Suppose you are a high school biology teacher in the American Deep South. Most of your students are creationists. You need to teach evolution. What do you do?
What seems to be underappreciated in this debate is that, generally speaking, it’s too late. At that point, explaining evolution is like pushing students down an expert-rated ski trail when they are still falling on the bunny slopes. Before considering evolution, they need to be well-practiced in critical thinking skills. First things first.
I propose that teaching skepticism early is a path which leads out of this predicament. I’ll use skepticism as a catch-all term for critical thinking, the scientific method, baloney detection kit, etc. Substitute whatever term you believe is most appropriate.
- Skepticism is foundational. A background in skepticism is necessary for evaluating creationist claims. A conversation without this agreed-upon approach is pretty much forlorn; participants may as well be speaking mutually unintelligible languages.
- Skepticism has no prerequisites. It is readily understandable by anyone, religious or non-religious.
- Skepticism is universal. It provides a form of intellectual self-defense. It can offer protection from being swindled by pseudoscience, cults, and crass commercialism. It can prevent the adoption of conspiratorial thinking, for example the “birther” subculture, AIDS denialism, and global warming denialism. It is (desperately) needed for a more reasonable, forward-looking society.
- Minds are only changed through their own exertion. Therefore the best we can do is give students the tools which they can use to change their own minds. Besides, we don’t want them to accept our answer because we say so. We want them to work it out for themselves, like a math problem.
If a student understands skepticism but continues to hold creationist beliefs, then at least he knows the path leading out. He may not follow it, but he also knows that he’s not following it. This alone may prevent a persecution complex. Presumably the student at least understands where science is coming from; that science is not out to get him.
- Skepticism is not “accommodationism.” Promoting skepticism just means “first pants, then shoes.” If you can’t even agree on whether homeopathy is ridiculous or not, then teaching evolution is going to be difficult or impossible. Arguing about religion is going to be even worse.
- Atheists and “accommodationists” have skepticism in common. Atheists can be content in believing that their position is the logical outcome of applying skepticism to religious claims. Religious persons can be content in believing that their religion can withstand skeptical inquiry (though atheists will wonder if the religious person ever undertook such an inquiry).
- Skepticism slips through the cognitive dissonance barrier. Debating religion raises the dissonance barrier. See Mistakes were made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Here’s an interesting podcast on it (if you are impatient then skip to the 33-minute mark).
- Skepticism is a long-term solution. Skepticism can be introduced to young audiences, ideally as part of a formal curriculum. And the earlier the better–before the habit of credulity becomes second nature.
Bringing skepticism into schools nationally is a realistic and practical waypoint on the road to a scientifically literate society. However it runs headlong into the historical issue of local control over education which has contributed to the dismal condition of scientific literacy in America (see the second chapter of The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby).
Would it be too cynical of me to suggest that the last thing the Powers-That-Be want, in government, religion, business, or society, is a large group of people who can think critically?
Once people start thinking for themselves they become much less pliable.
Where to start on this?
You’re dead right – scepticism isa basic skill that all children should learn – like how to swim. In fact, it’s much more necessary. You might never have occasion to swim. You will certainly need to assess arguments, whoppers, propositions and all sorts throughout your life.
I’ve been trying to remember when I encountered at school. This is what I’ve come up:
1. “If he told you to stick your hand in the fire, would you do it?” – What a teacher would say to someone who did something stupid and then made the excuse “But he told me to do it.” The message – Think For Yourself.
2. Later on, while studying history, being encouraged to check sources, go to primary sources, to not take for granted that a photo caption accurately described the photo. To at least make an effort to engage common sense and to look, to really look.
It is depressing to read of the bizarre attitudes to science in some parts of a country that plays such a leading scientific role in the world.
As a child in grade 7 at catholic school, we were taught creation in the daily morning religion class and evolution in the daily afternoon science class. yes, it was just a bit confusing. as a natural born skeptic, i put up my hand in science class one day as we were discussing evolution. with a very serious face, i asked the brother the following: ‘brother, if man was made in the image of god, and man came from monkeys, does that mean that god used to look like a monkey?’ i tell you no lie – i was sternly reprimanded and sent to the office for a discussion about not being so naughty in class. i protested and argued to defend myself as the question was very serious for me. no one ever answered it…hmmm.
Nice arrow pointing here from Greg Laden. If he had known I was going to receive it, he might have pointed it at my left rib cage.
To whom are you writing? We’ve got Ed Brayton talking about originalism and now you about skepticism and accommodationism. Very few people know what these terms are getting at. I suspect Ed’s originalism is code for Scalia and Bork, then somehow, who knows how, you’re not talking about them but some ethereal idea, which you define, which you make up the boundary lines on. Now your word, skepticism the people, populi, would know, but not in the sense you are using it. Then, we could go a whole day not finding one person who knows what you mean by accommodationism. Some might ask if accommodationism has anything to do with Neville Chamberlin. So you have picked a very narrow group of people, and not numerous, to be writing to.
Is it a fair question whether there are too many “isms”? Are they too removed from reality, too based in pusillanimous academe? You want them there? Are names, specifics, dates, better? My answer, your answer, determines who has initial interest and will listen, and possibly respond by comment. Comments are entertainment, I guess for others too. Of course my answer about isms is there are too many “isms.” I know nothing of ‘originalism’ but I know of Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Bork.
Now skepticism and accommodationism, as stated. It so happens that I was a geology teacher in the southern U.S. and taught evolution as part of the course. However, I don’t recognize my experiences in anything you have said about isms.
Too many, too damn many isms for me. It’s always been that way. I remember those long lectures on realism, naturalism, romanticism and in the end they don’t mean chicken squat, except teacher’s got a job. Oh sure there’s a big pretense that we each understand the same dog I am talking about. But it is not true, not for a minute that I understand what you mean by an ism. Meanwhile you are ready to make something up for the word as the boundaries suit you. Morse Peckham studied the meaning of the word romanticism for about ten years, and across international boundaries, and concluded that it meant so many different things to different people, that the facts would not stand still, that it had no real meaning even in a cloud.
As it so happens, I read the science blogs and can guess at what you aim for by these isms. I guess they must mean something, however vague. But the isms are not for everybody. And I may guess wrong.
So it is exciting to see the start of a new blog. If no one questions your bases, what’s the use of having a blog? Good luck, happy blogging, and cheers.
@blackwatertown
I’m not trying to be snarky here, but “think for yourself” is not equivalent to critical thinking. You have to be trained to think critically – the world is full of people who think for themselves without thinking critically, which is possibly one of the reasons humanity keeps making the same damn mistakes.
@Szwagier – Fair point. I suppose the message was more to think, to think at all, to think before acting. That would be the first step away from blindly accepting or following an instruction. Then when a child appreciates that opportunity and responsibility, you can try to equip them to think critically.
Interesting blog with some challenging ideas. On this whole issue of teaching scepticism, I wonder if part of the problem is the way that kids are handled in school today. They are early users of technology and the school environment is highly controlled to minimize bullying, disappointment, etc. That does not create an environment conducive to resiliency or ability to cope when the unexpected arises. That goes for both unfamiliar situations as well as new ideas. Maybe if they spent more time building things or doing tasks where everything doesn’t work the first time they would become a little more flexible and not take everything at face value. Worse, the internet may have everything out there but it also is a place where you can find what you are looking for and if you want confirmation of the ‘truth’ of your opinions you can always find it.
I agree that technology, modern teaching philosophies, and other modernisms are contributors to the problem, however the South has been woefully behind on science education throughout the history of the U.S.
One main reason for this, offered by Susan Jacoby (the last point in the post), is local standards for education. To put it bluntly, uneducated citizens did not want those highfalutin know-it-alls telling them what their kids should be learning. Evolution schmevolution.
“Suppose you are a high school biology teacher in the American Deep South. Most of your students are creationists. You need to teach evolution. What do you do?”
What I did, as an Earth science teacher in the South (my first career), was to outline the evidence as clearly as possible, and show where some interpretations followed logically, whereas others required ever-more-elaborate “conspiracy theories” to reconcile. And then stopped a step short of just blurting out what I was thinking. I taught probably 180 kids a year for 6 years, of whom probably 70% were YECs when they got to me, and at least 3 of whom changed their views, by their own admission years later when they came back to visit me, because of my class. That’s a rate of verified successes of only 4/10 percent, but that’s better than 0 (despite claims by commenters on other blogs to the contrary).
And, yes, more skeptical thinking, earlier on, would almost certainly have made that rate a lot higher. Kids are bombarded daily by “Woo,” from church to entertainment media, and they get almost no dose of rationalism to counter it until much later on. It’s a wonder that any of them are able to think critically by the time they reach high school.
Thanks for this first-hand account, Kirth. I would guess that few people visit their old Earth science teacher from high school, so I’m sure your success rate was considerably higher than 0.4%.
It makes me wonder if there are any studies which track evolution/creationism beliefs through high school. It is well-known that creationism drops off during college, but that is a different story. I find that I have to keep reminding myself that not everyone goes to college.
After I first drafted these bullet-points you mentioned that skepticism should be taught early, and I had forgotten about that after writing this post and fiddling with html.
So a belated thanks to Kirth for inspiring this post.
@oedipusmaximus, specifically.
This is all very well, and I absolutely support your view, but you still haven’t addressed the question of how difficult it would (not ‘might’, but *would*) be to create a whole educational system based on not believing what you (the kid) are told.
Ideal universes are wonderful, but we don’t live in one. Utopian ideas of the stripe of ‘we should teach kids how to think critically’ (not just about YEC vs. Evolution – that is still, no matter how important it is to you, I, or Kirth, a sideshow, frankly) are useless without a practical implementation.
What do you suggest?
/I’m really *not* trolling; I want to know what your vision of the next step is – I think the issue of critical thinking is much bigger than just science v religion./
Szwagier, I had imagined a “Foundations of Science” course being taught across the country, advertised as an introduction to critical thinking and the scientific method. “Skepticism” is a loaded word in this context and should be avoided.
Practically speaking, the NCSE and/or the NSTA and/or others would organize a movement to draft a congressional bill and/or meet with the Secretary of Education and/or do whatever politicking is necessary.
There are lots of ways to sell it to the public. The case can even be made on purely economic grounds. It’s no secret that the U.S. imports much of its brainpower, and those imports are on the decline.
I suppose I or someone else could send a proposal to Eugenie Scott. As for immediate plans–I don’t know, solicit more input?
…and “Foundations of Science” would not mention religion, of course. Leave it to students to apply critical thinking to their own religion, if they wish.
Ultimately this is about setting national science standards, and that is a such a huge proposal that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I’m sure the above is too naive and too narrow.
So my final answer is that I have no idea.
Looking back on this post, I would severely curtail its ambitions, whatever they were.
I think it suffices to say: Isn’t it obvious that skepticism is a prerequisite? If so then why is it not taught? I want to spread that meme.
@Szwagier, if your concern is that the kids would ultimately refuse to participate in school because you’ve taught them not to believe, I think you’re mistaken in gauging their most likely reaction. I personally encountered fewer behavior problems, not more, when the kids were actively engaged in finding their own interpretations, rather than being sat down and told what to memorize and/or believe. Adolescent psych people will stress the difference between authoritative leadership (“I’m saying you should give this a try because of X, and then you can see for yourself what happens”) vs. authoritarian (“sit down and shut up and do what I tell you, because I told you to!”) — most kids respond better to the former.
One problem is the low salary and low standards for teachers, which make it hard to find teachers who can tell the difference between these two modes, and pull it off successfully. Raising standards would require, in many places, drastically raising salaries (I started at $19K a year, as a degreed geologist also fully licensed to teach), which would raise taxes, which parents resent — seemingly they’d rather gripe about teachers than do anything to improve the profession. I don’t have a solution to that; if your teachers don’t understand different authority structures, or even critical thinking themselves, then you just have to do the best you can to write the curriculum to force them into those areas anyway (I wrote the Earth Science curriculum for my county with an eye towards forcing less-prepared teachers out of their comfort zone and into inquiry-based learning).
In many ways I agree with what you say here, but I think you are failing to distinguish between two separate (though related) aims: Pedagogy and social change.
From a pedagogical perspective, you are dead on the money. I won’t really bother to elaborate, because your post already covers most everything I would have to say on the matter. I do think it is somewhat of a strawman, though, to imply that anybody thinks that the classroom is the place for attacking religion. Nobody — to my knowledge — is suggesting that.
From a broader social change perspective — and from the more narrow aim of political change — the pedagogical argument you make is way off-base. For one thing, when it comes to social change, the audience does not merely consist of those on the exact opposite side. In fact, I would argue that in many ways, the opposite side is not part of the audience at all when it comes to social and political change. It is those who are in between who are the audience. And recent research suggests that the majority of human fence-sitters are more heavily influenced by loud shouting than by carefully reasoned argument. (Not wishing to sacrifice my principles, I would condone “carefully reasoned loud shouting” as the primary approach…)
In addition to the audience being much broader, the arena is also much broader in regards to social change than in regards to education. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assert that, as important as it is to limit this Creationist nonsense in the US, it is far more important to stop the brutality of religion, such as stoning, female genital mutilation, murder of abortion doctors, etcetera. The pedagogical endgame is critical thinking; the social endgame is the abandonment of thoughtless medieval brutality.
And in the middle of the two lies the political battles. The political endgame is the cessation of religious influence over the political process. You’re not going to win that won by speaking softly and respecting people’s beliefs. Or maybe you haven’t been paying attention to the way politics has functioned for the last 100+ years…
In any case, all this is not to disagree with the thrust of your post — if the goal is to get high school students to accept evolution, you are quite right to say that attacking religion gets you nowhere. But that is not the only goal. And I would assert that, when it comes to some of the other goals, unsparing criticism of religion is exactly the right approach.
Thanks for your response, James.
Most of my post was lifted from a discussion about how to improve science education in the Bible Belt, and so it was directed toward classrooms rather than the public.
There is other context missing from my post as well, such as the reference to attacking religion. I don’t believe any reasonable teacher has ever explicitly attacked religion. Rather it was a reference to the FoxNews “controversy” over the biology textbook which referred to creationism as “the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian god in 7 days.”
In light of this I should overhaul this post.
As an initial stop-gap measure, I’ve changed the first mention of “attack” to “arguing about”, and the second to “debating”.
My point was that the question of whether or not to address religion is moot. Since they don’t even have the tools to address it, the question is premature.
“In any case, all this is not to disagree with the thrust of your post — if the goal is to get high school students to accept evolution, you are quite right to say that attacking religion gets you nowhere. But that is not the only goal. And I would assert that, when it comes to some of the other goals, unsparing criticism of religion is exactly the right approach.”
This post seems to be taking a longer view. Many people do abandon religion after their beliefs are boldly questioned — but not unless they possess a modicum of critical thinking ability to begin with. This isn’t just about creationism vs. evolution; critical thinking is a key component in realizing that condemning gays doesn’t prevent hurricanes, stoning suspected witches won’t fix social ills, molesting virgins doesn’t cure aids, and loops of wire don’t detect IUDs (to cite just a few current events).
I think that the approach Oedipus adocates is absolutely necessary for the accomplishment of all of the goals mentioned, even if it is not by itself sufficient.