Educating Children

"If you fight science, you will lose your children"

(Pat Robertson, tele-evangelist and conservative Christian commentator)
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  It is important to understand what Theory of Evolution says, and why scientists think it is the best explanation of origins.
  
  Don't have to 'believe' it or accept it, but it is important to know the facts about it.
  
  If your education policy works like this:
  
  (1) Don't even teach the subject
  (2) Tell kids that one side is completely wrong
  (3) Feed them propaganda rather than facts
  
  Then this isn't education, it is simply brainwashing.
  
  If you use bumper-sticker slogans like "It's only a theory", "Evo doesn't tell us where we came from" "Where are the missing links" "Nobody saw it so we can't know what happened" then you are serving up propaganda. As with all propaganda, the words are designed to cheat and deceive - the exact opposite of what schooling is meant to be about.
  
  
  
  

  This actually harms your cause. Children believe what adults tell them, for a while. But when they get out in the big wide world and start noticing all the holes in your propaganda, they realize that they've been actively mislead. And then they start to question everything else you told them.
  
  Easy to see whether this is true or not. If it is true, you should see a big drop off in church membership when people hit their 20's. That's when they've had a year or two out of the brainwashing bubble, and they start to think for themselves instead of accepting the propaganda. They realize that there is a huge body of evidence which you tried to pretend didn't exist, and they realize that the arguments you put forward were not factual.
  
  It's worth considering whether it's better to teach Evo honestly, and let kids make up their own minds. If you try to brainwash them into accepting your point of view, you run the obvious risk that all your teaching will be tainted.