by Rob Seip

Created on: May 18, 2009   Last Updated: May 26, 2009

Are explicitly rationalist charter schools the next step in the fight against fundamentalism and superstition in America?

The debate over intelligent design, although it has been resolved in the secular world by the Dover decision, continues to rage on the Christian airwaves. While the courts have determined definitively that intelligent design is an effort to deceptively repackage precisely the same creationism that was previously thrown out of the schools by the courts, the fundamentalist community continues to find great propaganda value in intelligent design. There is no more vivid demonstration of the ignorant, authoritarian and anti-intellectual nature of fundamentalism in America than 20 minutes of a Family Radio piece talking smugly about the flaws in the theory of evolution. The fundamental misunderstand of the meaning and purpose of science in these programs is contextualized by the constant errors in logical reasoning and misinterpretations of grade school biology. In short, if these programs are not produced by ignorant people, they are duplicitously designed to keep ignorant people who dont understand logic or science, ignorant and incapable of understanding logic or science. The anti-intellectual subtext is ever present and is a deeply pernicious force in American culture.

Listening to this stuff is valuable for me as a scientific materialist because it affords me the opportunity to reflect on the next requirement for the evolution of public schools: Charter schools with a very explicitly scientific materialist mission and world view - one that firmly sets all non-physical realities outside the consideration of serious, responsible people.

This is, in and of itself, a radical idea in the US. But as the numbers of the non-religious continue to grow, people are beginning to gather around the idea that all mysterious, improvable, non-physical, magical things (no matter how pervasive and persistent theses ideas may be in popular culture) are just not important to our lives. Radical idea perhaps to some, but increasingly popular none-the-less (check out the unfortunately self-named Brights or the Naturalist movement advocated for by CFI or the Humanists, to name a few).

Because regular public schools in the US are at the political mercy of their communities, they are forced to work tirelessly to avoid running afoul of the desires of the fundamentalist Christian Right. Most immediately, this negatively affects accurate sex education,

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