aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Teaching in the age of belief
Last night on the Newshour they had a segment on creation conflict in schools. The video and the transcript are available on the web, very well done and worth watching. But what I carried with me today were these student comments:
STUDENT: I believe that God created the Earth and put life on this Earth. I don’t really believe in the whole evolution theory…
STUDENT: I believe that God also made us. I just think it’s a lot easier to believe then the big bang theory, or any of the other theories about apes.
STUDENT: I believe God molded man from the dust and he breathed life into it, and I believe we came out with two legs and thumbs and the thought capacity better then any other animal.
I thought that what we are supposed to be doing is teaching students, not catering to their beliefs.
I went to Catholic schools through high school. I learned religion and I learned science. Even today this doesn’t seem to be an issue in Catholic schools. My guess is they’ve dealt with this eons ago, in a different time, and have come down on the side of education.
It makes me wonder again, is this undermining of science an unintended consequence of the separation of church and state?
At a party recently I had a conversation with a Georgia Military College biology teacher. A Brit who’s the son-in-law of the Commandant, he spoke of the problems teaching biology here. For example some students flat out refuse to even listen in class. He believes the problem is Constitutional and boiled it down to this: the lack of religious education in school. He believes religion should be taught in school. All religion. World religion. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, you name it.
And what of faith? Catholics hold faith in high regard. There’s plenty that the believer is not expected to understand or explain but rather to accept as a part of one’s faith. How does that square with the fundamentalist adoption of Intelligent Design and the need to have their beliefs taught as fact in schools? Have they no faith?
With certainty in place of faith, it strikes me as reasonable for them to try in every way they can to get it taught. It’s what they believe. If science is undermined, what does it matter to them? They don’t believe it. I don’t blame them. (I do blame the Discovery Institute: “From the science, we argue that you can tell that intelligence played a role. But we don’t think from the science you can tell the nature or the identity of the designer.” huh? That’s science?)
But America is with them; only a third of Americans believe in evolution. Now that’s a shame.
