|
|
| PUBLIC EDUCATION | |||||||||||||||||
| WE MUST SAVE OUR CHILDREN! |
Dear God, Why didn't you save the children of Littleton School ? Sincerely, Student Dear Student, I am not allowed in schools. Sincerely, God Students’ letters spelled trouble By Elaine Woo Los Angeles Times How do you spell failure? The citizens of Middlletown, Calif., an agricultural community 60 miles north of San Francisco, feared the answer was on the letters page of their local newspaper. There they found more than two dozen letters from eight-graders furious about an outbreak of vandalism at their school. Departing from its usual practice, the newspaper ran the letters exactly as they had been written. It didn’t take long to figure out why. For starters, the 25 students spelled “vandal” in nearly as many ways. “Dear Vandales” went one letter. “I really think that you were stuped to mess our classrooms ...Our teachers our upseat and so are the students. I think you should rote in ----.” Others got “vandals” right but not much else. “We just got are new cumperters,” said one. “Yor relly dameg are thing. | ||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
|
What the Public Schools are Selling and What the Public Thinks They're Buying: The Deceptive Promise of "Learner-Centered" Schooling by John Stone Developmental Psychologist One of the major problems in consumer assessment of education is knowing exactly what we want from our schools. We want schools that produce results but don't want our kids subjected to boring, meaningless, or unhappy educational experiences. Isn't there a way to have both optimal achievement and optimal satisfaction at the same time? In the following, I will try to show that consumers have been sold schooling that promises student achievement but is designed primarily to deliver student satisfaction. My discussion begins with an analysis of learner-centered schooling and ends with questions that parents and school board members might ask of school personnel: How can consumers tell whether a school really puts learning first? Dewey and the Progressive Ideal Learner-centered schooling is a generic name for a pedagogical orthodoxy that originated around the turn of the century and has reigned among public school educators ever since: Progressive education. It was promoted under different names by a succession of luminaries, most notably John Dewey. "Learner-centered" schooling is a current term referring to a wide range of progressive practices. It was used in the title of a recent book published by the National Education Association: Excellence in Teacher Education: Helping Teachers Develop Learner-Centered Schools, (Darling-Hammond,Griffin, & Wise, 1992). Since Dewey's time, an enormous number of schooling innovations have come and gone but almost all of them have fit the strictures of progressivism. Constructivism, developmentally appropriate instruction, transformational outcome-based education, and whole-language reading instruction are widely known present day examples. The role of the learner-centered concept in undermining effective schooling would be difficult to overestimate. Dewey thought that evolution had equipped man in such a way that encounters with the ordinary problems and challenges of life were the optimal learning experience. He believed that schools should model their teaching practices after this mode of learning and thus considered formal schooling practices such as drill, recitation, and memorization to be unnatural, decontextualized, and faulty. Virtually everyone who had been subjected to the public school teaching of Dewey's day agreed that traditional practices needed revision. The public schools of Dewey's era often employed drill and memorization as a kind of mental exercise. The prevailing pedagogical theory of "formal discipline" held that even meaningless drill and memorization were beneficial. Dewey disagreed and argued that teaching should engage students with interesting and personally meaningful slices of life. Not only would such teaching be more pleasant, it presumably would be more effective than traditional schooling as well. Today's pedagogical emphases on teacher sensitivity to multicultural diversity, "hands-on learning" and "authentic" experiences are examples of Dewey's concept. The centerpiece of the progressive view was that student engagement in educational activities must be occasioned by a genuine interest in that which was to be learned. Most of that which is faulty about progressive schooling arises from this extremely appealing idea. Instead of the child conforming to the school, the school was expected to conform to the child's interests and proclivities. Good teaching was that teaching which fit the child, i.e., it was "child centered." Good teaching was that teaching which was well received by the student. Good teaching was intended to produce meaningful learning but student interest and enthusiasm were unquestioned prerequisites. The Practical Limits of Learner-Centered Instruction Learner centeredness greatly limited progressive education's practical usefulness. No longer were teachers expected simply to find a way of getting students to learn, they now had to engage students through intellectual enticement. Today--eighty years into the progressive revolution--the proposition that student interest is the key to learning is still taken as a given. Teachers today are taught that students should be expected to study and learn but only to the extent that they are intrinsically motivated to do so. The implications of learner centeredness were profound. No matter that learning primarily requires student time and effort, responsibility for the student's actions was assigned to the teacher. No matter that individual students might differ greatly in that which they found enticing, all had to be engaged. Because student disinterest and inaction were now defined as evidence of poor teaching, teacher priorities were drastically altered. Good teaching became that teaching which first and foremost stimulates and engages the student. Student acquisition of expected knowledge and skills became a secondary consideration. Limitations on learning that might stem from a lack of student interest were assumed surmountable and limited only by teacher energy and ingenuity. An added difficulty with learner centeredness was that much of what students need to learn--especially the basics--is not inherently interesting. Basics are often no more than prerequisites to that which is interesting. Phonics, for example, is not the sort of thing that children are apt to find attractive. Neither are multiplication facts and correctly spelled words. Much of education prepares for more education and for the future thus it may not be immediately important or attractive to the learner. Dewey's solution to the problem of uninteresting curricula was to let students begin with that which is interesting and return to the fundamentals as needed. In other words, let students discover why the basics are needed and teach them only after the student recognized their importance. Of course, such an approach proved largely impractical and ineffective. Students who struggled with reading rarely became interested in phonics. Students who had a hard time in math rarely felt like memorizing the multiplication tables. Learner-centered teaching suggested that students should take the lead in learning when, in reality, teachers are responsible for teaching precisely because they know what needs to be learned and in what sequence. Requiring students to learn certain things in a certain sequence is not only more efficient, it avoids the problem of students learning habits that interfere with subsequent progress. For example, one can learn to propel a tennis ball over the net with strokes built on bad footwork but once the bad footwork is learned it is very much more difficult to learn the strokes necessary to more proficient play. Professor Cunningham is quite correct about the disservice done children by progressive avoidance of drill and memorization in the basics. Fundamentals may or may not be pleasant to learn but they are always vital to subsequent progress. The learner-centered view of the teacher's role came to be an absolute of mainstream educational thinking and not merely for reasons of theory. It was a critical underpinning of the idea that schools need teachers who have extensive professional training. Teachers without proper training might achieve results through pushing, insisting, or demanding student effort but teachers trained in the methods of the "new school" (as Dewey called it) would know how to engender learning by appealing to curiosity and otherwise fitting teaching to learner characteristics. The great but misleading promise of progressive education was that students would learn as well or better than in the past but under conditions that would make their experience seem attractive, natural, and effortless. Progressive or learner-centered schooling would, in effect, take the work out of schoolwork. Schooling that offers gain without pain might have been false advertising but it was an idea that gained enormous acceptance. Even today--an age of growing skepticism about schooling--parents and others ask first about whether a child likes school, and it is more or less assumed that liking means they are learning. In my opinion, this question reflects the continuing influence of learner-centered thinking. The Progressive Promise in Action The claims made for learner-centered schooling cannot be dismissed as unfounded because it works fairly well under some circumstances. With students who by reason of background and previous experience are motivated to pay attention and study, learner-centered methods can work marvelously well. Also, students who have experienced language rich backgrounds typically respond well. Of course, these are the students who, by and large, need only opportunity and a teacher/facilitator. These are students who are likely to do well regardless of the training had by their teacher. Parents simply want their kids to learn, thus they should worry mostly about results, not methods. Learner-centered approaches may be less effective today than in Dewey's era because of differences in student motivation and preparedness. Children who attended school in the late eighteen hundreds were more likely to have been from homes in which education was appreciated and encouraged. Parents and children in such homes talked and students read instead of watching TV. Schools were selective and education was a privilege. Students who failed to make an effort were subject to dismissal. Dismissal often meant immediate consignment to the rigors of the workplace. The life circumstances confronting today's youth are vastly different. They are immersed in a world that encourages everything but attention to schooling and study. Their homes are not language rich, i.e., there is little talk of intellectual substance and there is less reading. Moreover, dismissal from school is highly improbable and second chances at schooling abound. Society has changed but the schooling establishment's core doctrines have not. Instead their failure has been concealed, ignored, or blamed on other factors. Rather than setting high expectations for student effort and achievement and locking arms with the parents who want excellence, schools have lowered expectations to modal student preferences. They have used their monopoly status to resist public demands for change and permitted students to use or waste publicly funded learning opportunities at their whim. They have retained schooling practices that are not designed to produce results but have blamed the lack of results on lack of opportunities. Insufficient use of existing opportunities is the real problem. Deficient outcomes are created by one other feature of the learning-centered design. Consumers of education expect students to acquire certain skills and understandings as a result of their educational experiences. In fact, the very idea of educational accountability is premised on the notion that good schooling can be known by the learning it produces. To the contrary, Dewey, et al, believed that the only proper objective of good schooling is intellectual growth, not the accumulation of conventionally understood knowledge and skills. Learner-centered schooling is not intended to achieve preconceived educational outcomes, rather its objectives are idiosyncratic to the learner. Thus in the learner centered vision of education, externally planned educational objectives are erroneous in principle. In other words, good education is about process, not results. It is not surprising to find that education's establishment embraces a process-oriented rather than a result-oriented view of schooling. A process emphasis comports nicely with an institutional aversion to accountability. Within a process-oriented, learner-centered framework, high stakes objective tests of school and teaching effectiveness are understood to be faulty. Portfolios and nonstandardized performance measures are preferred--presumably because they are better suited to the assessment of the intellectual skills that learner-centered schooling is intended to produce. Oddly, the business community seems to have bought into the idea that conventional standardized tests distract from education because workers need generic intellectual skills that are best demonstrated by performance in real world circumstances. Wittingly or not, they seem to have adopted assessment concepts derived from the very practices they formerly criticized. What Consumers Want and the Deception of Learner-Centered Schooling Schools are selling the idea that boring, meaningless, time consuming educational experiences are ineffective and unnecessary because learner-centered practices can both produce better results and make the experience attractive, engaging, and seemingly effortless. Presumably all that is needed is well trained teachers, good facilities, and plenty of time and money. Such is the promise of learner centered schooling. Most Americans want children to have the very kind of experience learner-centered schooling purports to offer and they want to believe that it works as advertised. They are willing to pay for it even if it is overpriced and does not quite live up to its billing. They agree with the idea that a school is not a factory or a competitive business so they question whether reforms seeking efficiency and effectiveness are applicable. Few parents or school board members would want children to undergo the rigors and adversity that are presumed to accompany traditional schooling if "enlightened" teaching and a cosmopolitan curriculum can comfortably provide success for all. The fallacy in this transaction is that learner-centered schooling does not deliver what it promises--a fact that consumers are gradually discovering for themselves. Yes, learner-centered schooling can work as promised but, in truth, it often does not and for reasons that an ethical seller would make clear. Known risks, qualifications, and limitations are not merely ignored, they are concealed until after the fact. For example, parents of first graders taught by whole language may not be told that their child's reading could be delayed for years. Instead, these and other limitations are divulged only after the parents discover their third grader is not reading and they are demanding answers. In general, education's consumers are subjected to the same kind of misrepresentations that take place in health and fitness marketing, i.e., buyers are not informed of the extent to which the expected benefits depend on their commitment of time and effort. Here are some of the risks and qualifications that a responsible representation of learner-centered schooling would disclose: - Your child will have to exhibit a high degree of attentiveness and intellectual curiosity because his teachers will attempt to motivate only by stimulating curiosity and appealing to interest. They will not push or demand or insist on attention and effort, neither will they use rewards or incentives or other inducements. - Your child is going to have to work hard to excel despite minimal adult expectations and peers who may not be making much of an effort. - Your child is going to have to take the initiative in learning--especially in learning the boring or difficult parts of an education--because the teacher's role is to facilitate learning, not direct it. - Your child may need some time to develop before he or she is ready to learn because learning-centered schooling is developmentally appropriate. - Your child may not achieve mastery of conventionally expected facts and skills because the prime objectives of learner-centered instruction are the "outcomes" believed appropriate to the 21st Century workplace, not performance on standardized tests. - Your child's level of achievement may not reach the 12th grade level within the usual 12 years because of developmental or other limitations. - Your child may require tutorial help in school and/or remedial work before he or she is ready for college or the workplace because learner-centered schooling is not intended to prepare children for meeting external standards. Learner-Centered Priorities and Consumer Priorities The fundamental reason that learner-centered schooling would not be acceptable to fully informed consumers is that it doesn't agree with their aims. Consumers want learning first and student satisfaction second. To most consumers, schools that fail to produce learning are nonsense. Learner-centered instruction embraces both aims but with a subtle yet critical difference: It puts the student's tastes and preferences first and learning second. It embraces consumers' objectives but alters their priority. As consumers attempt to assess schools, the matter of teaching methodologies is important but not the real issue. The primary question about which consumers need be concerned is whether a school makes decisions about teaching and learning primarily on the grounds of that which optimizes learning and secondarily on the grounds of that which optimizes student satisfaction, or does it do the reverse?. There is nothing wrong with schooling that students find attractive and satisfying. What is contrary to parent expectations and the public interest is decision making that serves student satisfaction first and learning second, i.e., that limits options for the improvement of learning to those possibilities that students would find most satisfying. A school's priorities may not be conspicuous but they are visible and here are some questions that parents or board members might ask: Are practices such as drill, recitation, memorization, and structured experiences unfailingly avoided? Ask why, but remember that school personnel have been taught to emphasize learner centered methods. Does the school have lots of activities but makes little effort to determine what students have learned from those activities? Does the school insist on or require student effort when students fail to do their work? Do teachers reward or otherwise act to induce student effort when needed? (If school personnel recoil in horror at the suggestion that a school should do such things, you may have to remind them that permitting students to go through school without learning is like imposing a death sentence on their prospects for success in life.) Does the school have certain benchmarks for achievement against which the student's progress is judged? Does the school embrace these standards or merely hold their noses and conform to policy? Will the student's achievement enable him or her to score well on objective, standardized exams? Will student progress that falls below grade norms be treated as unacceptable and remediated? Answers that are evasive or that seem to place student satisfaction, student needs, student development, and/or self-esteem ahead of effort and achievement likely indicate learner-centered schooling. So long as the public fails to understand the deceptions in the learning-centered message, schooling that actually produces results will seem an unattractive choice. Anything that actually works will require diligent application of student time and effort to studies. Different students may require differing amounts of effort and some approaches to teaching (e.g., good quality computer-based instruction) will be more efficient and effective than others but the basic equation is that more learning will require more time and effort devoted to schoolwork. Of course, this means less time will be available for youthful distractions and such added time and effort will require insistence by both teachers and parents that schoolwork comes before pleasure. These facts may be unpalatable but they are facts. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Whoa! What in the world is happening with our kids today? Let's >>see...I think it started when Madalyn Murray O'Hair complained that she >>didn't want any prayer in our schools, and we said OK. >> >> Then someone said you had better not read the Bible in school-the >>Bible that says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your >> neighbor as yourself. And we said, OK. >> >> Remember Dr. Benjamin Spock, who said we shouldn't spank our children >>when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be >>warped and we might damage their self-esteem? And we said, OK, we won't >>spank them. >> >> Then someone said that teachers and principals better not discipline >>our children when they misbehave. And our administrators said whoa, no >>one in this school better touch a student when they misbehave because we >>don't want any bad publicity, and we surely don't want to be sued. >> >>Then someone said, let's let our daughters have abortions if they >>want, and we won't even have to tell their parents. And we said, that's a >>grand idea. >> >>Then someone else said, let's give our sons all the condoms they >>want, so they can have all the "fun" they desire, and we won't have to >>tell their parents. And we said, that's another great idea. >> >> And then some of our top officials said that it doesn't matter what >>we do in private as long as we do our jobs. And we said, as long as I have >>a job and the economy is good, it doesn't matter to me what anyone does >>in private. >> >> So now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, >>why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to >>kill. >> >> Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it >>out. >> >>I think it has a great deal to do with "we reap what we sow". >> >> Whoa! What a concept! | EDUCATION WITHOUT GOD IS THE VERY GATE OF HELL | ||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
| YOUR CHILDREN ARE NOT MONKEYS |
The Religion of Evolution: Official name of the Evolutionist’s Religion... Humanism The Evolutionist’s Prophet... Darwin The Evolutionist’s Infallible Book (Bible)... "Origin of the Species" The Evolutionist’s Statement of faith.... Theory of Evolution The Evolutionist’s Church, Temple... Public Schools The Evolutionist’s Priests... High School Biology teachers (university professors are arch-bishops) The Evolutionist’s Evangelistic Medium... High school textbooks, TV, Radio The Evolutionist’s "Church Treasury"... Your public Tax Dollars The Evolutionist’s Divine being... Himself The Evolutionist’s view of where we came from: Random chance processes The Evolutionist’s purpose of life and where we are going None, nowhere Avoiding worldly & empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called "science" 1 Timothy 6:20 Why haven't professors told me that scientists rejected Darwin over 40 years ago? Is evolution philosophy positive or negative on society? Humanism: The Atheist's Religion!!! Atheist refuted by 3 year old! An atheist was indoctrinating his 3 year old daughter that God did not exist and all these things just happened by chance. His little girl looked up and said, "Daddy, do you think God knows that we don't believe in Him?"-----------------------------------------------------------------FOSSIL MAN APES UP FROM?, DONALD JOHANSON, "At any rate, modem gorillas, orangs and chimpanzees spring out of nowhere, as it were. They are here today; they have no yesterday...., LUCY, p.363 GREAT GRANDPA APE, EARNST HOOTEN, Harvard, "If we are descended from apes our remote ancestors ought to look their part. You may not bewilling to admit that you resemble an ape;.... But if that thousandth ancestor's forebearers become progressively more simian as you trace back the genealogical lines you will have to admit that somewhere in your family tree there squats an ape.", UP FROM THE APE, p.289 RECONSTRUCTIONS? EARNST A. HOOTEN, Harvard, "To attempt to restore the soft parts is an even more hazardous undertaking. The lips, the eyes, the ears, and the nasal tip, leave no clues on the underlying bony parts. You can with equal facility model on a Neanderthaloid skull the features of a chimpanzee or the lineaments of a philosopher. These alleged restorations of ancient types of man have very little if any scientific value and are likely only to mislead the public.... So put not your trust in reconstructions.", UP FROM THE APE, p.332 RECONSTRUCTIONS? W. HOWELLS, Harvard, "A great legend has grown up to plague both paleontologists and anthropologists. It is that one of ; men can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone, gaze at it, and pass his hand over his forehead once or twice, and then take a sheet of paper and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like as it tramped the Terriary terrain. If this were quite true, the anthropologists would make the F.B.I. look like a troop of Boy Scouts.", MANKIND SO FAR, p. l38 THEORY DOMINATED DATA, DAVID PILBEAM, YALE, "I am also aware of the fact that, at least in my own subject of paleoanthropology, "theory" - heavily influenced by implicit ideas almost always dominates "data". ....Ideas that are totally unrelated to actual fossils have dominated theory building, which in turn strongly influence the way fossils are interpreted." Quoted in BONES OF CONTENTION p.127 PARANORMAL ANTHROPOLOGY, LORD SOLLY ZUCKERMAN, "We then move right of the register objective truth into those fields of presumed biological science, like extrasensory perception or the interpretation of man's fossil history, where to the faithful anything is possible and where the ardent believer is sometimes able believe several contradictory things at the same time." BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER, p.19 "SIMILAR" NOT NECESSARILY "KIN" - RELATIONSHIPS IMPOSSIBLE TO PROVE BASIS OF "FAMILY TREE". ROGER LEWIN, Editor, Research News, Science, "The key issue is the ability correctly to infer a genetic relationship between two species on the basis of a similarity in appearance, at gross and detailed levels of anatomy. Sometimes this approach....can be deceptive, partly because similarity does not necessarily imply an identical genetic heritage: a shark (which is a fish) and a porpoise (which is a mammal) look similar…, BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p. 123 PROVEN ANCESTRY? RICHARD C. LEWONTIN, Prof. of Zoology, Harvard, "Look, I'm a person who says in this book [Human Diversity, 1982 that we don't know anything about the ancestors of the human species. All the fossils which have been dug up and are claimed to be ancestors we haven't the faintest idea whether they are ancestors. ....All you've got is Homo sapiens there, you've got that fossil there, you've got another fossil there...and it's up to you to draw the lines. Because there are no lines.", Harpers, 2/84 RAMPITHECUS IS DISCARDED APE "APE MAN" OUT, ROGER LEWIN, Ed., Research News, Science, "The dethroning of Ramapithecus from putative first human in 1961 to extinct relative of the orangutan in 1982 is one of the most fascinating, and bitter, sagas in the search for human origins." BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p.86 "APES", Robert B. Eckhardt, Penn. State Univ., "...there would appear to be little evidence to suggest that several different hominoid species are represented among the Old World dryopithecine fossils... (Ramapithecus, Oreopithecus, Limnopithecus, Kenyapithecus). They themselves nevertheless seem to have been apes morphologically, ecologically, and behaviorally.", Scientific American, Vol.226, p.101 AUSTRALOPITHECUS IS AN APE SECOND "APE MAN" OUT, ROGER LEWIN, Ed., Research News, Science, Richard and his parents, Louis and Mary, have held to a view of human origins for nearly half a century now that the line of true man, the line of Homo large brain, tool making and so on has a separate ancestry that goes back millions and millions of years. And the apeman, Australopithecus, has nothing to do with human ancestry." BONES OF CONTENTION, 1987, p.18 LEAKEY DEFECTION, "Dr. Leakey bases hisrepudiation of Darwin on the results of his long search in East Africa for the remains of the original man. The generally accepted post Darwin view is that man developed from the baboon 3 to 5 million years ago. But Leakey has found no evidence of a spurt in development at that time.", Chicago American, 1/25, 1967 DISMISSED APE, LORD SOLLY ZUCKERMAN, "His Lordship's scorn for the level of competence he sees displayed by paleoanthropologists is legendary, exceeded only by the force of his dismissal of the australopithecines as having anything at all to do with human evolution. 'They are just bloody apes', he is reputed to have observed on examining the australopithecine remains in South Africa.. Zuckerman had become extremely powerful in British science, being an adviser to the government up to the highest level...,while at Oxford and then Birmingham universities, he had vigorously pursued a metrical and statistical approach to studying the anatomy of fossil hominids....it was on this basis that he underpinned his lifelong rejection of the australopithecines as human ancestors.", Roger Lewin, BONES OF CONTENTlON, 1987, p.164, 165 DEFINITELY AN APE, LORD SOLLY ZUCKERMAN, "The australopithecine skull is in fact so overwhelmingly simian as opposed to human (figure 5) that the contrary proposition could be equated to an assertion that black is white.", BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER, p.78 UNHUMAN, LIKE THE ORANGUTAN, CHARLES E. OXNARD, Dean of Graduate School, Prof. of Biology & Anatomy, USC, "....conventional wisdom is that the australopithecine fragments are generally rather similar to humans....the new studies point to different conclusions. The new investigations suggest that the fossil fragments are usually uniquely different from any living form: when they do have similarities with living species, they are as often as not reminiscent of the orangutan, ...these results imply that the various australopithecines are really not all that much like humans. ....may well have been bipeds, .... but if so, it was not in the human manner. They may also have been quite capable climbers as much at home in the trees as on the ground..", The American Biology Teacher, Vol.41, May 1979, pp.273-4 LIKE PYGMY CHIMP, ADRIENNE L ZIHLMAN, U. C. Santa Cruz, "Zihlman compares the pygmy chimpanzee to "Lucy," one of the oldest hominid fossils known and finds the similarities striking. They are almost identical in body size, in stature; and in brain size.... These commonalties, Zihlman argues indicate that pygmy chimps use their limbs in much the same way Lucy did....", Science News, Vol.123, Feb.5. 1983, p.89 AUSTRALOPITHECINES, William Howells, Harvard, "...the pelvis was by no means modern, nor were the feet: the toes were more curved than ours; the heel bones lacked our stabilizing tubercles; and a couple of small ligaments that, in us, tighten the arch from underneath, were apparently not present. The finger bones were curved as they are in tree climbing apes." GETTING HERE, 1993, p.79 SHRIVELED STATUS, MATT CARTMILL, Duke; DAVID PILBEAM Harvard; GLYNN ISAAC Harvard; "The australopithecines are rapidly shrinking back to the status of peculiarly specialized apes...", American Scientist, (JulyAugust 1986) p.419 FAILED LINKS: PILTDOWN MAN, NEBRASKA MAN, JAVA MAN, PEKING MAN BELIEVE IT, SEE IT, ROGER LEWIN, Editor of Research News, Science, "How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones the cranial fragments and "see" a clear simian signature in them; and see in an apes jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity. The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientist's' expectations and there effects on the interpretation of the data … It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective truth, data dictate conclusions. If this were the case, then each scientist faced with the same data would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as we've seen earlier and will see again and again, frequently this does not happen. Data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions.", BONES OF CONTENTION, pp.61, 68 FALSIFIED CASTS, ALES HRDLICKA, Smithsonian (Re: Java Man)None of the published illustrations or castsnow in variousinstitutions is accurate." Science, Aug.17, 1923 EVIDENCE MISSING, WILLIAM HOWELLS, Harvard, "Java Man went into Dubois' locker for a time. But Peking Man seems to have gone into Davy Jones' locker, and for good. He disappeared, one of the first casualties of the war in the Pacific, half a million years after he had died the first time." MANKIND IN THE MAKING, p.165 NEANDERTHAL, CROMAGNON ARE MEN EVOLUTION OR VARIATION? "....a Neanderthaler is a model of evolutionary refinement. Put him in a Brooks Brothers suit and send him down to the supermarket for some groceries and he might pass completely unnoticed. He might run a little shorter than the clerk serving him but he would not necessarily be the shortest man in the place. He might be heavierFeatured, squattier and more muscular than most, but again he might be no more so than the porter handling the beer cases back in the stock room." EVOLUTION, TimeLife Nature Library. LARGER BRAIN, WILLIAM HOWELLS, Harvard, "The Neanderthal brain was most positively and definitely not smaller than our own; indeed, and this is a rather bitter pill, it appears to have been perhaps a little larger.", MANKIND SO FAR, p.165 MODERN CAME FIRST, O. BARYOSEF, Peabody Museum, Harvard, B. VANDERMEERCH, Univ. Bordeaux, "Modern Homo sapiens preceded Neanderthals at Mt. Carmel. ...modem looking H. sapiens had lived in one of the caves some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, much earlier than such people had been thought to exist anywhere. ...The results have shaken the traditional evolutionary scenario, producing more questions than answers." Scientific American, p.94, April 1993 MAN "OLDER" THAN PROPOSED ANCESTORS RUINED FAMILY TREE, "Either we toss out this skull 11470] or we toss out our theories of early man," asserts anthropologist Richard Leakey of this 2.8 million year old fossil, witch he has tentatively identified as belonging to our own genus. "It simply fits no previous models of human beginnings." The author, son of famed anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey, believes that the skull's surprisingly large braincase "leaves in ruins the notion that all early fossils can be arranged in an orderly sequence of evolutionary change.", National Geographic, June 1973, p.819 HUMAN BRAIN, "Leakey further describes the whole shape of the brain case 11470] as remarkably reminiscent of modern man, lacking the heavy and protruding eyebrow ridges and thick bone characteristics of Homo erectus." Science News, 102 (4/3/72) p.324 HUMAN BRAIN, Dean Falk, St. U. of N.Y. at Albany, "...KNMER 1805 Homo habilis should not be attributed to Homo... the shape of the endocast from KNMER (basal view) is similar to that from an African pongid, where as the endocast of KNMER 1470 is shaped like that of a modern human." Science, 221, (9/9/83) p.1073 HUMAN BRAIN "The foremost American experts on human brain evolution Dean Falk of the State University of New York at Albany and Ralph Holloway of Columbia Universityusually disagree, but even they agree that Broca's area is present in a skull from East Turkana known as 1470 Philip Tobias...renowned brain expert from South Africa concurs." Anthro Quest: The Leakey's Foundation News. No.43 (Spring 91) p.13 NOT ERECTUS, "According to paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York the African skulls...assigned to erectus often lack many of the specialized traits that were originally used to define that species in Asia, including the long low cranial structure thick skull bones, and robustly built faces. In his view, the African group deserves to be placed in a separate species..." Discover, 9/94, p.88 "OLD" MODERN MEN, Louis Leakey, 'In 1933 I published on a small fragment of jaw we call Homo kanamens1s, and I said categorically this is not a nearman or ape, this is a true member of the genus Homo. There were stone tools with it too. The age was somewhere around 2.5 to 3 million years. It was promptly put on the shelf by my colleagues, except for two of them. The rest said it must ~e placed in a 'suspense account.' Now, 36 years later, we have proved I was right." Quoted in BONES OF CONTENTION, p.156 'THE OLDEST MAN', "[African Footprints] ....they belonged to the genus Homo (or true man), rather than to manapes (like Australopithecus, who was once a thought to be the forerunner of man but is now re8arded as a possible evolutionary dead end). ....they were 3.35 million to 3.75 million years old. ....they would, in Mary Leakeys words, be people 'not unlike ourselves,'...." Time, Nov. 10, 1975, p.93 TOO HUMAN TOO OLD, Russel H. Tuttle, Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago, Affiliate Scientist, Primate Research Center, Emory University, "In sum, the 3.5millionyearold footprint trails at Laetoli sight G resemble those of habitually unshod modem humans…If the G footprints were not known to be so old, we would readily conclude that they were made by a member of our genus...in any case we should shelve the loose assumption that the Laetoli footprints were made by Lucy's kind..." Natural History, 3/90, p.64. MODERN & TALL, RICHARD LEAKEY, ....the boy from Tukana was surprisingly large compared with modern boys his age; he could well have grown to six feet. ....he would probably go unnoticed in a crowd today. This find combines with previous discoveries of Homo erectus to contradict a longheld idea that humans have grown larger over the millennia.", National Geographic, p.629, Nov., 1985 MAN EVEN "BEFORE" LUCY CHARLES E. OXNARD Dean, Grad. School, Prof. Bio. and Anat., USC, "...earlier finds, for instance, at Kanapoi...existed at least at the same time as, and probably even earlier than, the original gracile australopithecines... almost indistinguishable in shape from that of modern humans at four and a half million years..." American Biology Teacher, Vol.41, 5/1979, p.274. HENRY M. MCHENRY, U. of C., Davis, "The results show that the Kanapoi specimen, which is 4 to 4.5 million years old, is indistinguishable from modern Homo sapiens..." Science Vol.190, p.~28. WILLIAM HOWELLS, Harvard, "...with a date of about 4.4 million, [KP 2711 could not be distinguished from Homo sapiens morphologically or by multivariate analysis by Patterson and myself in 1967 (or by much more searching analysis by others since then). We suggested that it might represent Australopithecus because at that time allocation to Homo seemed preposterous, although it would be the correct one without the time element.", HOMO ERECTUS, 1981, p.79-80. EVE KICKED OUT, STEPHEN J. GOULD, "...'mitochondral Eve' hypothesis of modern human origins in Africa, suffered a blow in 1993, when the discovery of an important technical fallacy in the computer program used to generate and assess evolutionary trees debunked the supposed evidence for an African source...disproving the original claim.", Natural History, 2/94, p.21 | ||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
| Favourite links | ||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
|
This page has been visited
|
