Teaching only science

Royal Institution of Australia director, Dr Paul Willis, explains how creationism is disrupting science education, both in Australia and around the world, and why effective science teaching should not follow any religious, social or political agenda.

The content of a science curriculum ought to be easy to identify and should be included without challenge – good science content is good science! Anything else should be excluded. We owe it to our children not to cloud their developing minds with phantoms and fantasies dressed up as realities no matter how comforting they may be for some people. We need to be clear what science is and isn’t before we can clearly explain that difference to our children.

I’m quietly bemused by the fact that I went to school, not just in the last century but also in a previous millennium! But when I reflect on what I had hoped would have changed over the last three decades and compare that to what’s actually happened, I’m left deeply saddened.

The big change that I was hoping for all those years ago was that the pervasive non-scientific assaults on science education would be eliminated. Instead, they seem to have increased as creationism – demonstrable codswallop – is backed by a concerted push to be taught in science classes.

My early and abiding passion for fossils and prehistory attracted the attention of some teachers who urged me not to take my palaeontology books seriously and some even provided creationist texts for my consideration. Luckily creationism was not part of the curriculum in my home state, even if it has occasionally been part of the formal schooling for students elsewhere. And there was a detectable effect on science teachers underplaying evolution in biology classes most probably to avoid getting into long-winded arguments with creationist students and their parents. Even if creationism wasn’t part of the official curriculum, there was still a corrosive effect on effective science teaching.

I distinctly remember thinking as my younger self that this surely couldn’t go on much longer. That the obvious absurdities of creationism would lead to its own self destruction leaving the science classroom unhindered in the pursuit of its primary mission: to teach science.

Oh how naïve I was! 32 years later not only is creationism still around, it has morphed into even more uncertain pseudoscientific beasts such as Intelligent Design (ID). Its unrelenting pressure from outside the science class still erodes the efforts of science teachers to present a solid education in science.

It’s a global phenomenon. Creationism’s home turf has always been and continues to be the USA. There, despite stunning rebukes such as the infamous Dover Case some school boards and state governments still try to bring in equal-time for teaching creationism in science classes and/or measures to eliminate evolution from the school curriculum. Creationist text books are available and are in use in home-schooling and some Christian Schools. They teach a litany of anti-scientific gobbledygook such as humans and dinosaurs living at the same time, what you see while you are ‘mating’ will determine your offspring’s colour and pattern, that the moon exists and the oceans are salty because God made them that way, and that fire-breathing dragons once roamed the earth. But the anti-science of creationism extends far beyond the biological sciences and statements that Darwin was completely wrong. Climate change is taught as ‘not a real issue’ and atomic theory must all be askew because nothing can have been decaying for millions of years in a universe that is only a few thousand years old.

Across the Atlantic in the UK, they are also facing a creationist onslaught. A program from Texas called ‘The Accelerated Christian Education curriculum’ is apparently used in more than 50 schools across the UK. It has been described as ‘a teleological account of American history as leading to the ultimate fulfillment of God’s will’.

Among the absurdities put forward in ACE ‘science’ textbooks are the existence of the Loch Ness monster is evidence against evolution, no transitional fossils exist, solar fusion is a myth and, of course, evolution is a deliberate lie. Despite such outrageous nonsense, the UK NARIC (a National Agency responsible for providing information, advice and expert opinion on qualifications) deemed ACE’s in-house qualification, the International Certificate of Christian Education, as comparable to A-levels (the UK’s High School Certificate) and subsequently defended this decision when it was challenged.

Here in Australia, things are not much better. ACE material is available and recommended as the foundations for Australian Christian Home Schooling. This material is distributed through Southern Cross Educational Enterprises who will show you how to integrate their teachings into the National Curriculum and they tout the UK NARIC certification.

There are other creationist groups active in Australia and many have programs aimed at getting their nonsense into school science classes.

In recent years there have been reports of creationism creeping into schools in NSW and Queensland. Earlier this month there was a report on Radio National claiming creationism was being taught in some state schools in Queensland. In most states they are expressly prohibited from doing so but mutterings of ‘teach the other side’ or ‘encompass other points of view’ persist around the nation.

On the surface of it, that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing does it? Why not teach both sides and let the students decide? And, if we’re only talking about something as esoteric as the history of life or the age of the earth, what harm can it do to believe that evolution is wrong or that the world is only 6,000 years old?

My concern is not simply for the specifics of demonstrating through science that evolution has occurred, that the palaeontologists are right and that the creationists are laughably wrong on each and every count. The burden on a science education of having to deal with this rubbish effects the fundamentals of understanding what science is and how it’s conducted. It challenges and erodes an education in logic and reason.

A couple of comments following this article illustrate my concerns. This first is from a commentator who had been through one of these creationist teaching regimes in the USA and had subsequently gone on to secular higher education.

‘One of the most important goals of a liberal arts education (and my own teaching and scholarship) is the ability to think critically: a skill for which I have a very deep appreciation. So the undermining or even flat prohibition of critical thinking and understanding of multiple perspectives that pervades these curriculums seems to me perhaps even more troublesome than the strange things they teach.’

I found this comment from a different commentator even more incisive:

‘I assume you believe Evolution to be fact… but its (sic) not, not even in the scientific world. Science is very cautious and very specific about what is considered fact. Evolution is a very well accepted working theory but it has not been proven and there are gaps in the theory. What we now accept as fact may be proven wrong – there are many long accepted scientific theories that took centries (sic) to be proven/ disproven. It is an injustice to the advancement of science to teach something as fact when it is not and effectively stunts science. Facts are Facts – but by your argument (sic) we should nt (sic) be teaching evolution either since it is not a proven fact. Science gets stuff wrong too – remember when pluto (sic) was a planet?’

Clearly this commentator has been left with a very strange idea of what science is and how it is conducted. And that’s my beef with any influence that undermines the teaching of the philosophy and methodologies of science. How can a student appreciate the beauty of atomic theory, relativity or evolution if they do not appreciate the foundations in logic and rational thought on which they are built? How are students supposed to see that, because of its well-honed and defined methodologies, the fruits of science are not just another set of ideas that you can take or leave according to your tastes? We are talking about the best tools humanity has ever developed to understand the physical world and we are being asked to corrupt them with meaningless pulp just to appease someone else’s religious, social or political agenda.

While I’ve focused here on creationism as an unnecessary harassment of science education, the politicisation of science and science education has also seen confusion in the teaching of science-based issues such as climate change. Here we can see real-world consequences of muddying the clarity of the science.

So, some 32 years after leaving high school, I’m still fighting battles that should never have had to be fought. The content of a science curriculum ought to be easy to identify and should be included without challenge – good science content is good science! Anything else should be excluded. We owe it to our children not to cloud their developing minds with phantoms and fantasies dressed up as realities no matter how comforting they may be for some people. We need to be clear what science is and isn’t before we can clearly explain that difference to our children.

RiAus Director Dr Paul Willis is well-known as a science broadcaster with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, presenting and producing on ABC television science shows including Quantum and Catalyst. Paul is passionate about informing, educating and amusing people of all ages and backgrounds about science. He was rewarded for his passion in 2000 when he was joint recipient of the Eureka Prize for Science Communication. Dr Willis has a solid research career in vertebrate palaeontology and as a science communicator. This blog was first published on riaus.org.au and appears on Open Forum with the kind permission of the author.