Posts Tagged ‘classroom teaching’

In a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Charles Darwin wrote, “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish.”

Since the publication of the first edition of The Origin of Species in November 1859, attempts over the past 150 years to avoid fulfilling Darwin’s own prediction have largely been a failure, according to an article in The New York Times —at least in the classroom.

In the Times article “On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan,” free-lance writer Nicholas Bakalar notes “that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology.”

While only 28 percent of the teachers consistently follow the recommendations, Bakalar was even more dismayed that researchers discovered that “13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.” Continue Reading