Back in May, we learned that the Youngstown City Schools in Ohio were showing a video by Turkish Creationist Adnan Oktar (who also goes by the pseudonym Harun Yahya) in the classroom.

As Zack Kopplin wrote for the Daily Beast,

A curriculum map… recommends teachers in this public school district show a creationist video, Cambrian Fossils and the Creation of Species, as part of 10th-grade science education. The video claims that the Cambrian Explosion “totally invalidates the theory of evolution.” The Cambrian Explosion was a time period, nearly 550 million years ago, where, over the next tens of millions of years, the number of species on Earth experienced a (relatively) rapid expansion by evolutionary standards. Christian creationists regularly point to this explosion of life as evidence for creation by God and against evolution.

The same curriculum map included showing kids the videos Unlocking the Mystery of Life and Darwin’s Dilemma, produced by the Intelligent Design-promoting Discovery Institute.

But a new CEO for the District has put a stop to the anti-science nonsense. Krish Mohip says that the District’s science curriculum will match the science standards promoted by the Ohio Department of Education. And that means no faith-based pseudoscience.

The memo says that “beginning this 2016-2017 school year any reference to intelligent design, creationism, or any like concepts are eliminated from the science curriculum.” … Mohip writes that discussions, activities, videos and articles that may have referenced what he characterized as “objectionable concepts” have been replaced with state science standards.

Just like that, anti-science concepts are out the door and potential lawsuits from church/state separation groups are moot. Not a bad way for the new guy to begin the school year.

Hopefully, he can also come to understand how that Creationist propaganda made it into the curriculum in the first place so that he can prevent it from ever happening again.

(Image via Shutterstock. Thanks to McSkeptic for the link)



