A-C-E is not A-OK

Accelerated Christian Education (known as A-C-E or ACE) is in the news, and for all the wrong reasons. ACE is a homeschooling curriculum from the US (Texas) which is accredited in New Zealand, and covers children from age 5 through to college level. Here's Duane Howard, Vice President of ACE, talking about what he thinks education should be for (check out some particularly icky stuff he says around 32 minutes in):

Duane from ACE is surprisingly explicit in his words about sheltering children, and avoiding anything that disagrees with “the bible”. And, of course, “the bible” in this instance isn't anything objective - he's just talking about his particular interpretation of the Christian bible, a relatively strict interpretation that many Christians do not agree with. ACE has seven “principles” that underpin what they do, which not only include “Integration of Biblical Principles” and “Godly Character Training”, but surprisingly also contains “Development of Critical Thinking Skills”. We'll see why this is surprising as we delve into what they teach.

ACE has been on my radar for a while now, since I was given a heads up a few years ago about some of the content in their current curriculum that warned boys about the dangers of the “troubled woman” - talk of some women being immoral and having a tendency to lead men astray. At the time I looked into the organisation and the training material, and was unsurprised to see a lot of science denial documented by ex-students - along with a liberal sprinkling of bible quotes throughout the material for all subjects, including science. Here are some ACE teachers talking about just how integrated religious belief is to the course material, and why they think it's important:

Stuff published an article recently pointing out just how bad ACE's curriculum is. They quoted one ex-student saying that the system feels like a cult, and that teachers used to speak in tongues. The article also mentioned the teaching of Young Earth Creationism - which normally means a belief that the earth is about 6,000 years old. The standard scientific understanding is that the earth is about four and a half billion years old, which is around a million times longer than this curriculum is teaching. That kind of disagreement is pretty stark.

As an aside, “worldview” is a word that is often used by Young Earth Creationists (YECs) to try to frame their biblically based beliefs as just a difference of opinion. Rather than framing the difference in beliefs as an evidence-based, science-backed view versus a religious-based one that rejects scientific evidence for an old earth, creationists prefer to argue that they're just looking at the same evidence through a different lens, the lens of the bible - which they call their worldview.

And, just to be clear, the evidence for evolution by natural selection is overwhelming. Even back when Charles Darwin first published his theory of why evolution happened, it was already an established fact that species evolved. The idea of species evolving is thousands of years old, and the evidence for this change was apparent before Darwin's time - the fossil record, the geologic record and the documented similarities of species all made it clear that species change over time, and that creatures diverged from common ancestors. Scientists like Lamarck tried to come up with reasonable explanations for why this change happened, but it wasn't until Darwin (and Wallace) came along that variation, inheritance and natural selection were understood to be the reasons for the observed family tree of all life.

Looking online, I've found mention of some ridiculous ideas that ACE is teaching children:

The Loch Ness monster is apparently real. This is a creationist effort to cast doubt on science's claim that the earth is old - surely if dinosaurs are still around today, scientists are wrong when they say that they died out 65 million years ago. And if they can't get it right about the dinosaurs, they probably messed up their age of the earth calculations as well.

The sun is supposedly not a ball of hydrogen gas being forced to fuse into helium under the pressure of gravity. ACE's perspective is that older theories of why the sun outputs so much energy were discarded because of a belief that the universe is very old, around 13 billion years. But, if the earth is only 6,000 years old, there's no need to throw away ideas like the one that the sun is a burning lump of coal, or that the heat is the result of a chemical rather than nuclear reaction.

There are apparently no transitional fossils between species. This argument I find interesting, as creationists have found an “irrefutable” defence of this stance. Let's say we have two species that are several million years apart. In the scientific understanding of the world, if scientists find a fossil of a species that lived somewhere in the middle, and has features of both other fossils, this is a transitional fossil. This could be like Tiktaalik, a recent fossil find of a fish-like creature that has several adaptations to live on land - e.g. a neck and ribs. To a young earth creationist, however, this is just a third creature that God created - one that was created either on the fifth day (as it's partially a fish), or the sixth day (as it's also part land animal). Not only that, but now instead of one gap in the fossil record that needs a transitional fossil to prove evolution, now we have two gaps!

With the recent pandemic, more and more parents have taken to homeschooling - which is understandable. But what is worrying about this trend is an increase in parents using this deeply flawed ACE curriculum at home. Stuff reported that there are at least seven schools in NZ using ACE, and around 250 kids being home schooled with ACE material. The article talked of a four-fold increase in ACE enrollment at an Otago school that offers distance learning. That means more kids in New Zealand are now being taught that the earth was made by God a few thousand years ago, and that scientists are either lying to them or they're so bad at their jobs that they've got everything wrong.

This gross miseducation is a problem that really needs to be fixed. It seems that the government has been concerned enough with ensuring they don't upset Christians that they've been willing to institute and protect special treatment for this one particular religious belief for a long time now. This kind of unfair treatment is bad enough when it's selectively giving tax breaks to groups purely for believing in a god. But when the problem is deeper than that, such as in this case where children are being misled about fundamental ideas of the world and how it works, it's so much more damaging.

It's my belief that a strong science education is a really good basis for critical thinking - not just learning what science has figured out, but learning how they figured it out. When you know a little bit of maths, and some of the basic principles of how particles and forces are assembled to make everything around us, and how this happened over billions of years, you can make a rough and ready estimate of whether something makes sense or not - be it psychic powers or a perpetual motion machine. And when you read about something that sounds fantastical, you won't just accept it at face value - you'll go and look for evidence. Who's making the claim, what evidence have they given to back it up, what are their peers saying about it, how much does it contradict what we've already learned about the world through science?

I can highly recommend the book Alexander mentioned in his article, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's a humorous look at how scientists came to piece together our current understanding of the world - including failed experiments, funny mishaps and discoveries that were more luck than rigour. Science is a gift that we are lucky to have - it's full of wrong turns, and tainted by our very human shortcomings, but slowly and surely it's unravelled more truths in the last few hundred years than we managed in the entirety of history before then. And it really just boils down to the simple act of testing whether something's true, rather than accepting it blindly.

Skeptic Steven Novella put it well, talking about when he's confronted by people who denigrate science. He said:

“What do you think science is? There's nothing magical about science. It is simply a systematic way for carefully and thoroughly observing nature and using consistent logic to evaluate results. Which part of that exactly do you disagree with? Do you disagree with being thorough? Using careful observation? Being systematic? Or using consistent logic?”

Science is not a codified belief system that people choose to believe in - it's not in any way analogous to a religious belief. Instead it's a method of learning about the world around us, a way that constantly second guesses itself, using a variety of methods to double check its results. It's been tried and tested, and over the last few hundred years has proven itself to be better than anything that came before it as a tool for discovering about nature. The idea that children should be sheltered from science, or from what it's managed to glean, simply because it doesn't align with someone's flawed interpretation of an ancient holy book, seems absurd. It's disappointing that the ACE curriculum has been accredited in New Zealand, and that it's okay to use it in this country to misinform children about some pretty fundamental ideas.