Evolution in Public Schools: A Threat or a Challenge?

This is a guest-post by Physicist Karl Giberson, and is the eighth installment in our “Evangelicals, Evolution, and Academics” series. Karl is the author of the book Saving Darwin: How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.

America’s evolution controversy is rooted, curiously, in her noble attempts to provide every child with a free quality education. Early in the 20th century, when public schools began to educate students beyond the 8th grade, the curriculum included impressive amounts of science. And, although evolution in textbooks like that used in the Dayton school where John Scopes taught was a minor topic, students were bringing home accounts of origins at odds with what they were learning at home and in their churches. William Jennings Bryan was the first great champion of the idea that taxpayers should not have to fund schools that undermined their values.

Evolution in the Public Schools: A Recipe for Atheism and Moral Anarchy?
The public schools have remained the primary battleground for the origins controversy, particularly in the courts where endless challenges to the teaching of evolution have been launched by local school boards from Pennsylvania to Louisiana and California. Anti-evolutionary pundits like Phillip Johnson have charged the public schools with promoting atheism in the name of science, even suggesting that evolution is responsible for widespread moral anarchy of the sort we saw at Columbine.

Johnson is joined by crusaders like Ken Ham, the late Henry Morris, John Ankerberg, the late D. James Kennedy, Anne Coulter, and others who claim, as earnestly as any Old Testament prophet, that evolution is the basis for Nazism, homosexuality, rising divorce rates, pornography, drug addiction, socialism, atheism, and every other imaginable ill. School children are supposedly being taught to think of themselves as meaningless assemblages of molecules with no more purpose or meaning to their existence than the pencils in their desks.

These hyperbolic claims should raise our eyebrows. They certainly raised mine. Having known schoolteachers for all my life, from my sainted mother, to my sister and brother-in-law, to all the teachers I had in public school, to my countless students studying to become teachers, and so on, I simply could not imagine that any public school teacher anywhere would teach any of these things. These peculiar ideas are not in the textbooks; they are not natural extensions of evolutionary theory; they are very unlikely to be a part of the worldview of the teachers—so why are Johnson and Ham claiming children are being indoctrinated with these ideas? Do they know something we do not?

Research Reveals the Rhetoric is Wrong
My intuition gave rise to a modest research project a few years ago. My student, Tim Johnson, and I looked at the public school curriculum in Quincy, Massachusetts. Quincy schools, located on the bulls-eye of America’s bluest state, are hardly restrained by local conservatism and far beyond the reach of the creationists. There is thus no reason to suspect that public schools are constrained by any pandering to the foes of evolution.

As we expected, our examination of the textbooks and teaching standards, and our interviews with teachers confirmed that evolution was being taught with thoughtful and careful consideration of the concerns of the students. Religious issues were addressed directly in the classrooms and students were assured that evolution did not rule out belief in God as Creator. No doubt the imaginary wall between church and state was repeatedly breached by Quincy’s conscientious educators.

Our study, summarized in the article “The Teaching of Evolution in Public School”, concluded that there was “no evidence that public school teachers in Quincy are exacerbating tensions with students and parents in the way that evolution is presented; indeed, most of them are expending energy in minimizing such tensions…Quincy public school teachers are appropriately sensitive to the religious backgrounds of their students.”

We concluded there was no basis whatsoever for Johnson’s charge, in "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds", that American educators have chosen to “tell the people that all doubts about naturalistic evolution are inherently absurd … and that their silly misgivings will be allowed no hearing in public education.”

Our research suggested exactly the opposite, and I suspect that this inference could be extended to the majority of public school systems in America. Anti-evolutionary pundits like Johnson and Ham are simply wrong. They are little more than shrill demagogues pretending to fight imaginary foes and selling lots of books in the process. Quincy public schools nowhere teach students that they are the result of “a mindless evolutionary process.”

The Theological Challenge for Evangelicals
This is not to say, however, that all is well and that evolution can be comfortably harmonized with traditional religious understandings. It is one thing to note that evolution need not exclude God as creator and quite another to show exactly how creation and evolution are to be harmonized. In "Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution", published this month by HarperOne, I offers some tentative suggestions in this direction. But this harmony comes with a price that many evangelicals may be unwilling to pay—the loss of some key aspects of the traditional creation story.

I suggest in Saving Darwin that we must abandon the historicity of the Genesis creation account. Adam and Eve must not be thought of as real people or even surrogates for groups of real people; likewise the Fall must disappear from history as an event and become, instead, a partial insight into the morally ambiguous character with which evolution endowed our species. Human uniqueness is called into question and we must consider extending the imago dei, in some sense, beyond our species. These are not simple theological tasks but, if we can embrace them, I think we may be able to finally make peace with Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

There is a lot of work to be done. Evangelical churches have typically been unwilling to confront this topic—except to run off evolutionists like Howard Van Till when they become controversial—and it will be a great effort to reorient the teaching ministry of the church to bring it into alignment with the generally accepted ideas of modern science. But only when this task has been accomplished can we declare the war in the public schools to be over.