Why is resistance to evolution so strong among science teachers?
photo: ©istockphoto.com/topshotUK
By ROD DREHER
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Despite winning court battles at every turn, advocates for teaching evolution as the unshakable bedrock of high school biology courses have been losing on the ground to an astonishing degree.
In a recent essay in Science, Penn State political scientists Eric Plutzer and Michael B. Berkman reported that their survey of U.S. public high school biology teachers show that only a relative small minority unambiguously teach the mainstream scientific view of evolution. Only 28 percent of the 926 instructors surveyed consistently implement the recommendations of the National Research Council, which calls on high school biology instructors to present without qualification the overwhelming evidence for evolution. About 13 percent of these public school instructors are active advocates for creationism or Intelligent Design as “valid scientific alternatives” to evolution — and, says Plutzer, “an additional five percent of teachers take the same position, though typically in brief responses to student questions.”
Plutzer, co-author (with Berkman) of Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms (Cambridge, 2010), discusses in a Big Questions Online interview more surprising facts uncovered by the survey, and their implications for science education in America.
Many assume that resistance to evolution is something largely confined to the rural South. Do the survey data indicate that the phenomenon is limited to one or more regions of the country?
Prior to our study, there were many surveys of teachers that also pointed to widespread teaching of creationism. But these earlier studies never included studies of the California, New York and the New England states. Our national probability sample of teachers confirmed what several scholars had suspected, that active proponents of creationism as science can be found in every state, even in fairly cosmopolitan school districts. Skepticism about evolution can be found all over the country, and many future teachers begin their education as evolution deniers. Those with strong feelings are unchanged by their college science education and bring these feelings to their classrooms.
What role does the local community play in the kind of biology taught in their public high schools?
The local community plays several important roles, and perhaps the most important is in the hiring and retention of teachers. We found that (on average, of course) teachers who do not accept human evolution tend to find jobs in the most socially conservative districts. Thus many teachers share values with their communities and find it easy to teach in accord with those values. Of course, “mismatches” are quite common, and teachers who find themselves at odds with local sensibilities may try to leave or fit in as best they can without stirring up controversy.
However, fitting in and avoiding controversy is not always possible. Many communities have large pro- and anti-evolution constituencies. We found that the teachers who experienced the most pressures to teach in a particular way were those in school districts with both a large number of doctrinally conservative Protestants and a large number of highly educated citizens. In these districts, there is no easy path for teachers to teach in accord with local opinion because local opinion is polarized.
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More broadly, many people of faith are drawn to the study of evolution to explore God’s work, and find a spiritual connection in their study of nature. This perspective was common in the 19th and early 20thcenturies, but is not often enough articulated in current debates about evolution. Maybe that is because nobody has yet stated it more eloquently than Darwin himself:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
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Read more here/Leia mais aqui: Big Questions Online
