By MARTIN DYCKMAN, Times Columnist
Published September 4, 2005
My oldest son, John, is beginning a new career in the Connecticut public schools, having chucked a deadening, dead-end middle management job at a charter bus company. He'll be teaching science to eighth-graders, which takes him back to what he studied in college. I'm terribly proud of him.
And also somewhat concerned. He's taking on the toughest subject in the curriculum. Not because it is hard to teach it correctly, but because there is so much pressure to teach it badly. More so than even history and social studies, it is vulnerable to politics and ideology and to clashing with what students hear at home and at church.
"How are you going to teach evolution?," I asked him.
"It won't be "intelligent design,' " he said.
But if a poll published last week is accurate, nearly two-thirds of the American public seem to think he should teach not only that a deity designed evolution, but that students should also be instructed on creationism, which the Supreme Court has barred from the public schools.
The poll, conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, found that 64 percent think "creationism," based on a fundamentalist view that that life has always existed in its present forms, should be taught along with evolution. A substantial minority, 38 percent, said it should be taught instead of evolution.
I mean no disrespect to other people's beliefs, but it is alarming if nearly four Americans out of 10 truly believe we should bring up another generation of scientific illiterates. Coincidentally, the New York Times reported last week that "American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century."
The 64 percent who said creation belief should be taught along with evolution are not necessarily all wrong. The poll apparently did not distinguish between teaching it within the science curriculum or in the context of comparative religion. The difference is huge.
Science is not inconsistent with faith - Albert Einstein acknowledged a belief in God - but it would be grievous educational malpractice to teach anyone's faith as science. Science is about what can be tested and explained by observable fact. Science comes ever closer to understanding the universe and how it became what it is, but not to knowing why it came into being. The why of it, which I think is beyond the reach of science, is the realm of faith. It belongs in the curriculum of comparative religion, not of science.
"Intelligent design," a not-so-subtle attempt to evade the Supreme Court ruling, is a supposition based on debated statistics. It is not susceptible of scientific proof, and has no more place in the science classroom than creationism does.
Unfortunately, Americans may be as widely uninformed about religion as about science. Despite a plethora of denominations and a multitude of worshipers, most of us know very little about what other faiths believe or how religion has shaped our society. This ignorance fosters intolerance.
This is one of my standard rants, but the good news is that educators nationwide are doing better than before at incorporating comparative religion into the general curriculum and into history and social studies textbooks. According to Charles Haynes, who specializes in this issue as a senior scholar of the Freedom Forum at Arlington, Va., nearly all states now address religion in their social studies curricula, and even the textbooks are improving.
"You could take a world history class in public school a decade ago and hear nothing about religion," he said. ". . . Teaching it isn't as difficult as some feared."
Most such instruction is still in the history and social studies contexts, though there has been an "uptick" in elective courses on comparative religion. But Haynes knows of only one school district - Modesto, Calif. - where that is a required subject.
There are still people, a lot of them, apparently, who want their children - and worse, other people's children - to learn only what they already take on faith about the origins of creation and of life. They couldn't be more wrong.
Perhaps I am naive, but I believe that the more science reveals about the wonders of creation, the more it says about the Creator. Wonderment is the essence of spirituality. Science indeed can complement faith, but only when one is not confused with the other.
