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Classroom Clashes Over Science Education
cheezitmike writes "In a two-part series, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science examines two hot-button topics that create clashes in the classroom between science teachers and conservative-leaning students, parents, school boards, and state legislatures. Part 1 looks at the struggle of teachers to cover evolution in the face of religious push-back from students and legislatures. Part 2 deals with teaching climate change, and how teachers increasingly have to deal with political pressure from those who insist that there must be two sides to the discussion."
Why 2 sides to discussions that have been scientifically settled? Have the other side of the discussion in Sunday School.
Climate change: the majority of climate scientists think it's true and a component is man-made, but a small and decreasing percentage of climate scientists disagree.
Evolution: There's all but no doubt, and essentially no reputable scientists in the field disagree with the core concepts.
QED.
There is no scientific debate about the theory of evolution; why, then, should any such debate be taught in a science classroom? A science teacher who is "skeptical" of evolution had better have some extraordinary proof that there is a problem with the theory, or else they should not be teaching science.
Palm trees and 8
They're trying to, but they're getting resistance for that, too: With few exceptions, teachers' unions fight against efforts to ground teacher evaluation in data and simultaneously resist giving administrators the discretion to remove teachers.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
...as long as all churches are required to have an atheist (e.g., Daniel Dennet) or a historic biblical scholar (e.g., Bart D. Ehrman) come in for every sermon or Sunday school lesson to present an alternative viewpoint.
Realistically, you can't. Science is hard and learning about it doesn't pay off in the obvious or self-gratuitous ways that matter to most people. So, the motivation will always be low, lower still if you have to work a job that does not require you to know any science, as most jobs today are.
It is a lost fight, especially in a world in which the future looks increasingly likely to be much bleaker than the past, for everybody.
Just have the Conservatives provide the peer-reviewed science behind their assertions. If it's actually science, there should be something testable to support it. If it isn't science, it doesn't belong in science class.
I would imagine it is the role of the science teacher to educate, not pontificate - if students enter the classroom with different ideas, theories, or beliefs I would expect the teacher to entertain their ideas, beliefs, and theories and then work with the student to understand how their ideas, beliefs and theories balance against scientific facts.
The teacher is not obliged to give equal time to all theories that the students preset, but the science teacher has the task of equiping the students to come to their own conclusions based on facts. A science teacher that can't (or doesn't want to) defend the ideas and concepts they are teaching needs to find another profession.
Religions typically teach the "One True Belief" on a subject and ask the followers to "believe without proof, as an exercise of their faith," not science.
Ken
I was doing some science outreach stuff at a museum a while back, and a seemingly intelligent looking thirtysomething woman with two children asked me if the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way around. That is when I gave up.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
The phrase "just a theory" means that you do not know what you are talking about. Educate yourself.
I don't "believe" in either one.
I accept as fact Darwin's theorems concerning evolution based on observation and proven fact. As a Christian, this does not conflict with my beliefs.
I accept on fact that climate change as a constant thing that has happened before mankind and will likely continue afterwards. The only question that remains unsettled (in spite of shouting from either side) is how strongly mankind can and does alter climate, and what, if anything, we could *safely* do to reduce mankind's influences if indeed they are strong enough to provide adverse reactions to the system as a whole.
I limit my beliefs to matters of spiritual faith and of human emotion. Everything else requires hard evidence.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Why do we let politicians write the text books, instead of having a quorum of people in their respective fields with masters degrees? Shouldn't the most educated in their respective fields have a say in what the younger generation is being taught, so they can be more prepared for higher education?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?_r=1
I don't see how evolution requires sexual reproduction to produce "distinctly different" (whatever that means) progeny. There are ample examples of speciation, if that's what you mean by "distinctly" different, wherein a population of animals are separated and over time, for instance, the two separated populations are no longer able to reproduce with one another. We have strong evidence for this, even if we haven't witnessed the event with our eyes, in the same way that you have incontrovertible evidence that your great-great-great-great grandfather was born, even though you know no one who was present, and there probably exists no written record of the event.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Some people aren't sold on the theory. It really doesn't make any sense to a lot of people because 2 controdictory things must happen: the organism must first be best adapted to the environment, and the organism also must have mutations (most of which are not immediately beneficial) to continue change.
Since existing organisms are already in existing environments the first thing you state has been observed and is what most people would call a fact.
Since mutations have also been observed in organisms this would also be considered by most as fact
To continue what I perceive as implied (that these observation can't make evolution happen).
We have also observed that dna is responsible for the traits displayed in the organism. We have observed that if we change that dna, traits of the organism are changed. We have also observed that we can select the largest organism of a given population and that over time the average size of the organism will increase (e.g. cows or strawberries or my fruit flies in 10th grade). We have observed that selection pressures exist in nature so that when the environment changes traits observed in populations change. (loss of sight for organism isolated underground, colors of moths as pollution-soot changes or reproductive ages of fish changing with fishing laws)
We have observed that the same trait can be detrimental in one environment and beneficial in another (pigmentation's benefit/detriment depends largely on latitude; Sickle Cell Anemia depends on the threat of malaria.)
I'm not sure I'm seeing the problem.
We don’t let people who can’t read teach kids how to read.
We don’t let people who can’t add/subtract teach kids math.
It should just be a hiring requirement for science teaches that they accept evolution as fact.
When it comes to attitude towards modern science, three types of people develop:
Sadly, most of the science teachers in schools gravitate towards the third group.
I guess there are two trends that collide to this sad outcome. One is, as I said above, the complexity and hardness of it all. The other is that politicians in modern democracies dislike educated population. Add to this the lack of motivation from a powerful adversary in the past 20 years or so, and the picture is really bad.
"Namely that there has never been an observed case of one species becoming another species (species being defined by the ability to reproduce withing the species, but not outside of it)"
Only, of course, while a rare event (it couldn't be otherwise) it *has* been observed and even produced in a lab. See i.e. http://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/evolution/speciation.php
But even if that wasn't the case, it so obvious that darwinian evolution *must* happen that there would be no point discussing it anyway: as soon as you know that there are random mutations (trivially probed in a lab), that these mutations affect fitness (trivially probed in a lab) and that fitness affects alleles distribution (trivially probed in a lab), speciation is nothing but an unavoidable fact.
"My point is that there are legitimate alternative theories besides evolution"
No, there aren't. There are legitimate *ideas* about evolution (i.e. lamarkian versus darwinian) already disproved that nevertheless make for a good case about how scientific ideas get concieved and accepted or rejected.
Realistically, you can't. Science is hard and learning about it doesn't pay off in the obvious or self-gratuitous ways that matter to most people. So, the motivation will always be low, lower still if you have to work a job that does not require you to know any science, as most jobs today are.
It is a lost fight, especially in a world in which the future looks increasingly likely to be much bleaker than the past, for everybody.
Actually no, science is easy, we start using it long before we learn to talk as we build up a mental model of the rules governing our universe. Several studies have shown that infants and children attempting to understand a new phenomena generally experiment in a fashion very near the statistically optimal pattern for exploring a new problem-space, it's only later in life that we start expecting things to behave in neat, well behaved patterns and get stymied by counter-intuitive behaviors.
The problem is science classes generally make no attempt to teach science, just scientific knowledge, and much of that *is* complicated. And without an understanding of science itself, the knowledge is just so much trivia that you're being asked to take on faith. Teach real science, do experiments where the answer *isn't* completely known beforehand, and ideally where the answer actually matters, or at least is interesting, and you can start getting students to appreciate that unlike almost every other subject (except math) science is a living, breathing, cutthroat combative subject where theories don't get widespread acceptance without considerable evidence. Once they *really* understand the rules of the game then it becomes clear that science, while still flawed, is far more authoritative than any other field on the planet.
Heck, ideally I'd say hold a class-wide experiment once a month or so to figure something out - students work in small "research groups" attacking the problem from different angles, but by the end of the "research window" (days?, weeks?) everyone needs to reach a consensus on what the "real" answer is, with some sort of prize (pizza party? movie break?) if they're correct within a certain margin of error so that they actually care. Then, once everyone has agreed, bring in a professional who can provide a conclusive answer in an understandable manner to verify the results. Not only would that provide a taste of real science, but it would also provide a periodic reminder of the fact that in the face of an implacable universe the best speakers and most inspiring/popular/attractive students generally aren't the ones you want to be listening to if you want to get it right.
Because, at the end of the day, all you really care about in most pre-university science classes is
(A) giving everyone a general background knowledge of how the world works (they'll soon forget most the details anyway, so the big picture is the important part)
(B) inspiring those so inclined to pursue careers in research or technology (and nothing like an occasional project were you're one of the respected "inner circle" to inspire a lonely nerd)
(C) instill a certain level of respect for scientists in the form of an understanding that, unlike in virtually all other fields of life, when it comes to questions of how the world works within their area of expertise, their opinion really is worth a heck of a lot more than yours.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If the religious parents of a child explain "give the answers they want even though we know they are wrong thanks to the Bible," the fact remains that the student is being exposed to evidence that undermines his faith.
This is what the religious practitioners all fear. When a young and impressionable mind is exposed to challenging information, no amount of preparation can prevent at least some of it from making an impression. So, it is not sufficient to keep religious discussions in the church and to allow secular discussions at school. Any exposure to religion-undermining memes *at all* is a threat to parent's goal of keeping control over their child's beliefs.
No amount of enlightened philosophizing will convince such parents that it is ok to keep secular education secular. And telling them to send their kid to private school is no good either; most religious parents either can't or won't pay for it. They want the property-tax-funded public education for their child, and they want to filter out anything that might challenge their religious beliefs, and they are going to fight for this tooth and nail.
You can't silence them through rational argument. There is no convincing them, and we are stuck with them. Your only option is to get just as involved, and just as pushy, and just as loud as they are.
We've also never seen tectonic plates move thousands of miles, but we have evidence that they have done so. We've never seen the inside of the sun, but we have evidence that hydrogen fuses into helium. We've never even seen a nucleus of an atom either! Science doesn't work by directly observing the phenomena it explains. Science works by making hypotheses about things and making testable predictions about things that we can observe. If we fail to observe what the hypothesis predicts, that's evidence that the hypothesis is incorrect.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
One person sees the glass half full, the other sees it half empty. You see a world that looks increasingly likely to be bleaker while I see a world that looks better and better with pollution levels going down and a world which looks better and is warming.
Its all a matter of perspective. But if we constantly tell children they are stupid and their parents are stupid, you are doing no good to helping matters. The children are neither stupid nor smart (same goes for parents.) (As GF says.) The problem is those who constantly tell people they are stupid and they have no hope in learning science. There is always hope to teach science, but the building blocks will never be there if people have this insane idea that they are smarter then anyone else and that most people are just stupid monkeys.
The science topics don't cause controversy. The controversy is caused by people who for religious and political reasons refuse to accept scientific evidence.
No, it should be a requirement that people who teach a scientific subject can explain the evidence for the prevailing theory, carry out experiments to test it, and use this to teach what science is all about. They should teach the scientific method and critical thinking. That is what science is about.
People who merely believe something without understanding the evidence for it have no business teaching science at all.
Try this experiment once: Try to convince someone that the sun goes around the earth that the earth actually goes around the sun. The chain of inference we had to use to deduce that is complex. That's why we didn't know until just hundreds of years ago. You can teach these things as science, even though you can't provide all the evidence from scratch.
Teaching climate change is easy. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When fossil fuels are burnt, they produce carbon dioxide. This will warm the planet. You can then show charts of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the global mean temperature. It's actually pretty easy to understand the chain of evidence.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.