The conflict with scientific reality in a democratic system with a large public educational system is readily apparent: if the majority of voters in a state or district elect school boards full of fundamentalists who do not “believe” in evolution — never mind that it’s been proven over and over again — you get stuff like the Scopes monkey trial.

The French Revolution was the first major instance of attempts to refashion reality through voting. Since then we have had hundreds of instances of that, including local and state school boards and legislatures who want to legislate evolution into a “theory” and deny actual proof that can be seen and touched.

The pure democrat would retort that this is the risk one takes with a democratic system. The more “centralized” democrat would say give curriculum control to the experts, the libertarian would say, let’s have a wide range of choices, public and independent, so evolutionary apostates can send their kids to schools where they call Darwin a theorist, and the rest of us can educate our kids.

The last option sounds far better to me.