Training legions of the ignorant

"What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out." - Bertrand Russell
The intelligent design/creationist advocates continue to spread their gospel, and are now forced to defend their position in court. Some parents are suing to keep ID out of schools because they claim it violates the separation of church and state. While I applaud that effort, it's not the most reasonable argument: which is, that ID has NO SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION WHATSOEVER. Of course that doesn't matter to it's proponents. In their attempts to introduce their unsupportable position, they find it necessary to rewrite the definition of science.
"Ah, this doesn't matter," you say. It does matter. When the fundamental principles of science are distorted into something useless, this country's ability to compete scientifically, and indeed economically, will be undermined. Do you care about that? Do you want to raise a generation of superstitious bumpkins that have no chance to solve the problems of the future? Challenges that will require HARD science to address?
The Greeks and Romans advanced science and medicine to the point that they were performing brain surgery over 2ooo years ago. When Christianity gained primacy and replaced science with superstition and dogma, western civilization entered the Dark Ages. During that time, diseases were treated with prayer, bleeding, and leaches. Galileo was persecuted for proposing (based on science) that the earth revolved around the sun. Prayer didn't seem to help with the plague, did it? Might have been better to use science to try and understand what was causing the disease. Europe experienced over 600 years of benighted ignorance and the suffering that accompanied it.
We are in danger of entering a new dark ages if we can't overcome this trend.
Here's an interesting take on the 'debate.'