/ 14 April 2006

Teaching the science of life

As far as the South African schools’ curriculum is concerned, life evolved, it was not designed.

The topics it covers include the Africa-cradle-of-mankind thesis, which reflects a widespread scientific consensus, and which is also likely to enjoy popular appeal in Africa, and population genetics, which demonstrates the potential that science has to discredit irrational racial prejudice.

But the curriculum still leaves a back door open for creationism to find a way into the classroom.

Mike Schramm, a publishing manager at Nasou Via Afrika, one of the country’s largest school-book publishing companies says: ”Evolution is given a great deal of prominence in the grade 12 life sciences curriculum. The subtext is definitely that evolution is the prevailing view.

”Compulsory topics include origin of species, theories of evolution, natural selection and so on.

”In the lower grades the term ‘evolution’ does not appear anywhere in the curriculum, and neither does ‘creation’, but the concepts of natural selection and variation — two key concepts that underpin evolution — are included.”

But the back door is opened by the constructivist educational paradigm that informs the new curriculum.

”Another compulsory topic,” Schramm says, ”is ‘beliefs about creation and evolution’.

”Learners are expected to understand that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is not only changeable, but discovered or c-reated within a context of human belief systems, and this is the place where teachers would typically deal with the evolution and creation debate.

”The curriculum expects an outcome within which learners understand such a context and how new ideas develop, and are adequately prepared to investigate and to debate the relationship of scientific discovery and that broader societal context within which it is made.”

But is such an outcome quite so open-ended — and open-minded — as might at first blush appear to be the case?

Writes Madelaine Bunting in a recent article on evolution and science in The Guardian: ”… some debates are not worth having. No one argues that it’s a useful project for year 10s to research -flat-Earth theories, so why intelligent design? … Some debates are so -corrupted by prejudice and ignorance that they are also not worth having.”

But Schramm holds his ground. ”The curriculum has made a vast positive leap not only by including evolution in the way it has, but by dealing with the nature of knowledge construction and development.

”It is important to have opportunities to explore contrasting viewpoints, such as those of -creationists — -probably most teachers and learners — and evolutionists.

”If we do not treat the subject in this way we run the danger that teachers will not deal with the topic of evolutionary change at all. There are plenty of examples of teachers subverting uncomfortable curriculum change in this way.”

Some publishers feel there is a need for sensitivity in the presentation of scientific claims to learners committed to a religious faith.

It is true that the majority of learners in South Africa will come from households within which a religion is practised.

But when ought the need for such a sensitivity to give way to a robust sense of commitment by scientists, by curriculum planners and by the writers of scientific textbooks to an epistemology based on evidentiary truth and scientific procedure, and the displacement of myth and belief from the science classroom to wherever else they might more comfortably reside in a school curriculum?

Claims to racial superiority or gender privilege — in many instances supported by religious belief — self-evidently have no place in any curriculum, nor any right to representation in any kind of classroom debate.

Even the most painfully fair-minded historians writing for the classroom would not be able to write about historical racial segregation in South Africa without visibly signposting their own rejection of such attitudes.

”We are making a show of being even-handed to so-called competing theories,” says Colleen Dawson, a school science textbook writer responsible for writing on the new curriculum for Heinemann Publishers. ”But it is a very selective even-handedness.

”If we are happy to use the impeccable science of the genome project to dispel theories of racial superiority, we ought to be equally happy to use the similarly impeccable science of Darwinian evolution to dispel creationism.

”Our learners need to understand that scientific discoveries that advance our understanding of life are sometimes irreducible to a context of any sort whatsoever, and they also need to be able to differentiate between a scientific theory and a religious belief.”

When we concede the legitimacy of a debate, we concede that there are two sides to an argument that both deserve hearing.

Whether there are two such sides in the confrontation between evolutionists and creationists is a human judgement of some weight.

A lot hangs on the sense of responsibility, the courage and the skills of publishers to make the right judgement call.