, or that things are the way they are because somebody-who-is-probably-God-but-good-God-don't-say-His-name-in-school-because-it's-unconstitutional made them that way. The Santorum Amendment is right about one thing: kids need to learn critical thinking. But what the amendment does is to encourage precisely the opposite by "inadvertently" (let's be honest, it ain't inadvertent, the language of the bill was written by ID proponents) promoting the teaching of a crackpot religious theory disguised in the garb of critical thinking. Allen, if kids were getting taught critical thinking in schools, I wouldn't constantly rail about their being taught nonsense; I'd be perfectly happy to let them think their own way through the nonsense. But we all know they're not getting a scrap of instruction in critical thinking in any of their classes, science or other. And I say this as someone who didn't learn critical thinking until I left my creationism-happy high school in Georgia and went to college, where I blessedly (ha) majored in biological anthropology and never looked back.