Adam Laats

Quick options {Click on a book or scroll down to read about em all}

Work in Progress:

• School Children: A New History of American Public Education

• Mr. Lancaster’s System: A Failed Reform and the Birth of American Public Schools, 1800-1840

Published:

• Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press, 2018)
• Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation, with co-author Harvey Siegel (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
• The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard University Press, 2015)
• Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

What’s Cookin’:

School Children: The Real Founders of American Public Education

The King of England vouched for it. The President of the United States, too. At the turn of the 19^th century, the great and good of the world agreed on a plan for America’s public schools. But in the early 1800s, children—like fourteen-year-old Billy Demerest—brought it down. Billy had been promised thirty-six dollars per year to help teach at one of New York’s first public schools. But the trustees ran out of money to pay him, so he quit. Without free teaching from children, New York’s first public schools collapsed.

Billy was far from alone. His decisions—and the decisions of children like him—shaped America’s public schools. In 1844, nineteen-year-old Robert Morris forced white Massachusetts to crack open their segregated schools. In 1821, a group of Black girls between the ages of ten and fourteen foiled the plans of their white school administrators. The administrators had decided that the girls could only learn “knitting and plain sewing” but the girls cajoled their teacher into teaching them more advanced “ornamental” techniques.

It wasn’t always about protest or subversion. In a million unheralded ways, children directed the course of their own schooling. Like the day in 1827 when a public school in New York had to face the facts: their unpaid, untrained child teacher was unable to stop the rest of the children’s “disposition to Levity and Laughter, which Seemed rather generally to prevail.”

It’s not too much to say that it was those children who shaped schools, just as adults were so sure that the schools would shape children.

Historians have done a lot to explore the history of children, but there is still no book that connects children to the institution closest to them: the public school. My new book digs deep into the archives to unearth the ways children influenced the structure and content of public schools in the first half of the 1800s.

The story of school changes a lot when we put children at the center. If, as David Tyack and Larry Cuban said long ago, education relies on a deep “grammar of schooling,” then children are the native speakers. As every teacher knows so well, students determine what can and can’t go on in the classroom. It’s not only dramatic walk-outs and petitions that matter; it is all the everyday decisions children make. Will they skip school? Will they accept their phrenological diagnosis? Will they listen to their teacher, or will they wreck the plans of adults by indulging in “Levity and Laughter”?

I aim to find out. Though children don’t claim the same headlines and resources as adults, they leave a clear trail in the archives. My ambition is to write a new history of America’s public schools, beyond the old “reform-and-resistance” model that focuses on the decisions made by adults. The history is crystal clear: Those adult decisions were never the last word. Sometimes they changed schools. Sometimes they didn’t. But every time, the people that mattered more than superintendents and politicians were the people who actually experienced schools—the children themselves.

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Mr. Lancaster’s System: A Failed Reform and the Birth of American Public Schools, 1800-1840

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Adam Laats

There’s no doubt something big happened. Historians know it. People at the time knew it. When it came to the startling changes sweeping their cities in the first decades of the 1800s, people in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and New York could hardly stop talking about it.

In some ways, historians have painstakingly mapped the changes, marked the ways that US cities developed modern municipal institutions such as prisons, hospitals, and almshouses. And historians of education have noted a similar change—one with similarly revolutionary results—in the birth of modern public-school systems. We know it happened. We know when it happened. And we know it was big. But so far, when it comes to schools, we don’t know how it happened.

Historians are well aware that it had something to do with the overhyped promises of one unsavory celebrity. At the time, the narcissistic London reformer Joseph Lancaster was one of the world’s most famous people, taking way more credit than he was due for his simplistic education “system.” In 1818, by special invitation, Lancaster emigrated to New York to bring his system to that city and all the cities of the US. America’s city leaders thought they were investing in the future. What they did not know was that Lancaster’s modern magic was a sham; he had built his supposed miracle on a foundation of embezzlement, fraud, and the sexual abuse of his closest students.

The key to understanding the complicated birth of modern urban public-school systems has been hidden by Lancaster’s wild claims. Urban elites in the US leaped to give Lancaster the credit he didn’t deserve. They desperately hoped he was right; they hoped he’d give them the modern public schools they were yearning for. Most important, they hoped his impossible promise could be true; namely, that he could solve all their problems without costing an extra dime.

At the time, Lancaster’s ideas were all the rage. He was feted and celebrated by kings and presidents around the world. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts passed laws mandating Lancaster’s London methods in their new city schools. Albany, Savannah, Cincinnati, Detroit, Baltimore, and a host of other cities followed. They invested in Lancaster’s fantasies; they believed their new schools would transform their cities and save them from uneducated mobs.

Lancaster’s system was fairly simple. He promised he could build cheap schools to corral the hordes of low-income children in America’s cities. Instead of expensive adult teachers, Lancasterian schools had children teach one another to read, write, and behave properly. Lancaster and his followers thought it would change everything. Lancaster told the world that his schools would “utterly exterminat[e] ignorance” from the entire planet. Mayor De Witt Clinton of New York City called the system “a blessing sent down from Heaven to redeem the poor and distressed of this world from the power and dominion of ignorance.”

America’s city leaders poured the equivalent of millions of dollars into the scheme. They built huge specialized schoolbuildings. They bought Lancaster’s teaching machines and offered him a huge salary. What they didn’t do was inquire too closely into what had happened in London. If they had, they might have saved themselves some heartache and expense, and they would have sent America’s cities down a very different path.

My new book tells the story: it’s the story of America’s original municipal sin, when white elites assumed their answers were the answers. Reformers were transfixed by Lancasterianism. It was modern, it was urban, it was high-tech…it was all the things they assumed their solutions would need to be. They thought it would save their cities from the dangers of modern urban life. They didn’t look elsewhere, closer to home, to notice that other kinds of public schools were succeeding and had been for a while. They didn’t listen to the voices of their lower-income neighbors, who knew what they wanted public schools to look like, and knew it wasn’t what Lancaster described. If the Lancasterian reformers had only listened, they might have discovered the achingly obvious key to the creation of modern public-school systems: public schools need adequate resources and they need to respond to community needs. When Lancaster’s simplistic ideas failed—as it seems painfully clear in retrospect they must—it was left to non-famous, non-elite teachers, students, and parents to create urban public-school systems from the wreckage left behind. And that’s what they did.

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Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution

Who are America’s creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In my new book, I argue that common misconceptions about creationism have led us into a full century of hapless and unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, tough as it might be to notice, America does not now and never has had deep, fundamental disagreement about evolution.

If we only read the headlines, that statement might seem obviously false. After all, as we’ve seen in Gallup polls since the 1980s, nearly half of Americans say they think our species was created pretty much as-is within the past 10,000 years. And of those creationists, about a quarter have been to college.

For those of us who aren’t creationists, it is difficult to understand how so many people—apparently even educated people—can cling to such outlandish anti-scientific ideas. Yet it doesn’t take much time to find more evidence everywhere we look.

In recent state school-board elections in Texas, for example, front-runner Mary Lou Bruner thought dinosaurs had survived Noah’s flood on the ark. For what it’s worth, Bruner was also convinced that President Obama had put himself through law school by working as a prostitute. It’s not only down in Texas. When President Trump picked his cabinet, he chose ardent young-earth creationist Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Education Department Secretary Betsy Devos has done more than just endorse creationism; she has funded creationist pundits and schools.

Are they simply dummies? Wacky conspiracy-theorists like Mary Lou Bruner sure seem like it. But that label is hard to accept in the case of Dr. Carson, a leading pediatric neurosurgeon. Can someone be a dummy if he invents a new way to operate on baby’s brains? Explaining away creationism as mere stupidity doesn’t seem to fit. Yet it is easy enough to find people who will tell you that it does. Atheists such as Oxford’s Richard Dawkins famously dismissed creationism as merely an outbreak of ignorance, insanity, or sheer wickedness. For some people, Dawkins’ explanation might be enough.

For the rest of us, however, Dawkins’ angry harangues don’t really help. We might not like creationism or understand creationists, but the answers don’t seem as stark and simple as Dawkins says they are. So where can we go next? If we hope to understand America’s culture wars over creationism, we tend to get caught in an unproductive loop. The most active pundits and writers about creationism tend to be the angriest on both sides. Radical creationists tell us that evolution equals atheism. Radical atheists agree, and insist that creationism is only for the radically ignorant.

Not surprisingly, the truth is more complicated. Though it might not seem possible to the casual observer, the battle lines in American culture between creationism and evolution are not really between creationists and the rest of us. There is not a stark and simple divide between religious creationists who think the earth was made 6,000 years ago and atheist scientists who disagree.

Americans do have significant disagreements about creationism, though, and once we press into the history of the creationism culture wars, those actual battle lines leap into high relief. Hard as it may be to believe, the real battle is not between creationists and evolution. Americans are not and never have been locked in a culture war between creationists and evolution. We could not possibly be, for two fundamental reasons. First, today as in the past, almost all Americans are creationists of one type or another. At the same time, almost all Americans, including creationist Americans, want their children to learn rigorous, mainstream evolutionary science.

These facts aren’t hidden, yet they remain shocking to those who do not understand the real world of American creationism. Creationism USA explains the history and current state of America’s true battles over creationism. It offers a nuanced but simple prescription to solve them.

The book’s recipe is straightforward. In order to understand the creationist culture wars—the real ones, not the phony headlines—we need to begin with a better understanding of creationism itself. Next, we need to clarify the areas on which we really do disagree about evolution. They are not insignificant, but they can be overcome.

All of us—religious, secular, and not sure—need to recognize a few things: 1.) what creationism truly is in twenty-first century America and 2.) what we really want out of our public schools. In addition, all of us need to accept the fact that we can’t force other people to admit we’re right. In short, we might not agree about religion and science…but that’s okay. The division we’ve gotten used to fighting about isn’t really about those things at all.

In this book, I’m arguing that our true division about creationism is not between creationists and evolution-lovers, but between two other types of believers. Once we recognize this fundamental truth about American creationism we can notice new ways to get over our century-old go-nowhere battles about textbooks and Darwin.

Will everyone agree? Certainly not. But the fiercest opposition to this program will be from the very radicals who have warped and distorted our conversations about creationism for a full century. Once we understand real American creationism, we will be able to see how insignificant those radical voices really are.

Cheapskate Corner! Want to check out the book, but don’t want to cough up twenty bucks for it?

• At Forbes, Peter Greene offered an insightful review:
  • “Laats provides an thoughtful and insightful guide to one of our most persistent education debates, and in doing so, may also provide some insights into the cultural war issues facing schools today.”
• Thanks to the folks at Nature for asking about the history. With universities under attack in the 2020s, I offered a look at the lessons from the anti-evolution battles of the 1920s.
• How did the creationism of the 1920s set the pattern for enduring movements to ban and burn books from America’s schools? I laid out the history for The Atlantic.
• How about this excerpt featured at Friendly Atheist?
• Or this piece at Anxious Bench?
• Maybe this argument I made about Trumpism and radical creationism at History News Network?
• Short on time? You can read this interview with my campus research newsletter.
• …or listen to this longer interview with Chris Voss on the Chris Voss Show podcast.
• You could give a listen to the Holy Post Podcast with Phil Vischer (yes, the “Veggie Tales” guy). He asks: Where did Young Earth Creationism come from? How new is it?
• At Kappan, I take on the myth of the “eternal monkey trial.” It might seem like America keeps fighting the same fight about creationism, but in fact evolution education has made huge strides.
• Why the book? Check out the interview at Righting America. What is a “radical” creationist? What does creationism have to do with Trumpism?

The reviews are coming in:

• At Science Education, John Rudolph of the University of Wisconsin–Madison offered a smart, insightful review. There’s a paywall, but Prof. Rudolph asks some tough questions and gives some positive answers. For example: Is there any need for yet another book about creationism? Dr. Rudolph: “After spending some time with this highly readable and engaging book, I am happy to report that [Creationism USA] offers something quite new indeed.” Or this one: Why have creationist culture wars lasted so long? Dr. Rudolph: “In a nutshell, [Creationism USA] complicates the longstanding us‐versus‐them, creation–evolution narrative, and demonstrates convincingly that a more accurate framing is really us versus us.”
• In Reports of the National Center for Science Education, Anj Petto nailed it. What’s the book about? As Petto writes, “we need to make it clear to the non-radical contingent of creationists that evolution education does not threaten their values. But the starting point of this process is to listen to what creationists really are saying about their concerns about the place of evolution in public life. If you are interested in promoting the acceptance of evolution among the general public, you should read this book!”

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Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education

Oxford University Press, 2018

If you want to run for President as a Republican these days, there seems to be a new requirement. In addition to shaking hands, kissing babies, and eating barbecue, every GOP hopeful since Reagan has added a stop at a conservative evangelical college. Why? What do these schools mean in the fractious politics of culture-war America?

In my new book, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, I’m exploring the complex history of evangelical and fundamentalist higher education. In many ways, these schools have functioned as institutional hubs in the kaleidoscopic world of conservative evangelicalism. From Reagan to Romney, from Cruz to (Jeb) Bush, politicians hoping to woo the conservative religious vote have visited conservative schools such as Bob Jones and Liberty University.

When the GOP contest kicked off for 2016, the tradition continued.  Texas Senator Ted Cruz jump-started the race in March, 2015.  Guess where he headed to make the announcement?  And when it came time for Liberty’s 2015 commencement address, was it any surprise that Liberty welcomed Governor Jeb Bush as a speaker? And today, the connections between the Trump White House and the Falwell mega-campus are tighter than ever. When it came time for President Trump’s first commencement address, there was little doubt where he’d go.

It makes sense. Schools such as Bob Jones and Liberty, as well as Wheaton College, Biola, The King’s College, and a host of other institutions, have educated generations of evangelicals in the distinctive intellectual and cultural traditions of their faith. Students at these schools agree to more rigid lifestyle rules than they would on secular campuses. And they agree to have their educations shepherded by faculties who have signed on to detailed statements of faith. Just as alumni of the Ivy League might brag about their alma maters, so alumni of these schools feel a distinct connection to their colleges. Politicians hoping to prove their conservative credentials want to jump on that bandwagon.

But that does not mean that these colleges are somehow monolithic.  The differences between these schools often loom larger than their similarities, at least in the world of evangelical Protestantism.  What does it mean to be “creationist?”  What changes are healthy, and what are dangerously heterodox?  And what is the proper, Godly relationship between men and women?  There is no single “evangelical” answer to these questions.  Just as at pluralist campuses, evangelical campuses have been rocked by controversy on all these issues.

But there is a palpable sense of connection.  There is something that unites the fractious world of evangelical higher education.  And in this book, I’m asking questions about it:  What did such schools hope to teach each new generation of evangelical student?  How did they hope to raise up new generations of faithful young people in a country that was slipping farther and farther into secularism?  And, importantly, how did students respond to these efforts?

If we hope to understand America’s continuing culture wars, we must make sense of the many meanings of these institutions.  After all, our culture wars aren’t between one group of educated people and another group that has not been educated.  Rather, the fight is usually between two groups who have been educated in very different ways.

Cheapskate Corner: Want to read more, but nervous about coughing up twenty bucks for the book? You can read author interviews around the interwebs:

1. Why is it so difficult to lead an evangelical college? Read my interview with the Trollingers at Righting America.
2. Why Fundamentalist U? Read an author interview at Inside Higher Ed.
3. Read more at Chronicle of Higher Education.
4. Listen to an author interview at Phoenix’s KJZZ.
5. Keeping the faith–read an author interview at Religion & Politics.
6. Race, confessional theology, and Marilynne Robinson: A talk about Fundamentalist U (and other things) with Adam Holland of The Daily Brew.
7. Can we ever get beyond our culture-war prejudices? Can studying schools help us understand religion? A talk about Fundamentalist U with Professor Andrea Turpin at Religion in American History.
8. What do evangelical colleges mean to those of us who aren’t (at all) evangelical? Listen to my interview with Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta to find out.
9. What are three reasons to read Fundamentalist U? Check out Justin Taylor’s recommendation at The Gospel Coalition.

The reviews are coming in:

1. Professor John Compton pairs Fundamentalist U with R. Marie Griffith’s Moral Combat in the LA Review of Books. Compton’s verdict? Fundamentalist U “offers an invaluable introduction to the esoteric world of Christian higher education. Few existing studies offer this level of insight into the inner workings of schools like BJU and Liberty.”
2. In the Wall Street Journal, Naomi Schaefer Riley had some nice things to say and some insightful reflections. For example, why do so many evangelical colleges love President Trump so much? As Riley puts it, “Caught between the vast changes in American higher education and the religious families they are supposed to serve, fundamentalist colleges have had to be especially attuned to which way the cultural winds are blowing. Which may occasionally get them some incongruous commencement speakers.” Riley’s overall take? “Mr. Laats . . .  takes a topic that could easily be treated with condescension and turns it into the occasion for a fascinating and careful history. His discussion of the racial policies of these schools is especially enlightening.”
3. Professor Barry Hankins in Christianity Today: As Professor Hankins notes, the “family feud” between fundamentalists and evangelicals often took place on the campuses of evangelical colleges and universities. And, as Prof. Hankins puts it memorably, “With fundamentalism subject to such a fluid range of definitions, controversies often centered on the question of authority. In other words, who gets to define fundamentalism for the college? Is it the board, the president, the faculty, or the students (certainly not, unless you ask them)? This was not shared governance but something akin to WrestleMania.” . . . “Overall, Fundamentalist U is an exhaustively researched and well-written book, even when it dwells on episodes we might prefer to forget.”
4. In Reading Religion, Andrew Gardner writes, “At its best, scholarship on religion and American higher education produces fascinating studies about the ways in which religion engages in a unique and complex network of educational institutions that, in many ways, is unparalleled in any other country. Adam Laats’s book, Fundamentalist U: Keeping Faith in American Higher Education, falls within [this] category.”
5. In History of Education Quarterly, historian Andrea Turpin of Baylor University, the author of a fantastic, award-winning recent history of American higher education, had this to say: “As a sympathetic outsider to the institutions he studies, Laats pairs depth of research and analysis with a commitment to rigorous fairness to his subjects. In Fundamentalist U, Laats does not merely explain the internal logic of an interesting, but isolated, group of colleges and universities; he also raises critical questions about the nature of broader American higher education and culture in the twentieth century. . . . Laats is an engaging writer, and the book’s chapters are filled with fascinating stories cleverly told. . . . Fundamentalist U reshapes our mental landscape of twentieth-century American higher educational institutions and is essential reading for understanding both their history and their present.
6. Yes! Thanks to leading historian of evangelicalism Matthew Avery Sutton for a great review in American Historical Review. As Professor Sutton writes, Fundamentalist U is “an engaging, well-researched study of an important, understudied, and underappreciated aspect of American culture and life. The schools that he analyzes have produced generation after generation of students who have had a major impact on American society and politics. . . . Fundamentalist U is an excellent book.“
7. Another good one. From Harvard’s Andrew Jewett in the Journal of American History: “Fundamentalist U is a superb book and a significant contribution to the histories of U.S. religion and politics as well as higher education.”
8. A meaty, insightful review by Tim Gloege, author of Guaranteed Pure, in Church History: “essential reading for anyone interested in the history of modern evangelicalism. . . .Fundamentalist U further challenges three persistent myths that have also been targets of the new evangelical historiography. First, it demonstrates evangelical “orthodoxy” was an aspiration, a dream—and a fleeting one at that. . . . Second, Fundamentalist U. challenges the myth of fundamentalist “withdrawal from culture” between 1920 and 1970. . . .Finally, Laats demonstrates the utility of defining evangelicalism as a social network anchored by educational institutions. . . . Fundamentalist higher education may be an oxymoron to many outsiders, but Laats has convincingly demonstrated it has been central to American evangelicalism.”

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The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education

Harvard University Press, 2015

[UPDATE: More good news!  I just heard that this book has been awarded the History of Education Society’s Outstanding Book Award for 2015.  Wow!  I’m very grateful to HES and to the selection committee.]

What have conservatives wanted out of America’s schools?

What has it meant to be “conservative” about American education?

When I started asking those questions a few years back, I went at finding the answers the wrong way.  At first, I visited the archives of prominent conservatives such as William Bennett and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

But I realized that I was putting the cart before the horse.  If I wanted to find out what made someone “conservative” about education, I couldn’t pick out the proper conservatives ahead of time.  So, instead, I examined the four most famous educational controversies of the twentieth century.  I looked to see who showed up to advocate the conservative position. Using this method, I identified what I call “educational conservatism.”

In short, the tradition of educational conservatism has ranged beyond any single self-conscious movement or organization.  From the 1920s through the 1970s—and, I think, well beyond—conservatives have agreed on a few basic principles.  First, conservative activists have rarely questioned their shared assumption that schools matter, a lot.  Among conservatives just as among twentieth-century progressives, activists have assumed that what goes on in schools will determine what goes on in society.  As a result, conservatives have insisted that schools must push a steady diet of religion and patriotism on their students.  The specific meanings of proper public religion and patriotism have changed significantly, but conservatives have always insisted that schools must never wobble in their firm adherence to the inculcation of traditional values, however those values are understood at the time.

That’s my argument, anyway.  Is it any good?

To find out, you can listen to an interview at National Review with John Miller.

Or read some reviews:

• In the pages of the Journal of American History, Kevin Kruse of Princeton University, author of One Nation Under God, had this to say:

Well researched, well written, and well argued, The Other School Reformers offers a clear, evenhanded account of conservative activism in public education.

• Or how about Andrew Petto’s take in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education, in which he says:

Laats’s analysis of the social and political contexts in which this [conservative] resistance [to educational reform] occurs makes this book a must-read for anyone interested in or hoping to effect educational reform—whether in the sciences or in other disciplines.

• No one knows more about conservative teachers and the history of efforts to teach anti-racism than Professor Zoe Burkholder.  In the pages of the History of Education Quarterly, here are her thoughts on the book:

The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education is the first comprehensive historical study of conservative educational activism in the United States. . . . Laats makes a compelling argument that a powerful tradition of educational conservatism has played a decisive role in shaping American public schools and culture from the 1920s through the present. . . . The Other School Reformers makes a vital contribution to the history of education by identifying a clearly discernable and politically powerful tradition of conservative educational reform in the United States since the 1920s. One of this book’s strengths is its ability to explain the connections between these four episodes separated by time and space, and also to account for such differences as the changing ways that conservative educational activists dealt with race and religion.

• Another good one from historian Emily Straus, in American Historical Review (January 2017) 122 (1): 189-190 (subscription required):
  

  The Other School Reformers directly engages several historiographical discussions and will be of interest to historians in a variety of fields beyond the history of education and the history of conservatism. By looking at conservatives’ fights around education, the book fills in the shadow figures against whom progressives—a group that historians have written much more about—fought. It also broadens our understanding of conservatism in the twentieth century by illuminating the centrality of education. Any scholar interested in how to tell a national story through a local lens will also benefit from reading Laats’s work. By excavating conservatives’ activism around public school education and by helping to reframe the discourse around education, Laats’s account will enrich both historical and contemporary debates on education and politics.

• Then there’s Mike Wakeford’s opinion in the blog of the Society for US Intellectual History:

The Other School Reformers is about big ideas and big questions. At bottom it is a valuable portrait of how Americans vie, in an ongoing way, to answer the questions that matter most: Why do we educate? What are schools for? And, in the context of crosscutting claims about the intrinsic relationship between ‘education’ and ‘democracy,’ what has, does, and should each of those terms mean?

• And don’t forget Kunal Parker’s review essay in the Tulsa Law Review, in which he considers OSR along with Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God:

If we are wont to think that American conservatives mobilized in opposition to Communism or Socialism, secularism, or the political demands of women and minorities, both Kruse and Laats, but especially the latter, show us how much conservative opposition in America has been directed against a modernist philosophical tradition that is uniquely the country’s own.  If American conservatives have long demonized unsavory ideas as foreign imports, they have also demonized the country’s own anti-foundational traditions.

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Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation

University of Chicago Press, 2016

What do we want out of America’s schoolchildren? . . . out of America’s creationists?  In Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation, my co-author Harvey Siegel and I tackle these difficult questions head-on.

Harvey and I review the historical and philosophical involved in America’s long culture-war battle over evolution and creationism.  Historically, I argue, creationism (in most of its religiously inspired variants) has worked like other forms of religious and cultural dissent.  Philosophically, Harvey reviews the tricky definition of science, as well as the most common objections to evolution education.

In essence, we argue that the best way to understand creationism is as a form of educational dissent.  By defining creationism that way, we can see some directions in which classroom policy should go.

Most important, we argue that the proper aims of public-school evolution education should be to inculcate a knowledge and understanding of evolution.  No creationist-friendly variants should be allowed in science classes as science.  But dissenting students must be allowed and even encouraged to maintain their dissent.  We can’t insist that students believe this or that about evolution.  Not in public schools, anyway.  We must insist, however, that students know and understand that evolution is the best scientific explanation of the ways life came to be on this planet.

Among the tricky questions raised by our book are these:

1.) Is “belief” an inherent part of good evolution education?  That is, should children in public schools be encouraged not only to know and understand certain facts about evolution, but to believe that evolution is really the best way to understand the roots of our species’ existence?

2.) Does it water down evolution education to allow dissenters to maintain their dissent, even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence?

3.) From creationists’ perspectives, is it too much to agree that mainstream evolution science really is the best science?  Will creationists agree that their ideas are more religiously inspired belief than legitimate scientific dissent?

4.) Can teachers in the real world walk this line between teaching facts about evolution and teaching belief in evolution?

What do people think?  Early experts have given us some nice blurbs:

Glenn Branch, deputy director, National Center for Science Education