Feb 5, 2011 -- 8:36PM, DotNotInOz wrote:

Feb 5, 2011 -- 7:00PM, Pam34 wrote:

Could be because to be a 'high school biology teacher' one generally needs only ONE (general) science class in the colleges of 'education' of this country.

That is complete malarkey. I had to take at least two science courses just to fulfill my general education requirements for a college degree, never mind that I was majoring in theatre and English. 

I grant you that "teachers" in these offshoot private Christian academies may have no more education in science than that if they have that much. However, I'd be very surprised indeed if you can link to one U.S. state that requires only a single general science course for a person to be licensed to teach in a high school. That wasn't so when I got my teacher training 40 years ago, and it certainly isn't these days what with the increased emphasis by the federal government upon improving math and science education.

Thank goodness most teachers who decide to teach science try to do a little better than that!

It's not a matter of "try[ing] to do a little better" since a licensed teacher must have around 30 or more hours of coursework in the subject simply to be licensed to teach it at the middle school or high school level. It's somewhat less than that for elementary teachers, since they must prepare to teach all subjects. 

To obtain minimal qualification, a teacher may sometimes have as few as 15-20 hours, although that would entail having taken at least 3-5 courses, depending upon the credit hours per course. Generally, someone with so little coursework in a subject will be assigned or hired on an emergency provisional basis contingent upon their agreeing to earn more credit hours in order to be re-hired. That would certainly be true for a teacher of math or science, although not necessarily so for someone teaching other subjects regarded as not so demanding.

But there are far too many teachers who have been intimidated by the school boards, or the local communities, to the point of avoiding the subject of evolution in science classes. That's a tragedy.

I'm not familiar with every state in the U.S. in this regard, but I can assure you that even in Kansas where the State Board of Education foolishly mandated the teaching of intelligent design, there was immediate uproar and the board members who pushed that through were summarily removed from their positions at the next election.

I taught in Kansas for nearly 20 years in largely Mennonite and fundamentalist Christian areas and never heard of a single public school that did not teach evolution.

As for the OP contention that shockingly few teachers are doing a decent job, if any, of teaching evolution, that's really not surprising given the immense pressure being brought to bear upon public education by rightwingers and fundamentalists. Elect enough of those to local school boards, and you'll soon find that evolution is out the door, or that science teachers are required to present intelligent design aka creationism as evolution's equivalent.
Teachers can be fired for countermanding a school board policy and few with families are courageous enough to jeopardize their livelihood by refusing to yield to such smallminded and ignorant mandates.

I'd say it's more that teachers are cowed by such political maneuverings even though they know full well that intelligent design is religion and not science.

Great post, DOT.

My family experience for 5 years in KS was that the education our children received was excellent. Since we lived on the grounds of the US Penitentiary our kids went to school on Ft.Leavenworth, home of the Army Command and General Staff College : now that student body was so gifted it was beyond the beyond. Our son did his hs school sophomore year at Leavenworth High School, again excellent.

Templar

I'll be forever grateful that I was educated in the Northeast................

And you are right about the RCC pinheads in Southern parishes.

Costrel

Looking st Scripture as literal is something I encountered only in my mid-twenties.

Feb 5, 2011 -- 10:24PM, REteach wrote:

The stupid thing to me is that evolution does not deny God--all one has to do is figure that God was responsible for the mutations that led to life.  Of course, that becomes teaching religion, not science, and as such should not be taught in public schools. However, some people do not understand what science is all about.

 Evolution does not deny God, but according to the Mennonites and Baptists that I knew in college, evolution, if true, does make God a liar. I recall one of them frantically questioning, nearly in tears, "Why would God lie? Why would God lie?" I knew another who, when faced with the possiblity that the first two chapters of Genesis might not have literally happened (she was taking a Bible as Literature course and learned of the JEPD hypothesis of the Torah for the first time), decided that life was not worth living if the world was not literally created as recorded in Genesis. She ended up retreating back into the stronghold of her literal interpretation of Genesis as if it were a form of self-preservation.

What saddens me is that  these literalist Christians seemed to have had such a childish understanding of the Bible and their religion. I know that they were just young college students, so hopefully they have matured over the years, but merely being exposed in the college classroom to the JEPD hypothesis and to evolution, which were innocuous to me, seemed to cause them genuine suffering and spiritual torment. I did not understand how they felt at the time, and I still do not understand it. But I could see how they suffered, though I did not know how to help them.  

Feb 5, 2011 -- 10:24PM, REteach wrote:

The stupid thing to me is that evolution does not deny God--all one has to do is figure that God was responsible for the mutations that led to life.  Of course, that becomes teaching religion, not science, and as such should not be taught in public schools. However, some people do not understand what science is all about.

Feb 6, 2011 -- 12:14AM, rangerken wrote:

  I always put an end to the nonsense by saying that science is about how, religion is about why, there is no conflict, and that they could believe what they wished and I had nothing to say about it, but they had best leave their religion outside my science classroom.

Well said both. The concept is called "non-overlapping magesteria" and it's one I believe in as well. It says that science and religion address different questions in different ways and have little to offer each other in most circumstances (although there are a few exceptions, they're mainly in the area of scientific ethics).

Accepting evolution as accurate doesn't even make god a liar (I think God is a liar but that's an entirely seperate philosophical stance), it just means that the Bible's account of creation was constrained by the limitations of human language.

Feb 5, 2011 -- 9:27PM, mountain_man wrote:

Feb 5, 2011 -- 7:05PM, costrel wrote:

...Some science teachers do not teach evolution because they do not accept it, while others do not teach it because they bow to community pressure and desire to live peacefully among their neighbors.

That's a great example of what I'm talking about. We are going backwards when a religion and it's adherents can suppress scientific facts.

I have heard everything from the idea that science teachers must teach the children what the majority of the parents believe (i.e., biblical creationism) to instances where science teachers were told by their churches that if they taught evolution -- even if they personally did not accept it but merely taught it as one origin theory among many -- they could not hold any leadership positions in their congregations.