Educators under pressure to avoid evolution — and geological history
There’s a fantastic article in the Arkansas Times about teachers in Arkansas under administrative pressure to avoid “the e-word” (evolution), but also to refer to the age of rocks in a geology classroom only as “very old”. Apparently, the administration is concerned that telling kids that we believe some rock to be about 300 million years old will spark controversy.
A lot is at stake here. The article focuses on a program that has increased the general level of scientific education for students, but which would be threatened if a controversy over evolution and “deep time” were raised. Educators and administrators are faced with an ethical dilemma: if they choose to teach sound science by dicsussing the theory of evolution, they risk losing the resources that support an otherwise excellent cirriculum. Adding to that dilemma is the nagging matter that the Arkansas state cirriculum standards actually require evolutionary biology and an understaning of an earth that is billions of years old; administrators that avoid these topics are actually violating the state’s own cirriculum standards.
Some of the best bits are at the end of the article… I especially like the point the writer makes that while plenty of scientists are both supportive of the theory of evolution and deeply religious, certain individuals and groups in the fundamentalist communities continually assert that one must be either anti-evolution or an atheist.