Writing in Scientific American, NCSE's Eugenie C. Scott and Minda Berbeco warn that "a move is afoot to keep climate science out of classrooms." As they note, "objections to the theory of evolution have bedeviled individual teachers, school boards, state boards of education and state legislatures" for decades. Now such objections have been joined by objections to climate change, both in legislation purporting to grant "academic freedom" to teachers to miseducate their students and in resistance to adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards. But "evolution is one of the most important ideas in human intellectual history," and the firm scientific consensus is "[t]hat the planet is warming and that the burning of fossil fuels over the past 150 years explains the current rapid rate of change." Scott and Berbeco conclude, "Beginning learners have a right to know what scientists have concluded. It is not right to allow religious, political or economic ideologies to trump instruction in science."
September 23, 2013