High schoolers deprived of education re evolution

From Mother Jones:

Based on data from the National Survey of High School Biology teachers, the authors estimate that only 28% of all biology teachers consistently teach evolutionary biology, while 13% explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. Avatar of Karl
    Karl

    And we all thought nothing in Biology made sense without a proper indoctrination into the tenants of Evolution.

    Must be the other 59 percent just don't want to deal with controversy in their classroom, or they might teach that both aren't actual science but really just theories about origins.

  2. Avatar of Jim Razinha
    Jim Razinha

    "all biology teachers" to me means all the private teachers as well. I'd be curious (and probably bothered) about the strictly public school numbers.

    Drilling down through the Mother Jones link to the Science article only got me a summary, so I don't know if the stats reflect all or all public.

    1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
      Erich Vieth

      I subscribe to Science; I'll take a closer look when that issue comes in.

  3. Avatar of grumpypilgrim
    grumpypilgrim

    The current (July) issue of Harper's magazine reports similar results in its Index: only a 1-in-4 chance that a U.S. high school biology teacher is an advocate for evolution. Not the English literature teacher or the track coach, the *biology* teacher. No wonder so many Americans are ignorant on this subject.

    1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
      Erich Vieth

      That is ghastly. Actually unbelievable. Grumpy, do they cite to a source for that statistic?

  4. Avatar of Mark Tiedemann
    Mark Tiedemann

    Karl—when you consider how little in other subjects "make sense" in high school, it should be no surprise that Biology can be "taught" without regard to the actual science. The only classes that seem immune to this sort of crap are math—and I suspect that's because the ostriches on school boards don't understand it well enough to object to anything. (Not that they understand evolution, but they think they do.)

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