In a study released this week (“Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict”), Cato’s Neal McCluskey suggests that America could end its thus-far intractable public school wars (over sex ed, school prayer, evolution vs. creationism or “Intelligent Design”, etc.) by adopting well-designed state-level school choice programs.
The most intense opposition to this proposal comes from people who want the theory of evolution taught to all children regardless of parental wishes. Anything less, they argue, would doom America to a new Dark Age of scientific backwardness.
As someone who agrees wholeheartedly that a natural process of evolution is the best explanation of how human beings came to be, allow me to suggest why the ram-evolution-down-their-throats approach is illiberal, undemocratic, divisive, ineffective, and counter-productive.
Illiberal:
It is illiberal because it makes the government the sole arbiter of absolute truth, and this is wholly at odds with a founding principle of our nation: freedom of thought and belief. If we accept the principle that government is in possession of absolute truth, and that this truth is derived from the application of scientific methods to natural observations, then where would we draw the line? Why would we stop at mandating evolution? Why, in particular, would we allow parents to pass along any religious views at all to their children?
Is there more evidence that Moses, Jesus or Mohammed communicated directly with God than there is that human beings were created by him and in his image? If it is the government’s role to impart a secular scientific explanation of human origins to all children, why would we not also instruct them that their parents’ religious beliefs are unsupported by scientific evidence and should be discounted in favor of natural explanations of historical religious figures? Doing so would clearly be government as Orwell’s “Big Brother” rather than the government envisaged by our Founding Fathers. The same is true of the ram-evolution-down-their-throats policy.
Undemocratic:
This policy is also incompatible with democracy. Those who insist that the teaching of evolution should be mandated generally claim to be supporters of the democratic process. But the majority of Americans do not subscribe to our view of human origins. Here are some relevant polling data:
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey (conducted by Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas (SRBI). July 6–19, 2006. N=996 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.5.) | ||||||
“Would you generally favor or oppose teaching creationism along with evolution in public schools?” |
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. | ||||||
Favor | Oppose |
Unsure |
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% | % | % | ||||
7/6–19/06 | 58 | 35 | 7 |
So if we chose to mandate what is taught about human origins, and we are true democrats, we should mandate equal time for creationism and evolution. Given the public’s views on the subject, exclusively mandating the teaching of naturalistic evolution is oligarchy, not democracy.