By John Sutter
The New York Times takes the evolution in education story down to the classroom level with an article about a teacher in Florida who’s trying to convince his students that evolution is the fundamental principle of biology. It’s a really interesting read. Here’s the setup:
He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.
“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”
As a graphic that accompanies the story notes, Oklahoma is one of eight states where biological evolution is “mentioned briefly, unclearly” in state education curriculum. The teaching of human evolution is not mentioned in state standards, according to the chart.
