The Chronicle: Creationism Persists in American Science Classrooms
A significant fraction of high-school biology teachers acknowledge teaching some form of creationism, according to the first large national survey to probe how that issue is handled inside American classrooms. At the same time, teachers with the most college-level biology credits were likely to spend the most time teaching evolution, indicating that college training shapes the way teachers treat this cornerstone of scientific thought.
One in eight teachers said they taught creationism as a “valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species,” reports a team led by Michael B. Berkman, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. The survey results, published in the journal PLoS Biology on Monday, also reveal that one in six biology teachers believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”
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