Classroom Science Under Siege
By Rod Dreher – Director of Publications
In the courtroom, the science of evolutionary biology has won every battle with creationism and Intelligent Design. In the classroom, however, scientific orthodoxy remains besieged and defensive to a startling degree.
That’s the striking conclusion of Penn State political scientists Eric Plutzer and Michael B. Berkman, authors of Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control American Classrooms, a book based on their survey of 926 public high school biology teachers. A John Templeton Foundation grant supported the book’s writing. The authors uncover evidence that creationism is surprisingly resilient in many U.S. biology classrooms, and that science and the scientific method are being systematically undermined.
“We find that about 13 percent of public high school biology teachers are active advocates for creationism or Intelligent Design,” Plutzer tells TR. “They emphasize to their students that these are ‘valid scientific alternatives’ to mainstream evolutionary biology, and devote at least some formal class instruction to the topic. An additional five percent of teachers take the same position, though typically in brief responses to student questions.”
Think anti-evolution teaching is confined to schools in certain regions? Think again. Plutzer says he and Berkman find that “active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts.” While it is true that those who reject evolution tend to find jobs in more socially conservative school districts, where they receive parental backing, it’s also the case that teachers who experience the most pressure teach in districts with large and clashing constituencies of conservative Protestants and pro-evolution opponents. Says Plutzer, “In these districts, there is no easy path for teachers to teach in accord with local opinion, because local opinion is polarized.”
The path of least resistance—one taken by 60 percent of high school biology instructors—is a pedagogical middle road, in which teachers remain non-committal about evolution, especially if they lack confidence in their own understanding of the science behind it. While politically safe, Plutzer says this approach “undermines the legitimacy of science and the weight of empirical evidence.”
This phenomenon is not limited in its effects to the classroom, he says. For one thing, failing to teach biology with integrity and accuracy misses an opportunity to turn young people on to science. For another, Plutzer continues, cheating students out of a sound science education harms public policy debates in our democracy. Citizens, he says, “should not blindly accept scientific findings, whether they come from academia, government, or industry. But neither should they believe that scientific debates are simply clashes or opinion and values.”
What can be done to improve the situation? Some remedies can be applied outside the classroom. No more than 30 percent of Americans, in Plutzer and Berkman’s estimation, belong to religious traditions that demand a literalist reading of Genesis. Many American Christians may be surprised to learn that there is no necessary contradiction between what their religious tradition teaches and what science has discovered about human origins. In his full-length interview with Big Questions Online, Plutzer calls on religious leaders to explain theology and science more clearly to their congregation. He also calls on the news media to do a better job exploring the nuances of the evolution debate, rather than simplistically framing it as a stereotypical clash between science and religion.
“This study is very important because it provides us with facts about the teaching of evolution and creation in the classroom to help correct our easy assumptions and stereotypes,” says Paul Wason, the Foundation’s director of life sciences. “And any attempt to foster change will have much greater chance of success if it is based on the way things really are. The idea of engaging science and faith issues more deeply and clearly in the context of faith communities, for example, very wisely builds on the idea that local religious leaders are often at least as influential as teachers in the creation of community leanings.”
The Nature of JTF
Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious science journals, profiles the John Templeton Foundation in its most recent issue (the online version of editor M. Mitchell Waldrop’s report is here). Though the Nature article repeats familiar criticism of the Foundation from prominent opponents, who claim that the Foundation improperly mixes science with religion, it also highlights comments from leading scientists who have actually worked with the Foundation, saying these critics are far off the mark.
Top science personages who praised their working relationship with the Foundation included University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, University of California—Santa Cruz astrophysicist Anthony Aguirre, and science journalist Michael Shermer, who edits Skeptic magazine.”
Józef Zycinski, R.I.P.
Józef Zycinski, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Lublin, a former Templeton Prize judge and member of the Foundation’s board of advisors, died February 10 in Rome. He was 62. A philosophy professor as well as one of Poland’s top churchmen, Zycinski was one of his nation’s leading public intellectuals. He was author of more than 30 books and 350 papers on science, philosophy, and theology, and was widely seen as a voice of constructive dialogue.
“He was a face of the Polish church,” reflected Father Adam Boniecki, editor-in-chief of Tygodnik Powszechny. “Listening to him, many people breathed a sigh of relief that one can think in this way.”
