WP's Jay Mathews Intelligent Design Bugaboo

I love reading Mathews' columns on education in The Washington Post, but this one led me to pause about other things tangentially related to the column. A few weeks ago he wrote a peice on Intelligent Design being taught as a counter-point to evolutionism and Darwinism in an effort to engage students. As Mathews wrote in his original column "Who's Afraid of Intelligent Design."

Drop in on an average biology class and you will find the same slow, deadening march of memorization that I endured at 15. Why not enliven this with a student debate on contrasting theories? Why not have an intelligent design advocate stop by to be interrogated? Many students, like me, find it hard to understand evolutionary theory, and the scientific method itself, until they are illuminated by contrasting points of view.

Surely the presentation of contrasting points of view in education cannot be viewed as a bad thing, right. Wrong according to Mathews' readers. One comment cited by Mathews goes like this one presenting the fear of religious groups:

Anthony Joern, professor of biology at Kansas State University, asked about "that poor high school teacher who must deal with the religious parents of the students who were subjected to such a debate. What happens if you do present a fair debate and religion loses? What does the teacher do in Kansas when the parents clamor for revenge?"

The next quote capitalizes the fear of the religious right getting all bent out of shape about the teaching of evolution:

Elizabeth Lutwak said, "I would like to agree with your approach. I think many science teachers and their students could handle, and would benefit, from such a debate. Yet the ulterior motives of these groups scare me. They are already scaring a fair number of science teachers into not teaching evolution at all, making the material a mere reading assignment."

But lest you think Mathews mailbox was fully of people fearing religious zealots, Mathews includes this little gem:

"If I'm reading correctly then in order to make classrooms more 'fun' we should consider junk science or introduce false information. No we shouldn't. Would you encourage denying the Holocaust and giving that argument any credence just because it would get the students more involved? Just because you personally were bored by biology, I don't think we should 'jazz' it up to make it fun."

Just to break that down a little, I don't think Mathews would argue with fact. Fact, the Holocaust happened, I don't think that is in dispute. That is not to say that differing viewpoints of the events don't exist, from the discredited Nazi viewpoint, the the viewpoint of survivors, their relatives and others. Fully understanding events and theories requires examination of differing viewpoints.

Mathews ends his column with this question: Is there anyone out there trusting their high school students to handle these contradictions and using them to better explain how science works?

This particular columns deals with the feed back he got from readers. But Mathews column suggests to me a major dichotomy in parental attitudes about schools and an apparently deep belief that kids can't think for themselves.

First the parents. As followers of education trends will tell you there is more and more of a "baby-sitting" component to secondary education. Parents routinely abdicate their responsiblities for parenting to the schools. Instead of the school being a place of learning, questioning, and the accumulating of knowledge, the schools become a place to park their kids for the day.

But when it comes to teaching a different theory than one that fits their world-view, the rhetorical guns come out and blast away at teachers, schools and school boards for trying to "indoctrinate" their kids with a left wing or right-wing agenda. For the deeply religious teaching anything but creationism borders on heresy or actually is heresy. Hence the fear of teaching evolution (merely a theory of how we developed and by no means proven beyond a shadow of a doubt). The result is that teachers no longer teach evolution or Darwin for fear of the parental backlash.

Similarly, people who believe in evolution get all bent out of shape that something like ID or creationism is taught. There are those who claim that intelligent design is nothing more than creationism that allows for disparities in carbon dating. The truth is out there, but we can't find it.

These scenarios point to the lack of principled thought. Parents want the best of both worlds in that they want to be able to not actually be involved in their child's education but at the same time they want to dictate what is taught to their child. Either the parent is involved or not--you can't have it both ways. You can't view the schools as as an agent in loco parentis, expecting the child to be taught everything and then get upset when the schools actually do their job and try to teach kids.

But in reality what Mathews sought was not teaching one version of history over another, but rather presenting competing theories and letting the students hash them out, debate them like the critical thinking young adults they can be. The result, both sides want nothin' doin'. Neither side is willing to concede that perhaps the mere discussion might lead to improvements in thinking skills among their kids, they only want to make sure their kids aren't exposed to junk science or heretical thoughts.

While all the buzzing by parents fascianates and amuses, it obscures the more important point--parents don't want to run the risk of their children learning how to think critically about any information presented to them. One of the underlying subtexts of the emails Mathews received belies the apparent lack of faith of parents and schools that children cannot be presented with competing theories and decide for themselves or rather they fear that the kids might decide something contrary to the adult's world view. In a period of our history when education seems to lack enough depth and quality, heaven forbid we try to inject into the classroom some exercises for critical thought.

Kids are smart, no matter what parents and educators may say to the contrary. If you present them with competing theories like Evolution, Creation and Intelligent Design, you get an engaged class. If you challenge a child's (and by implication their parent's) beliefs, the effort is not aimed a undermining those beliefs, but rather to think critically about them. The point is to make the child think and perhaps even defend their beliefs, an activity certain to make the child a better student and a better person.

Is not the expansion of one's horizons the point of education?

Intelligent Design, Unintelligent Me (washingtonpost.com)