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January 31, 2005
Weak Teaching on a Strong Subject
The following is from tomorrow's NY Times:
John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Ala., recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.
She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she'd get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it," he recalled. "She told me other teachers were doing the same thing.
The article goes on to describe, anecdotally to be sure, the various problems high school teachers face in trying to teach evolution: upset parents, complaining students, frenzied administrators. It offers the usual statistics about belief in evolution: "with about 45 percent accepting it, 45 percent rejecting it and the rest undecided" compared to 96 percent accepting evolution in Japan and high levels of acceptance in all industrialized countries except the US. The article also outlines the good work of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science to help teaches overcome the problems they face in side and out side of the class room. To be "balanced" Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, is quoted as mentioned the usual nonsense about "an assault of the secular elite on the values of God-fearing people." Of course, we have a President who thinks "the verdict is still out on how God created the earth."
And people wonder why we may be loosing the edge in science to all the rest of the world. Two issues are important: first is that evolution is the central fact of biology and natural selection is a central theory supporting virtually all biological research. Modern biology and much of modern medicine would simple not exist without it. Second, our failure to teach what science is and how it is done is at the very core of the problem addressed by this article and many others. As a society we need to help each other understand what science is and what it is not. Failure to teach evolution is failure to prepare the next generation to compete in or even understand the world they will be entering.
Even where evolution is taught, teachers may be hesitant to give it full weight. Ron Bier, a biology teacher at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Ohio, said that evolution underlies many of the central ideas of biology and that it is crucial for students to understand it. But he avoids controversy, he said, by teaching it not as "a unit," but by introducing the concept here and there throughout the year. "I put out my little bits and pieces wherever I can," he said.
Can anyone image introducing the central concepts of physics here and there throughout the year. Now, the students don't need to believe in evolution but they do need to understand it and we all need to support our teaches at every level so they are not afraid to teach central concepts as it they were indeed central concepts.
Posted by DuaneSmith at January 31, 2005 09:13 PM | Read more on Evolution |
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