What would Intelligent Design look like in the schools?

A history professor examines that question by looking at 19th century geography schoolbooks, which all existed as testimates to all things being created intentionally for the benefit of mankind.

After all, once you know that mountains exist because they were meant to exist, what is left to do but to sit in your armchair and meditate on the wisdom of their design?

Two textbooks laid out the very terms of the current controversy. Brocklesby's "Elements of Physical Geography" told readers in 1868 that "the physical phenomena of the world reveal in their harmonious action a unity of plan and purpose, and display in an infinite variety of ways the 'Power, Wisdom and Goodness of the Almighty Designer.' " By 1901, the Rand-McNally Grammar School Geography instead maintained that the study of geography ought to reveal "a connected chain of causes and results, every link of which presents a problem to stimulate investigation and awaken rational thought."

There is our choice. The details have changed, but the fundamental habits of thought at issue have not. Do we want children to learn what is currently known and, more important, what remains to be discovered, about the physics of planetary motion? Or rather should they learn that "As the earth is round, only half of it can be lighted at once. In order that both sides may be lighted, the Creator has caused the earth to rotate"?

Kudos to Rand-McNally for daring to put science into geology all those years ago.