Jan 052009
From an Ipsos / MORI poll of UK primary and secondary school teachers …
To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “Creationism is completely unsupportable as a theory, and the only reason to mention creationism in schools is to enable teachers to demonstrate why the idea is scientific nonsense and has no basis in evidence or rational thought”?
Agree 26%, Disagree 54% (67% who cite humanities as their subject specialism).
37% of teachers thought that creationism should be “taught” (as opposed to “discussed”) alongside evolution “in science classes”, including 29% of teachers who identified themselves as science teachers.
4 Responses to “Depressing Start To 2009”
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Sounds like something for schools liaison to tackle…
I always thought it was mainly the US that had a creationism problem. Clearly I was wrong.
Extremely depressing! Although the wording of the statement is somewhat aggresive. There are other reasons for teaching creationism, beyond exposing it as “nonsense”. It has cultural, historical and literary interest, you wouldn’t totally dismiss Shakespear just because his geography, but at the same time you wouldn’t teach Shakespear in a geography class.
Telling people they are stupid and their beliefs are crap is not going to win them over, even if its true. We need to be a bit smarter.
Whops!
Tthe above should read “…you wouldn’t totally dismiss Shakespear just because his geography was crap, but…”
I agree that the question is aggressively worded but there were options to ‘strongly agree’ and ‘tend to agree’ which gained 12 and 14 percent respectively. There were far more ‘strongly disagreeing’ (30%).
It’s the over 1 in 4 SCIENCE teachers that think that it should be taught (rather than discussed) in science classes that depresses me the most.