CSC’s John West has a very good piece at National Review Online today. Defending the Louisiana Science Education Act, West echoes the themes and ideas that he wrote about in his book Darwin Day in America, pointing out that in today’s schools political correctness, not critical thinking, is what most students are learning.

Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the “scientific” view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.

He goes on to call out conservatives for not standing up against the liberal agenda.

Fearful of being branded “anti-science,” some conservatives are skittish about such efforts to allow challenges to the consensus view of science. They insist that conservatives should not question currently accepted “facts” of science, only the supposedly misguided application of those facts by scientists to politics, morality, and religion. Such conservatives assume that we can safely cede to scientists the authority to determine the “facts,” so long as we retain the right to challenge their application of the facts to the rest of culture.

West explains the problems and with this approach and its consequences. An article definitely worth reading, and worth sharing with your conservative friends and colleagues.