Creation in the classroom – what are you afraid of?

I had the good fortune, as a student, to be taught by an outstanding historian. He taught me various skills that have proved useful, not least the ability to walk around an idea and consider it from every possible angle before forming an opinion. He also possessed a handy store of aphorisms, one of which was a warning never to embrace an ism. An ism, he argued, is nothing more than a dogma derived from an otherwise interesting idea; in the words of the poet Peter Viereck, ‘Formalism, by being an ism, kills form by hugging it to death.’

My history teacher would have been horrified at the veritable deluge of isms that currently threaten to drown the formation of reasoned opinion – creationism, Darwinism, secularism, humanism, atheism, fundamentalism, extremism, consumerism, materialism and naturalism, to name but a few.

Of these, creationism currently provokes the most heated arguments – in a recent poll 89% of teachers said that creationism should never feature in the classroom. This  banning brigade bothers me, for a number of reasons.  All three mono-theistic religions believe in a Creator God and Seikh, Hindu and Buddhist religions all attribute the beginning of everything to a god. So, if all major world religions share a common belief about the world’s origin, and those religions pre-date the emergence of science as a discipline, teachers have a duty to introduce these concepts to children, regardless of any personal view of their validity. It is not, and never should be, the role of any teacher to ban something with which they personally disagree when it forms part of the canon of human knowledge.  What, I wonder, are they afraid of?

Other questions emerge from this irrational desire for prohibition. For example, what are the criteria for a ban? Who defines them? One commentator suggested sarcastically that perhaps we should return to teaching that the Earth is flat. Well, guess what. I do just that. Oh, and also that the Earth is a spheroid. It doesn’t take students long to examine the evidence for both views and work out which one is accurate. But what it also does is provoke fascinating discussions: How did we discover that the Earth is spheroid? Why did people believe that it was flat? And the killer question after I’ve introduced pupils to the Flat Earth Society: So why do some people still believe that the Earth is flat when the evidence proves them wrong? The outcome of that discussion is usually that people are free to believe whatever they want, even when flying in the face of conclusive evidence. Belief, as pupils seem to understand better than many of the adults that teach them, is a personal matter and in a democratic society that prides itself on tolerance, people should be able to believe whatever they choose to believe. Pupils aren’t afraid to encounter ideas with which they might disagree, so what are so many teachers and scientists afraid of?

The fulcrum of the argument seems to be that discussing creation, even in RE, indoctrinates students, a view presented by Professor Alice Roberts as she commenced her tenure as President of the Association for Science Education. Well, anyone who thinks that you can make a student believe whatever you want them to believe needs to spend more time with students – they have minds of their own which they know how to use.  I hold a political view that is at variance with roughly half of the country in which I live. That doesn’t impair my ability to facilitate learning across the political spectrum or to respect the right of anyone, even a right wing extremist, to hold and express a different view. What holds good in the political sphere should also hold good in the religious sphere. So what is there to be afraid of?

It is now against the law to teach creationism in any publicly funded UK school or nursery – to do so is to be guilty of extremism which can lead to funding withdrawal. The creation ‘myth’ can still be taught as part of Religious Education; as long as it is made clear that there is no scientific validity to said ‘myth’. The problem is, people’s minds don’t work in synthetic subject compartments. Nor do they willingly comply with false dualisms. You can’t divide knowledge up into little packages, some labelled ‘fact’ and some labelled ‘fiction’ at the behest of one group of people in society, then tell everyone else that this is how they have to think. Science deals with the physical world of empirical evidence and knowledge. Religion deals with the metaphysical world of faith and belief. One cannot be used to prove or disprove the other – they are two sides of the same coin and students are entitled to consider both. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out in The Great Partnership, the task of science is to take things apart to see how they work and the task of religion is to put things together to see what they mean. Science is concerned with ‘how’. Religion is concerned with ‘why’.  So what are you afraid of?

When they were at school, my children encountered all kinds of ideas and beliefs that contradicted the faith in which they were growing up. Instead of banning contrary ideas, we discussed them, we looked at them from every angle, then I left my children to make up their own minds. The outcome was that they knew not just what they believed, but also why they believed it. Considering ideas which they later rejected honed their ability to think. In my experience, dialectic outweighs prohibition every time:  allowing the free and open discussion of any belief (even a dangerous one) is much the best way to achieve balance. Prohibition of knowledge is a sure route to ignorance and bigotry. Now that really is something of which to be afraid. Very afraid.

If you wish to comment, please do so on the central tenet of this blog, which is that students should be allowed to consider all aspects of human knowledge, even those with which you might personally disagree. Please do not use the comment facility to provoke arguments for and against creation, evolution, intelligent design or young earth creation. That is not the point of this blog – please respect it.