Teach Your Children

Someone sent me the video below. I assume it's part of a bigger documentary. It shows a high school teacher and kids who are creationists grappling in a public school with evolution, which is part of the curriculum. I understand documentaries don't show everything, but just based on the snippets here, the situation is pretty distressing.

We see three students speak in the clip. One girl says there's no way we could have evolved from simple organisms and we had to be put here by a supernatural being (she touches on abiogenesis, but I don't think that's her main problem). One boy claims we were put here by a supernatural being, and that plants and animals are here to help us survive. A second boy says we didn't evolve from anything, and to prove it, he asks how could a black person evolve from a white person.

The students seem to be making what Richard Dawkins calls the Argument From Personal Incredulity. They can't imagine how nature could accomplish certain things so they don't believe it's possible. I can't entirely blame them. They were taught specific religious beliefs and they've never (as far as I can tell) been taught about evolution.

Which is why we need good science teachers. Unfortunately, the teacher here seems worse than the students. We see him lecturing for a second, saying something about how creationists are "lumpers" and evolutionists are "splitters." Even if this made sense (and I'd think the opposite is true), what is it doing in a science class? His job is to teach evolution, not compare a scientific theory with competing non-scientific theories. He believes he gives both views "equal time"--taking him at his word, he's doing bad job, not to mention defying the law. And this is assuming he's able to give evolution a "fair shake," as he puts it, which seems doubtful.

He says he can't tell the students their ideas are "trash." Well, he doesn't have to be cruel, but his job is to explain to them what the present-day understanding of science is. If he can't explain evolution properly, he shouldn't be teaching biology.



PS Watching the clip, I tried to remember what I was taught in high school. Oddly, my teacher wasn't much better in that we spent a whole year on biology and less than a day on evolution. This is like teaching American law and spending less than a day on the Constitution. He basically said he understood evolution was controversial with some people, but it was the accepted scientific theory, and that was that. Hardly sufficient.

I had an English teacher who would occasionally insert his religious views into class, even though they had nothing to do with the subject at hand. He was actually a great English teacher, but he just couldn't help bringing up the occasional religious story in spare moments--he even told our class the notorious tale of the "missing day."