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If They Only Had a Brain

© Frank Monaldo

MANY PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE MIDWEST see Kansas as a perfectly flat expanse of wheat fields for as far as the eye can see. Central and western Kansas largely fits this description. The Flint Hills, to the surprise of many outsiders, give eastern Kansas a hilly countryside. The state geography is a metaphor for different aspects of the Kansas mind.

As ideas breeze through the Kansas plains only the toughest most rigorous strains take root in the flat, practical prairie mind. Most ideas, especially silly ones, fail to take root and are swept away. Occasionally a weak plant of a notion brushes up against a hill in eastern Kansas, gains a foothold, and is given temporary refuge from rigorous examination.

In the flat geographic center of Kansas, an important educational and intellectual institution has taken firm root. About one hour northwest of Wichita, astride Route 50, is the modest town of Hutchinson. However, out of this modest town, with the enthusiastic and proud support of the community, the Kansas Cosmosphere has grown. This museum, a small midwest version of the National Air and Space Museum, is dedicated to education and public outreach about science, in particular astronomy and space exploration. The museum boasts exhibits from the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane responsible for many air speed records to a Mercury program space capsule undergoing restoration. Hutchinson and its Cosmosphere are embracing science and the future.

Further east, by contrast, a silly idea has taken, it is hoped, only temporary refuge in Topeka. The State Board of Education decided to no longer require a study of evolution by high school students. It seems that the some in the state are desperate to steal from Tennessee, where the infamous Scopes Monkey trial was held, the moniker of the most provincial state in the union. The decision is an uncharacteristic example of frivolous thinking in the Sunflower State.

In 1868, a brave and resolute Kansan, Republican Senator Edmund Ross, cast the deciding vote acquitting President Andrew Johnson in the Senate. The vote cost Ross his seat and his standing in the community. One hundred and thirty-one years later, the State School Board of Education member from Haven, Harold Voth, ignored the Kansas tradition of independence of mind and cravenly provided the deciding vote that single-handily lowered state-wide educational standards and made Kansas an object of derisive ridicule. It is not clear what this formerly respected Kansan was lacking, a brain, a heart, or courage.

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