With weary regularity, my 15-year-old son flips aside his pencil and, slumping in his chair, asks why a person with no intention of becoming a physicist or mathematician should be tortured with science and algebra. He doesn’t yet see the value in learning the principles of logic, or the orderliness of the scientific method to test hypotheses.

I wipe my son’s sweaty brow.

“It’s so you don’t grow up to be an idiot like the school board members in Dover, Pa.,” I tell him.

Read entire article (Joan Ryan, San Francisco Chronicle)