It’s nice to see that I agree with a Northern Star columnist. In a recent column dictating that a rural school district in Pennsylvania should not be able to extend intelligent design into its curriculum, the columnist said to “leave the decision of what is taught up to the teachers, not the politicians.”

Unfortunately, a statewide policy in Illinois dictates what teachers should teach and literally how much they should teach of it, and it has largely gone through without any discussion.

Without consulting every educator in the state, the chief politician in this state implemented a plan which would require the teaching of various “genocides” in the history of the world. I agree with the importance of that history, but I agree more with the importance of all history. When a teacher has a limited time in a classroom, a governor should not dictate to that teacher what history is more important or more relevant. When we try to define genocide and setup a permanent list of these events, we run into events, which we may not view with enough seriousness as being genocide, but are very much genocide. This not only runs the risk of ethnocentrism in every history classroom in this state, but it will also limit the ability and depth of the teaching of important history lessons about everything other than genocide.

Once we begin to remove all politics from the drafting of education curriculum, we must also accept the independence and sovereignty of highly qualified educators in that decision-making process. If an educator chooses to teach intelligent design to bring out more depth in his or her classroom, there is nothing that politicians should be able to do about it, right? If parents are upset about the teaching of intelligent design to their students, they should have no more a right to strike down that theory than do the parents who disagree with the teaching of evolution, right?

If we really support giving the choice to choose curriculum to the educator and not to the influences of the politicians, then we have a lot of supporting to do. We would be required to recognize many different ideologies, theories and premises, including intelligent design and creationism.

But we agree with that, right?

Aaron Funfsinn

Junior, political science major