Keep Religion Out Of Science Education And Debates

A few years ago, Texas was the center of a nutty battle over rewriting science and history to include a clearly Christian worldview in its textbooks intended for public school students. Although the state’s textbook reviewers requested that publishers include creationism–yes, you read that right–in its science curriculum, ultimately, publishers declined to do so. Chagrined creationists bemoaned this steadfast adherence to including only science in science textbooks for our nation’s schoolchildren. According to the Dallas News:

Stephen Meyer, a Discovery Institute scholar who has advised the Texas board, said the new books “will leave students in the dark about contemporary mainstream scientific controversies over Darwinian evolution. Unfortunately, because Texas is a major purchaser of textbooks, the board’s action may have an adverse impact on science education across America for years to come,” he said.

The Discovery Institute is a creationist front group that uses marketing and faux scientific controversies (“teach the controversy“) to try to force the (Christian) creationist worldview into public school education. Their infamous “wedge strategy” seems to have failed on the textbook front for now, but that hasn’t stopped creationist activists from sabotaging science through other methods. Their latest choice of Trojan Horse is public charter schools.

In an alarming revelation, as Zack Kopplin writes at Slate, public charter schools in Texas and Arkansas are doing an end-run around that whole “separation of church and state” thing and implementing a creationist-backed ‘science curriculum’, all using taxpayer dollars. The company responsible, ResponsiveEd, has a deep relationship with creationism. According to Jonny Scaramanga, writing at Salon:

It emerged that ResponsiveEd was founded by Donald R. Howard, former owner of ACE (Accelerated Christian Education). ACE is a fundamentalist curriculum that teaches young-Earth creationism as fact. Last year it hit headlines because one of its high school science books taught that the Loch Ness Monster was real, and that this was evidence against evolution.

Lest anyone fail to understand that this kind of willful instruction in fantasy is harmful, ResponsiveEd even incorporates misinformation that steps directly into the public health domain. According to Kopplin:

Responsive Ed’s butchering of evolution isn’t the only part of its science curriculum that deserves an F; it also misinforms students about vaccines and mauls the scientific method. The only study linking vaccines to autism was exposed as a fraud and has been retracted, and the relationship has been studied exhaustively and found to be nonexistent. But a Responsive Ed workbook teaches, “We do not know for sure whether vaccines increase a child’s chance of getting autism, but we can conclude that more research needs to be done.”

Fifteen years of damage done, and this charter school network is teaching children at dozens of schools in Texas and Arkansas that the jury is still out on vaccines and autism, indoctrinating a new generation in the misinformation and fear surrounding both. The thread that connects government mistrust, vaccine resistance, fear, and religion is a tangled one, but it’s also very real. Teaching students to rely on belief rather than on evidence and results from testable hypotheses does them–and public health–no favors.

And it’s not only children attending publicly funded charter schools in Texas and Arkansas getting the short end of this educational stick. Your taxpayer dollars are paying for a lot of schoolchildren to learn creationist dogma. And they’re scattered all over the country.

I’ve taught students in my university classes who come from educational backgrounds like this. Students who don’t “believe” in evolution, having been taught that somehow, learning about the processes of nature is a threat to their religious beliefs. This mal-education sets them back academically and leaves them playing catch-up with some fundamentals of the field. That’s a failure of our system, one that is reflected in the public’s perception of how we do science and how to interpret it. Casting religion and science as a matter of public debate and spectacle doesn’t help reduce the perception of some that science exists solely as a challenge to their faith and therefore as something to resist or find inherently offensive.

In reality, obviously, science is something we should all embrace. We study the natural world so that we can understand it and often, use it to our presumed advantage. Tracing the path of this understanding nourishes important analysis and critical thinking skills, grounded in an evidence base and the concept of testable hypotheses, questions you can ask that experimental results can answer. Treating what lies beyond the natural world as having a place at the table in science education is just as false as casting the two as head-to-head adversaries.

In our multicultural democracy, no one conception of faith, spirituality, or belief has right-of-way in taxpayer-funded education. And when our students learn about how the natural world works, the only concepts that should have the right-of-way are evidence-based findings, established theories and laws, and testable hypotheses. If people don’t learn that testability and evidence are essential features of science, they won’t understand whether it’s science they’re being sold because they won’t have a good understanding of what science is.