The World Just Keeps Getting Weirder

"The poor world is almost six thousand years old..."—As You Like It.

Thanks to those Trojan Horses of stupidity (a.k.a. school vouchers), during the coming academic year some Louisiana school children will be taught at taxpayer expense that the Loch Ness Monster is an argument against evolution. Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, Lousiana uses textbooks provided by Accelerated Christian Education Ministries, which raises the bar on toxic nuttiness to staggering heights. Students at schools following the ACE curriculum will be taught that South African apartheid was good for everyone because it enabled "each group to maintain and pass on their culture and heritage to their children," that the Ku Klux Klan fought "declines in morality," and that evolution clearly never happened because there are no "transitional fossils" (you can read what's wrong-headed about this belief here).

And then there's this gem:

 Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie,’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.


Why is this important to these nut jobs? If the Loch Ness Monster exists and it's a plesiosaur, then it's a surviving dinosaur. And (the reasoning* goes) the survival of a dinosaur is much more plausible if the world is only 6,000 years as old as opposed to millions of years old.  One of the strategies employed by creationists is to contrive arguments that the world is much younger than it actually is.

It's bad enough that these "schools" exist. Unfortunately they're not confined to the U.S. In the U.K. approximately 2,000 young people are being subjected to this insanity. What's more, the National Recognition Information Centre, the UK office that evaluates educational degrees for universities and employers, has declared an ACE diploma comparable to an A-Levels diploma, the prerequisite for entering a British university.

A kid that's been through the ACE curriculum is in for a shock when he gets to a secular college (or most religious ones, for that mattter).

*If you can call it that.

Addendum: If you want to read  a superb takedown of the ACE from a medieval perspective, go here.