{"id":3234,"date":"2011-01-28T10:58:58","date_gmt":"2011-01-28T15:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=3234"},"modified":"2011-01-28T10:58:58","modified_gmt":"2011-01-28T15:58:58","slug":"1-in-7-students-are-taught-creationism-in-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2011\/01\/1-in-7-students-are-taught-creationism-in-school.html","title":{"rendered":"1 in 7 students are taught creationism in school"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Evolution\"<\/a>
Photo by latvian on Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A recent survey<\/a> of high school biology teachers shows the majority don’t take a solid stance on evolution with their students.\u00a0 Fewer than 30 percent of teachers take an adamant pro-evolutionary stance, while the majority hedge on the topic in order to avoid potential conflict.\u00a0 A full 13% openly teach creationism.<\/p>\n

President Obama’s “Sputnik moment<\/a>” call to inspire a new generation of science students stands in stark contrast to the stifled educations being offered to most of today’s kids.\u00a0 The argument is often that teaching creationism as science might stunt a student\u2019s biology career, but it shouldn\u2019t prevent producing scads of software engineers and physicists.\u00a0 But that\u2019s sophistry.\u00a0 A lot of the innovation space with the rapidly aging populace is in medicine and biology, so there is a need for people who really understand the life sciences.\u00a0 But moreover, when a child\u2019s early exposure to science of any flavor is basically that a bunch of whackos in lab coats have this nutty idea, but really the way the world works is something else, they learn an inherent distrust of science in general.\u00a0 Why would a student want to pursue a career using the same fundamental techniques that yielded such \u201cflawed theories\u201d as evolution?\u00a0 It requires a pretty significant cognitive dissonance to believe that biology, geology, anthropology, cosmology, and several other sciences are fundamentally wrong, but quantum physics is right on the money.<\/p>\n

The prevalence of creationism in schools does matter.\u00a0 Children require inspiration to pursue careers in science and technology. And teachers, especially science <\/em>teachers, who don’t have enthusiasm for the field or reject the discipline altogether are certainly not being inspirational.<\/p>\n

It would be easy but overly simplistic to dismiss this as just a problem in our schools.\u00a0 The reality is that teachers are human.\u00a0 They reflect the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the society as a whole.\u00a0 Considering that repeated studies<\/a> have shown about 45% of the population in general believe the universe is less than 10,000 years old, science teachers are already well outside the mainstream.\u00a0 The answers here don’t lie in fixing the schools as much as in fixing society.\u00a0 Children are not often motivated toward goals their parents openly reject.\u00a0 When almost half of parents reject science as hooey, it’s not surprising that kids are not flocking to the field.<\/p>\n

Industry doesn’t help here either.\u00a0 While demand for science and tech jobs has picked up a bit, the outsourcing of entry level positions to overseas markets continues to make it challenging for average students to find work after college.\u00a0 If the U.S. is to grow the next generation of talent, we have to be willing to plant the seeds domestically by hiring fresh grads.<\/p>\n

In addition, society doesn’t treat science as credible, cool, or aspirational.\u00a0 The CSI and Mythbusters television shows have helped make science seem a bit more interesting and mainstream.\u00a0 But science and tech careers are still things perceived to be pursued largely by those geeky kids who seems inexorably destined for lab coats from birth.\u00a0 Yet that minority of kids will not be sufficient to fuel a new Apollo program.<\/p>\n

If this is truly a Sputnik moment, we need to inspire a big chunk of the “normal” kids to get their geek on.\u00a0 Teachers are a part of that. Government is a part of that. But unless society as a whole embraces it, it will not succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That discredits all science because it’s a little nuts to believe that biology, geology, anthropology, and cosmology are fundamentally wrong, but quantum physics and chemistry are right on the money. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3,4],"tags":[100,101,57,67,98,25],"class_list":["post-3234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-madscience","category-politics","category-religion","tag-creationism","tag-education","tag-evolution","tag-gop-war-on-science","tag-school-policy","tag-stem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3234"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3245,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3234\/revisions\/3245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}