An interesting article concerning evolution and homeschooling was published by Associated Press. The article deals with the availability of homeschooling materials for biology courses. Having been critical of the media in the past, honest compels me to write this new post.
What surprised me was the general tone of the article. Normally, the news media reports on the evolution versus creation debate with a mixture of fear-mongering (Here Come the Ignorant Reactionary Homophobic Right-Wing Christianist Theocrats! may as well be the the universal title for such articles), condescension, and (sometime) an unmistakable dash of pure religious bigotry. This article, while not completely free of these sentiments, actually managed to present the other side without stereotype.
The part that was most interesting to me - astounding, to be honest - was the fact that the high school students and their parents were not portrayed as Bible thumpin' hillbillies. In fact, they were actually given credit for their intellectual prowess - something I do not recall AP doing before. The author(s) avoided the usual homeschooling-is-an-abomination meme and tried to be fair.
Disclosure: I am a mathematics instructor at a local community college, and have mixed feelings about homeschooling. If done right, homeschooling can be a blessing by allowing students to flee failing public schools and get the intellectual stimulation they need. But if it is done poorly, these kids will never catch up. In other words, it is not a guarantee of anything.
UPDATE 3/7/10: My local paper had an edited version of the same article. The original article had a rebuttal to the view expressed by the evolutionist professor that a Christian-based home school curriculum can cause children to avoid science. The edited version dropped the rebuttal, and the result was much more slanted.
Naturally, in a free society a newspaper can print what it wants. But there really wasn't any need to doctor the original story to make it appear that the author wrote something other than what he originally put out.
