By way of Pharyngula, many people are learning this week about a new paper published in Science with some very bad news about the teaching of evolution in our public schools. The gist is that we’re basically not teaching any evolution in our public schools.
From a summary at arstechnica.com:
Based on the 926 responses that came from nearly every state...they found that only around 28 percent of teachers consistently taught evolution in a forthright manner. The majority of teachers (60 percent) taught evolution cautiously, allowing room for debate and doubt. The rest of the teachers openly advocated creationism.
And I always thought it was just my teachers who never got around to properly explaining it.
Many of these teachers lack the educational expertise to defend evolution, so they resort to dodging the creationism vs. evolution "controversy" altogether. Some of them shift the blame of having to teach evolution to state examinations, while pointing out to students that they do not need to actually believe it. Other teachers focus on molecular evolution, avoiding macroevolution of species, which prevents students from understanding the complete picture. Finally, some teachers like to provide students with both sides of the discussion and allow students to draw their own conclusions. Berkman and Plutzer find this last approach particularly worrisome, as it gives students the impression that a well-established concept, which is supported by thousands of scientific papers, is debatable based on personal opinions.
This last finding is, indeed, the most alarming. It is little wonder that 40% of American adults believe in young earth creationism.
Many on both sides of the religion/science divide still claim that modern evolutionary theory can amble along arm in arm with theism. It is my experience, however, that a sound comprehension of the science can trigger a pretty severe non-theistic reaction. I leaned toward non-theism for many years. One of the things that kept returning me to a god idea was that I misunderstood the mechanics of evolution. When I finally buckled down to learn it properly, God was a goner.
The Reform Judaism of my childhood and rabbinical training generally embraced a fuzzy notion of theistic evolution. We accepted that the Torah wasn’t science but we didn’t talk about the science that the Torah wasn’t.
We certainly never considered the implications for such notions as the human soul: Did Australopithecus have one? Homo neanderthalensis? When the hell did God start passing out the souls?!
Proper teaching of evolutionary science will hardly affect the creationist types. They’re already a lost cause. But for those who are on the fence about their beliefs, a good scientific education might very well tip them right over to the non-theistic side of that fence. Until we genuinely start teaching this essential subject matter, we will never know.
I suppose this is what the creationists really desire.
I can say without a doubt that I do not know a single person who takes the Young Earth theory seriously. That a significant percentage of Americans do is alarming to me. Though, as a European, I was not subjected to the same education as them.
ReplyDeleteWhen I look back at my own education I find the crossover between religion and science in teaching strange and inappropriate. Though the two subjects have historic links, I was taught them as completely separate subjects.
The thrust of scientific teaching was: Here is how the world works. These are the findings that people have made so far. Prove it for yourself, experiment with things, observe them, evaluate the results. Through doing this we can improve our understanding of how the world works and our place within it.
While religion was: Here is what some people believe. An indepth examination of the world's major religions; their festivals, customs and practices.
At no point were we ever encouraged to adopt any of these beliefs ourselves. Nor were any of those beliefs pitched as being in anyway factually accurate or on-par with any scientific study. I would have been as surprised to see a Bible, Torah or Koran in a history lesson, let alone a science class.
The fact that both subjects were taught in the same establishment was purely a matter of having a complete syllabus and no question of controversy was ever expressed. I considered for a moment the possibility that if a student were to feel that there were mixed-messages then they would be free to conduct their own minds in an exercise in critical thinking and rationality to determine which was "The Truth"; however, mixed-messages were never an issue since the nature of my religious education was never explained as any sort of truth, and no one was ever made to pick a side.
It astounds me that a nation of economists, statisticians and engineers can seriously consider the views of any religion as being valuable to science.