Our educational system must evolve
For over a generation now we have been hearing about “a nation at risk” due to our declining educational system. If the Cassandras were right that our schools were turning out inferior students, then it only stands to reason that some of those students are now the young teachers guiding another generation whose educational future is in even greater danger. A 1998 survey by the University of Texas found that one out of four public school biology teachers believes that human beings and dinosaurs inhabited the Earth simultaneously. In other words, to borrow from Lewis Black, a quarter of our biology teachers watch “The Flintstones” as if it were a documentary.
In the book “The Age of American Unreason,” Susan Jacoby cites a 2005 Pew Forum opinion survey which found that only 48 percent of Americans accept any form of evolution (even guided by a supreme being).
Only 26 percent accept Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Forty-two percent believe that all living things (including humans) have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. In perhaps the most startling revelation (no pun intended), 27 percent of college graduates believed the same thing.
In the entire industrialized world, only Turkey has a lower percentage of citizens who discount the scientific principles of creation.
Even more disturbing is the survey that found that less than half of the American public could name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible. In other words, many people are basing their opinions on a book they never even read.
The traditional caveat that one never discusses politics or religion in polite company obviously never registered with me. First, the conjunction joining the phrase “politics or religion” is misleading.
One cannot separate politics and religion if the analysis is to be honest and accurate.
One of the most misconstrued interpretations of the Constitution is the idea of freedom of religion. The exact phrase is ” Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The founding fathers understood that intolerance was the biggest threat to democracy. They were men who were educated and influenced by the European Enlightenment ideals of the era. In fact, America was settled by those who fled a continent where people killed each other over which religion was the “national religion.”
Most people just wanted to be left alone by the government so that they could practice their religion in peace. However, soon after the country was founded, many people began to rewrite history to fit their own religious views. Thus began the slow inevitable march toward the ridged irrationalism of a de facto theocracy. Thomas Jefferson’s progressive democratic ideals were marginalized by an increasingly ridged and provincial collection of home-grown Calvinists and Quakers, who would eventually form an alliance with the new wave of Catholic immigrants. As this transformation occurred, the anti-intellectual dye was cast.
The movement was stemmed briefly in the early to mid 19th century by a pulse of intellectualism led by men such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and many others who were products of the Enlightenment principles of education and rational discourse based on empirical analysis.
However, the fateful decision to leave education up to local entities would eventually lead to the rise of fragmented and diverse religious-based school systems. Jefferson, Madison and Noah Webster led the fight for a national school system financed through general taxation.
When this battle was lost, so too was any chance of creating an education system based on scientific principles and empirical methodology.
In the textbook “Universal History,” published in 1779, the world was said to have been created on September 21, 4,004 B.C. In this creationist interpretation, the making of man occurred six days later. Even the location of the event was given as a two days journey north of Basra, Iraq. This version remained intact (give or take 500 years according to one’s begat calculations) throughout the next century.
However, by the dawn of the 20th century, Darwin’s theory of evolution created an upheaval of literally Biblical proportions. The famous Scopes Trial of 1925 had a seismic effect on our educational system. It is often assumed that the result of the trial was a push toward secular education. However, because of our system of local control of schools, a groundswell of fundamentalist backlash resulted in the entrenchment of anti-scientific principles in many parts of the country that has lasted to the present day.
If we take the population of the United States today and subtract non-Christians, non- religious people and Christians whose knowledge of Genesis ends with the opening montage of “Desperate Housewives,” we are left with a very small minority calling the shots in the most important foundation of any nation.
If we are to remain the most powerful nation on Earth and compete in an increasingly technological world economy, we need to fix our antiquated educational system. We must turn the business of education over to professionals. Most importantly, we must finally complete the transformation to a society in which science and religion coexist in their proper spheres of influence. After all, most Americans will now admit that Galileo may have been right about the whole “Earth revolving around the sun” thing.