Skepticizing Ourselves to Death

It's fairly well documented by now that the United States is falling behind other nations in the quantity and quality of students who get good science education. A cursory Google search turned up this information from Purdue University Provost Sally Mason:

20 years ago, the United States, Japan and China were graduating similar numbers of engineers, and each was producing twice the total coming out of South Korea.

By 2000, Chinese engineering graduates had increased 161 percent, Japanese graduates had increased 42 percent and South Korean graduates had increased 140 percent while U.S. engineering graduates had declined 20 percent.

"Today, we have lapsed and lapsed dramatically in a remarkably short period of time," Mason said, a professor of biology. "Our middle and high school students are unprepared in math and science and, correspondingly, uninterested in these careers."

India, the largest English-speaking nation in the world, is by conservative estimates producing 100,000 engineers a year, while U.S. universities produced about 59,500 in 2000, Mason said.

"It has been predicted that if current trends continue, by 2010 more than 90 percent of all scientists and engineers in the world will live in Asia," Mason said. "That is only four years away."

Usually, blame is assigned to teachers and educational institutions, which is fair and even useful as a program for trying to keep up.

But it's the students, too. Sometimes they would rather be scientific ignoramuses:

Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.

As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection — in a word, by evolution.

The challenges begin at once.

"Isn't it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?" sophomore Chris Willett demands. " 'Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn't."

Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but Willett isn't listening. "I feel a tail growing!" he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.

Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He's about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: "How are you 100% sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could just be some deformed raccoon."

From the back of the room, sophomore Melissa Brooks chimes in: "Those are real bones that someone actually found? You're not just making this up?"

"No, I am not just making it up," Frisby says.

At least half the students in this class of 14 don't believe him, though, and they're not about to let him off easy.

Two decades of political and legal maneuvering on evolution has spilled over into public schools, and biology teachers are struggling to respond. Loyal to the accounts they've learned in church, students are taking it upon themselves to wedge creationism into the classroom, sometimes with snide comments but also with sophisticated questions — and a fervent faith.

I'm going to laugh long and hard when, in pursuit of strengthening our nation's moral fiber, our homegrown zealots Christianize America so totally that we can't do science or math.