Do you not have private schools which are not run by a church over there?

Yes, and they're expensive.... in addition to paying for public schools through taxes. If you're going to teach..oh, make that discuss, religion in school, how many of the 10,000 religions are you going to discuss?
10 minutes on each religion is 100,000 minutes.
A 180 day year, with a typical 50 minute period, is 9,000 minutes.
So, if you spend 11.1 hours, every school day, you can do that. But somehow I think the science and other subjects would suffer. :rolleyes:

Bruce, I'm not suggesting that any of these things SHOULD be discussed or included as a part of general curriculum, but when it comes to the best way to teach kids, the more you have to work with the better.

All I'm suggesting is that they shouldn't be banned, so that if, during the course of a lesson the subject comes up, the teacher doesn't have to 'not answer' questions or should dissuade discussion.

Of course, some teachers will abuse the system and use it as their own little soap box, but then there are the teachers who truly wish to give kids something to think about, and maybe expand their horizons a little.

Surely that makes sense to you?

So were many wacky ideas. The difference is whether something is based on science or not.

OK, the subject matter is evolution, which is a very small part of science.
But if a student asks the teacher how this can be, when his church has been touting inteligent design, I can see the teacher explaining the difference between faith and science.

However, if the student is deliberately trying to introduce ID as the real truth, then the teacher can use this law to head off the debate.

And, ID should never be part of the curriculum. :tinfoil:

By the same token, though, it shouldn't be absolutely ruled out, either, which is I think what happens in some classrooms.

Meaning that because a teacher is teaching evolution, they should not be able to declare that evolution means that God or no higher power was involved.

If we're going to keep faith or belief in God/Higher Power out of the equation, it has to stay all the way out.

Side rant: Which is why each child should get their allotment of state/federal funding to be applied to whatever form of education their parents prefer. It seems like the most fair way for children of all economic levels to have a shot at religious private school, secular private school, public school or home school. As it is too many kids are stuck with a mediocre system and without the ability to bargain for something better.

Yeah, yeah, I know, then the public system would go kaputs . . . would that really be a bad thing?:confused:

"ID" should be absolutely ruled out, because it is a lie. It is pretending to be science in order to try to weasel its way into public schools, and it is in no way science.