It’s time to update science education standards, and that means another burst of hysteria. We were here just a couple of years ago with middle schools, and now we’re back again for elementary and high school standards.
While most of the effort is spent on non-controversial advances in learning, there are a few hot buttons like evolution and climate change that inevitably slow things down. It looks like this round will be no different. With no Utah standards to discuss yet, some Utah Board of Education members are already launching pre-emptive attacks on national science education standards.
“There’s a heavy emphasis on global warming,” board vice chairwoman Alisa Ellis said of the national standards. “There’s a heavy emphasis on evolution as a fact and not a theory.”
“I am not in favor of furthering an agenda,” board member Lisa Cummins added. “but maybe just teaching theory and letting both sides of the argument come out — whether it‘s intelligent design or the Darwin origin.”
Are we gluttons for punishment? Those concepts are emphasized because they are well understood explanations of observed phenomena. The national standards reflect the best thinking of a country that is still the envy of the world for its science, and physical and chemical mechanisms don’t change when you cross the state line into Utah.
This is more culture wars stuff, but it’s not really a competitive fight in those wars. High science literacy is linked to high economic production, an association that is only growing stronger. That is obvious even in our religious and politically conservative state.
Intelligent design is biology’s version of fake news. It is propagated to undermine well understood science in the hope of making a religion-based explanation more plausible. We should be advancing science instead of having to defend it. It’s almost a century after the Scopes trial. Do we really have to do this again?
Yes, but as always it’s likely more show than go. Similar concerns from many of the same board members stretched the debate over middle school standards to two years. But the resulting document did not ignore climate change and evolution, and it truly advanced science teaching, giving students a more hands-on experience.
In the end, modern science is mainstream thinking in Utah.
LDS Apostle Russell M. Nelson gave his version when he dedicated a new life sciences building at Brigham Young University two years ago: “All truth is part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whether truth comes from a scientific laboratory or by revelation from the Lord, it is compatible.”
Amen to that.