[Taxacom] evolution education

[John Grehan]

Jeff concluded

"I would argue that eliminating evolution from high school science
education at best maintains our current situation, while continuing our
teaching of evolution does no additional harm, but has the potential for
good. I think you could possibly make an argument that we never
should've taught evolution in high school, but now that you have,
removing it would only remove the opportunity to fix the misconceptions
that exist in the general population and could possibly increase
tensions between the perceived "believers" and "nonbelievers". The
solution is in better teachers and better curriculum."

Yes one could argue that, just as much as the opposite. As for
misconceptions, I would argue that this is not the problem, the problem
being the absence of evolution being taught as a science rather than a
belief system (and a particular evolution belief system at that).

John Grehan

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Gunther
Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2011 2:25 PM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] evolution education

I am a secondary science education student with a background in
organismal biology, so felt I'd throw in my two cents on this topic. I
agree with some of the already mentioned sentiments that there is a
significant problem with the quality of evolution education and that a
lot of it boils down to teacher and curriculum selection issues as well
as a perceived red state/blue state issue associated with the topic.

However, I would have to say that despite the fact that there is some
terrible evolution education out there, the answer is not giving up on
it until post-secondary education. First off, despite seeing some pretty
bad teaching of evolution, nothing I've seen has actually been bad
enough that it does some active harm, in my opinion. The worst evolution
education simply reinforces the major misconceptions that exist in the
general population. While we obviously don't want these reinforced, the
worst case scenario is a reinforcing of what students are already being
exposed to. On the other hand, a competent high school teacher (which do
exist) can actively try to combat these misconceptions.

I would argue that these misconceptions are well enough ingrained in our
common consciousness that ending the teaching of evolution in high
school would not erase them, at least not in any meaningfully short
timeframe. In addition, as has been previously mentioned, the majority
of people don't ever attend a 4 year college and of those that do
attend, some will never take a biology class. I think that never
exposing the majority of people to evolution will allow the
misconceptions to continue unabated and may even expand the red
state/blue state issues by making evolution appear "privileged",
ivory-tower knowledge.

Therefore, I would argue that eliminating evolution from high school
science education at best maintains our current situation, while
continuing our teaching of evolution does no additional harm, but has
the potential for good. I think you could possibly make an argument that
we never should've taught evolution in high school, but now that you
have, removing it would only remove the opportunity to fix the
misconceptions that exist in the general population and could possibly
increase tensions between the perceived "believers" and "nonbelievers".
The solution is in better teachers and better curriculum.

Jeff Gunther
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