Clay Burell's Library tagged schooliness →  View Popular

Britain has just made evolution a mandatory part of the curriculum for even its youngest students, and American states ought to follow. Without evolution, biology isn't really science—it's just memorization—and our kids, even the littlest ones, deserve a more interesting introduction to the natural world than that. It's time we gave it to them.

The Concord Consortium is already working on one way to teach evolution to kids—an interactive, technology-driven fourth-grade curriculum called Evolution Readiness. The group is testing the approach in classrooms in Massachusetts, Missouri, and Texas. It's purposely keeping things simple, but it's not talking down to its students. "When you're 10 years old, the time to your next birthday is a long time, so it's really hard to understand things that take place over millennia," says Horwitz, who leads the project. "So we're looking at adaptation over a few generations, not a few million years." The group is also keeping things at the macro level, leaving out discussions of the genetic change that drives evolution—which, of course, is how Darwin did things, too, since genetic science hadn't been worked out in his time.

So far, Horwitz says, Evolution Readiness has been a hit. Yes, he's run into a little resistance from some parents. "At least one of them called a teacher and said, 'I believe in Jesus, and I don't want any part of this,'" he says. "But we have not yet run into what I call the pitchfork phenomenon, the angry mob." As for the students, he says, "there's one thing we can definitely say: they aren't bored." Darwin and his adventurous kids would surely approve.

What Darwin knew about kids should be obvious to anyone who has one: They make good amateur scientists. "At age 3, 4, 5, 6, all they ask is, 'What's that and where did it come from?' " says Colin Purrington, an evolutionary biologist at Swarthmore College and a father of two. So why, like Darwin the theorist, holding back his book—and unlike Darwin the dad, letting his kids loose in the lab that is the world—are so many parents and teachers loath to give kids straight, scientific answers about natural selection?

"What's that?" It's a bird. "And where did it come from?" The correct, and interesting, answer is "from a dinosaur that was well-adapted to changing conditions millions of years ago." But in a lot of schools, kids are just as likely to hear "from the sky." "I think a lot of people believe that if we can get evolution taught well in high school, we should just be happy with that, because teaching it in middle school will bring angry parents out of the woodwork," says Purrington. "As for elementary school, that's a line almost no one wants to cross."

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Even parents and teachers who have no religious objection to evolution often balk at sharing the concept with young kids. Some of them say it's too complex, to explain to kids who are still learning the basics. "I think there's a perception by teachers that evolution is horribly hard to teach," says Purrington. "There's a fear that if they don't have an advanced degree in biology, they'll get something wrong."

And yet, all science is complicated. Untangling the thicket for children is what teachers are supposed to do. If anything, that's a harder task if teachers don't allow themselves to talk about the founding principle of life science, the theory that explains and underlies nearly everything about the field.

My own experiences have convinced me that today, the vast majority of students are unable to practice true journalism at their high school papers. For the past six summers, I have directed a program for about 20 high school journalists at Princeton University. All the students are talented writers and thoughtful intellectuals. Yet, by and large, they work for newspapers that are either explicitly censored or restrained by the looming threat of official disapproval -- newspapers that read more like school-sponsored news releases than true journalism. Many have been taught to write fluffy profiles of teachers and to celebrate the achievements of their sports teams; fewer have been encouraged to challenge, to criticize or to investigate. Perhaps the most important part of our program's curriculum is to help students unlearn the instincts they have acquired at their high school newspapers.

No high school principal would dream of telling the basketball team that it could run drills but not play games, or permit the drama club to rehearse but never to stage shows. Yet, thanks in part to Hazelwood, many high schools train their students in journalism without allowing them to truly practice it.

Umm yeah, so I'm the valedictorian. Number one. But, what separates me from
number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 50, or 120? Nothing but meaningless numbers. What really
is the difference between 3.8, 2.9, and 1.5? All these randomly assigned numbers
reflect nothing about the true character of an individual. They say nothing
about personality. Nothing about desire or will. Nothing about values or morals.
Nothing about intelligence. Nothing about creativity. Nothing about heart.
Numbers cannot and will not ever be able to tell you who a person really is. Yet
in today's society we are sadly becoming more and more number oriented. Schools
today are being forced to teach to the numbers. Children are no longer learning
because it is interesting and fun; they are learning to pass the test so that
the school will continue to be funded. New mandates across the country and in
our own state incorrectly correlate test scores with the worth of teachers and
schools. Not once do these new mandates take into account that schools in low
income areas will never have as many books, long term students, parent
volunteers, or state of the art facilities. How can anyone call these tests fair? Just as class rank and
SAT scores say nothing about
the true worth of a person, a child's or school's score on a test says nothing about the worth of the school or teachers. 

It is disturbing enough that throughout high school, GPA and grades are pushed as the most important things, while learning, the real reason we
are in school, falls by the wayside. The MCAS serve as just another set of meaningless numbers that add one more reason to focus on scores and
forget learning. 

The already teetering learning process, made difficult by the social dynamics of school cliques, disrupted by a constant lack of funding and
misplaced values, has been further torn apart by a few meddling politicians and yuppies who were bored and felt the need to create what
they call a standard.