i can't imagine

learning anything OTHER than evolution. it's shocking to me to think this country is SO backwards (in some places and/or states) that some have to be mandated to teach the truth of natural selection. there is infinitely MORE proof we did not ride on the backs of dinosaurs, the earth and it's inhabitants evolved over millions of years than us only being around a few thousand years.

i'd also like to give a shout out to teachers like david campbell. he taught the truth even before it was mandated. he taught the truth even though parents complained. he taught the truth even though he couldn't always teach the WHOLE truth. even now he has to watch his p's and q's on how and what he says.

if you want your kids NOT to have a proper education, that's fine by me. haul them out of public school and either home school them OR send them to private school. then you can teach them all the fables you wish with MY PERSONAL BLESSING

A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash

By AMY HARMON

ORANGE PARK, Fla. — David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.

“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.

Some come armed with “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document circulated on the Internet that highlights supposed weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Others scrawl their opposition on homework assignments. Many just tune out...........