Creationism Creeps into U.S. Classrooms

One in eight U.S. high school biology teachers presents creationism or intelligent design in a positive light in the classroom, a new survey shows, despite a federal court’s recent ban against it. The research also revealed that between 12 percent and 16 percent of the nation’s biology teachers are creationists.More scary results from the survey:

  • The majority of biology teachers spend between 3 and 15 hours on evolution, which the National Academy of Sciences considers to be the most important concept of biology.
  • The majority of teachers spend no more than five hours on human evolution.
  • Only 23 percent of teachers strongly agreed that evolution is the unifying theme for their biology or life sciences courses, though the majority of teachers see evolution as essential to high school biology.
  • The more biology or life sciences classes taken in college by a teacher, the more evolution they taught.

 

read more | digg story

Tags: ,

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 8:04 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Creationism Creeps into U.S. Classrooms”

  1. SfavillareAtea Says:

    May 23rd, 2008 at 1:54 pm

    I recommend the Nova show “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.” For me, one of the most fascinating details was that the prosecution requisitioned from the publisher all the drafts of Pandas and People, an early and prominent book teaching intelligent design. The prosecution’s meticulous researcher discovered that after a major ruling against the teaching of creationism in California, the next draft of Pandas and People had the word “creationism” changed in every instance to–you guessed it–”intelligent design.”

    After the presentation of this evidence, those in Dover who argued
    that intelligent design was in no way related to creationism were left without a leg to stand on.

    Here is the web link

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html

    Ruling by JUDGE JOHN E. JONES III: “In an era where we’re
    trying to cure cancer–where we’re trying to–prevent pandemics,
    where we’re trying to keep science and math education on the
    cutting edge in the United States. To introduce and teach bad
    science to ninth grade students make very little sense to me. You
    know, garbage in, garbage out. And it doesn’t benefit any of us
    who benefit daily from scientific discoveries.”

  2. askegg Says:

    May 24th, 2008 at 8:09 am

    For some reason Akismet marked your comment as spam. I have fixed it now. Sorry about that SfavillareAtea.

    It’s is a devastating point when they do statistical comparisons of the two texts and graph the frequencies of “creationism” and “intelligent design”. You can plainly see the wholesale exchange of one term for the other.

    Why defenders of this “scientific theory” need to cower behind such dishonest tactics flies in the face of the scientific method and common decency.

    If they want ID taught in the class room, then go through the process of making predictions with your theory, testing those predictions, publishing your paper, having it heavily criticised by your scientific peers. If it survives all of this you can call it a theory and teach it in the class room. Until then, it’s just a silly idea based on superstition, myth, and vague notions of the supernatural.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.