Indiana Alumni Magazine
Teaching Critical Thinking: Evolution in the Classroom
An escalation of the debate over the teaching of evolution in public classrooms is putting pressure on schools and teachers and provoking some new strategies for confronting the issue.
by Anne Kibbler
This photo, from the Mansell collection, was taken shortly before Darwin's death in 1882.
Until August 1999, science teachers in Augusta, Kan., a middle-of-the-road community 10 miles east of Wichita, had a clear-cut mandate when it came to the teaching of evolution: They followed the state curriculum.
"The concept of evolution was given as an objective in science classrooms. The assumption was made that it would be taught because students needed to be exposed to it before moving on to higher education," says Ann Garrett, BS'74, MS'77. At that time, Garrett was an assistant superintendent in the Augusta Public Schools, and her duties included curriculum planning and implementation.
But on Aug. 11, 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education muddied the waters for science teachers in Augusta and around the state, rekindling an emotional nationwide debate on the place of evolution in the classroom. It voted, by a 6-4 margin, to eliminate from the state curriculum and from state-wide assessments all mention of the evolution of the species, the Big Bang theory, and geologic time. The law itself would not prevent teachers from teaching evolution, but it would give local school boards the authority to ban the subject.
In Augusta, science teachers worried about how the law would translate to the classroom. Would they have to stop teaching evolution? On the advice of attorneys, the Augusta administration decided to keep the current curriculum and sit tight until after the November election, in which half of the state board's 10 seats were up for grabs.
"We decided we wouldn't have a reaction to the state board's decision — not to be arbitrary and capricious, but just to be careful," says Garrett, now assistant superintendent for human resources in Derby, Kan. "Our school board and our teachers accepted the fact that we were taking a wait-and-see position."
The Kansas decision is emblematic of a growing movement in the United States that essentially would do away with the separation between church and state. The Ten Commandments are appearing in schools and courthouses around the country; calls for prayer at school athletic events are becoming more common; and the fight to abolish evolution from school curricula, or at least to give equal time to creationism, has been gaining strength.
It would be difficult to find any issue that cuts more to the heart of the American psyche than one involving personal beliefs and freedom of expression, particularly when it comes to the teaching of children.
"The whole idea of religious liberty assumes that people should be protected in their beliefs, even if society at large thinks they are erroneous," says IUB law professor Daniel Conkle, an expert on religion and the law. At the same time, the Constitution precludes the government from favoring religious points of view, creating, Conkle says, a fundamental tension between two constitutional principles.
THE TWO SIDES OF THE DEBATE
The evolution-creation debate plays out this tension on a very open stage: the public schools. On one side of the debate are fundamentalist creationists, who believe literally in the sequence of creation as described in the Book of Genesis. In recent years, the movement has pushed to provide scientific explanations for the literal creation of the universe, spawning such terms as "creation science" and "intelligent design."
On the other side of the debate are evolutionists, who list volumes of evidence in physics, geochemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, and other scientific disciplines to support the theory first published by Charles Darwin in 1859. (Darwin himself apparently saw no conflict between evolution and religion, having earned a degree in divinity at Cambridge University.)
"In science, there is no controversy about evolution," says IUB Professor of Biology Craig Nelson, an evolutionary ecologist and co-author of The Creation Controversy and the Science Classroom, a book for teachers from kindergarten through college published in April by the National Science Teachers Association. "The evidence for evolution makes it overwhelmingly probable. It is as good as, or better than, other major theories. It is a core, incredibly strong piece of science."
The NSTA, the National Academy of Sciences, and a host of other scientific organizations — not to mention numerous major religious denominations — support the theory of evolution. But where do schools and teachers stand in the midst of this controversy? Their position, as history shows, depends largely on the law.
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In the wake of World War I, a revival of fundamentalist religious beliefs led to a campaign to erase evolution from the education system.
By the mid-1920s, several Southern states had passed laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution. One such law, in Tennessee, became the subject of the infamous Scopes "monkey trial," in which science teacher John Scopes, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenged the constitutionality of the law. Scopes was convicted, and although the conviction was later overturned, the highly publicized trial had brought the evolution debate to the public's attention.
Over the years, some state laws banning the teaching of evolution remained on the books until the matter came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968. The court ruled unconstitutional an Arkansas law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. In response, some states passed laws mandating "balanced treatment" of evolution and creationism, increasingly referred to as "creation science."
The Supreme Court took on that issue, too, invalidating a Louisiana balanced-treatment law in 1987. Since the Louisiana decision, no further cases involving the teaching of evolution have come before the Supreme Court, but the debate crops up frequently in the lower courts.
In the last five years alone, school boards and state legislatures in more than 10 states, from Arizona to Ohio, have considered such measures as the removal of evolution from state science standards, the firing of teachers who have taught evolution as "fact," and the placing of disclaimers on books dealing with evolution.
THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION
“The reason these controversies keep coming back is that public-opinion surveys indicate a substantial portion of the American population — more than one-third — believes in literal Genesis creation," says law professor Conkle.
More surprising may be the fact that many future science teachers apparently do not subscribe to the theory of evolution. A survey of 218 science education students, published in the May/June 1997 issue of Reports of the National Center for Science Education, found that only 43 percent of preservice elementary teachers and 79 percent of preservice secondary teachers believed in Darwin's theory of evolution. Eighty-eight percent of students preparing to teach science in elementary school and 63 percent of students preparing to teach secondary school science agreed that other views, including "the divine origin of life through special creation," should be taught alongside the theory of evolution. That teachers might be reluctant to broach such a volatile subject in the classroom is not surprising.
"The truth is that evolution simply is often not taught because the principal or department head tells the teachers not to teach it, or because the teacher is afraid to," says Hans Andersen, EdD'66, a professor of education at IU Bloomington and co-author of the survey. "There is a kind of avoidance syndrome."
Andersen, who can give numerous examples of former students who have had to confront the evolution/ creationism controversy in the classroom, says the School of Education prepares student teachers to deal with the issue the same way they do any other problem: by teaching them how to think about teaching science.
TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING
Teaching teachers and students to think critically is key to the approaches taken by two IU professors with a keen interest in the teaching of evolution.
In a seminar called "Issues in Human Origins: Creation and Evolution," Robert Meier, Chancellors' Professor Emeritus of anthropology at IUB, challenged his students to examine the two opposing views from a scientific standpoint. One of the most fundamental differences between creationists and evolutionists, he explains, is their very approach to scientific discovery.
"Creation science has to conform to the biblical truth," says Meier. "Hard-liners hold to biblical literalism. It is a belief, and there are no alternatives. Scientific inquiry, on the other hand, does not begin by assuming that a law is there and trying to prove it. The foundation of science is questioning and skepticism."
Meier accordingly devoted several class sessions to the concept of "ignorance-based education," which he describes as "a learning strategy that emphasizes uncertainty, critical questioning, and the limits of knowledge."
Meier's own conclusion is this: "If you disallow organic evolution, you may as well do away with astronomy, physics, and biology. All of the sciences would crumble if it were to go."
In The Creation Controversy and the Science Classroom, biology professor Nelson lays out a blueprint for teachers broaching subjects related to evolution. Nelson's goal is to help educators produce a scientifically literate society that understands major theories such as evolution.
For his impact on undergraduates, his scholarly approach to teaching, and his contributions to undergraduate teaching, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education honored Nelson in November as U.S. Professor of the Year. The only national award recognizing excellence in teaching, the Carnegie/CASE award is presented each year to four of the country's most outstanding undergraduate instructors, chosen from nearly 500 nominees. Nelson was the winner from a research and doctoral university.
"The interesting paradox is that we live in an era in which most people's jobs depend to an ever increasing extent on the application of modern theories of science. Yet the public either does not understand those theories or rejects them explicitly," he says.
Nelson examines traditional approaches to content, curricula, and teaching methods and suggests more effective alternatives. Traditional methods, for instance, have relied heavily upon passive learning; but active learning is particularly important when students confront controversial topics such as evolution.
"Science teachers teach conclusions more than processes," Nelson says. "The process in all higher-order critical thinking is comparison. The first thing teachers need to do is to get students to understand how scientists decide which answers are better."
Encouraging students to evaluate the consequences of various viewpoints, rather than to simply debate the strength of various pieces of evidence, Nelson believes, can "help students attain a richer understanding of the alternatives and of the benefits and consequences of accepting and rejecting them."
Creationists, for instance, believe they have nothing to lose by rejecting the theory of evolution, but everything to lose — their belief system and even their souls — if they accept it. Evolutionists, on the other hand, see "an immense payoff in the understanding of scientific phenomena," Nelson says.
Another strategy teachers can use is to help students understand intermediate positions between what he calls the "false dichotomies" of extreme views. For example, the creation-evolution argument is often portrayed as religious creationism vs. atheistic science, when, in fact, there are many degrees of acceptance of evolution.
In his book, Nelson provides answers, from creationist and evolutionist standpoints, to 21 common questions about the origin of consciousness, biological evolution, the origin of life, physical development, and the origin of the universe. But the Professor of the Year stresses that scientists don't know all the answers. "How do we get consciousness out of a molecular reaction? How do we get a genetic code working? We are likely to make more progress on the latter question than on how the universe got started," Nelson says. "But simply because no one knows how it got started doesn't mean it's miraculous."
EPILOGUE: In the Kansas Republican primary, voters rejected three conservative candidates — two incumbents and a newcomer — who were running for the Kansas State Board of Education. The three supported science standards, adopted just a year before, that removed all mention of evolution.
The three moderate Republicans who won the primary, along with two Democrats, took the board's five open seats in the November election. If their pre-election promises hold true, one of the board's first orders of business in January will be to drop the new standards and start over, this time with evolution once again a required subject. 
Anne Kibbler, MA'88, is a freelance writer and editor in Bloomington.