16% of US high school biology teachers are creationists, and about 12.5% lecture on it as a “valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species,” according to this study led by Prof. Michael Berkman at Penn State University. New Scientist reports:
Science teaching experts say they are not surprised to find such a large number of science teachers advocating creationism.
“It seems a bit high, but I am not shocked by it,” says Linda Froschauer, past president of the National Science Teachers Association based in Arlington, Virginia. “We do know there’s a problem out there, and this gives more credibility to the issue.”
I am shocked, even if Ms. Froschauer isn’t. I had always assumed it was interventionist school boards and activist parents who were pushing the creationist agenda. Apparently naively, I assumed that science teachers had been educated in the science they were teaching and were doing their best to communicate real scientific knowledge to their students. Silly, silly me.
How does this happen? Why are we as a society so apologetic for these people? We don’t tolerate it in other fields… but maybe no one’s tried it yet. Can you imagine a math teacher who taught that pi was exactly 3 (as in 1 Kings 7:23) or a history teacher who taught nothing more than six thousand years of who begat whom? Honestly, “My religion told me so” isn’t a valid reason for ignoring the facts in front of your nose. These numbers are more than “a bit high.” One biology teacher who lectures on creationism as a valid scientific theory is one too many.
The concept of evolution by natural selection doesn’t say anything about where life originally came from. It doesn’t answer every question we have about how the world works — even though Ben Stein seems to think that’s the claim — but it explains and predicts a lot. (Here are fifteen well-written answers to creationist nonsense by John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American.) If you’ve received any kind of scientific education, you know that you don’t form a scientific theory merely by saying, “Some aspects of the world are not explained by your theory!” then asserting what you would like to be true. Creationism/”intelligent design” hasn’t come anywhere close to science.
These biology teachers can’t possibly have an adequate biology education. An education degree, however impressive it might sound to school administrators, simply does not demonstrate an adequate knowledge of the subject material, and the bar must be set higher. We ought to require high school teachers to have a college-level education in the actual subjects they’re teaching. Indeed, Berkman’s study showed that teachers who had taken more science courses, particularly in evolutionary biology, were less likely to spend class time on creationism or ID. This isn’t stacking blocks and playing dress-up in kindergarten; in order for someone to be able to teach biology (or any other subject) properly it’s necessary for them to have truly learned it themselves first. If these teachers don’t know that creationism belongs in religious services rather than in science classrooms, they should never have been hired.