Miramar Florida:

 
“Oscar Howard Jr., superintendent of Taylor County’s School District, and Danny Lundy, vice chairman of the School Board said, “We’re opposed to teaching evolution as a fact.” Howard added that his School Board and 11 others have passed resolutions against the imposition of evolution in the school curriculum. Lundy warned that evolution would tear the Taylor public schools apart. “The good people back home,” he warned, “would have no choice but to pull their kids out of school.”

 
The debate over what should be taught in public school science classrooms, the theory of evolution or intelligent design, has been bitterly fought with ardent supporters on both sides.

 
Concerns from Social Work

 
1. Integration of Faith and Practice

 
First, schools should respect the personally held beliefs of all those in the classroom. Are the beliefs of the students being respected? Are the beliefs of the teacher simply excused in the school administration’s attempt to avoid a bad incident? In social work, there is a value placed on the integration of faith and practice that disallows the disrespectful and insensitive dismissal of a person’s beliefs, faith, and values.

 
2. Person in Environment & Cognitive Development

 
Consider the school classroom as a setting and what is expected in such a setting. The classroom should be a place of safety and trust. It is most counterproductive for a teacher to “shutdown” a student when they raise the subject of faith. Such rejection can stigmatize the religion and faith of the student. In Gary Wills’ discussion on Church and State, he claims it easier to separate religion from politics than it is to separate morality. It can be argued that personally held beliefs, spiritual and secular alike, comprise much of the normative stability present in the classroom environment. There is an intersection of Piaget’s theory of human development, Fowler’s Faith Stages, and the classroom. It is unreasonable to hold children and adolescents, who are in pre-operational and concrete operational stages of cognitive development, accountable to standards of substantive separation in the classroom; standards which at best are only understood in formal operational or abstract terms. Is government overstretching to try and regulate all “conversations” held between teachers their students?

 
3. Cultural Competency

 
In most public schools, the policy is to allow teachers to engage in conversations about faith so long as the “student initiates the discussion.” Many teachers may be able to respond to a question posed about faith in a perfectly objective manner, however, lack the ability to provide equitable time and instruction to a faith perspective of another student in the class, especially when the student’s faith is varied from the teacher’s own. This inability may be due solely to general ignorance of the issues involved with the student’s faith perspective. A teacher’s ability to competently provide equitable treatment to all faith’s present seems necessary in order to maintain fairness.

 
4. Evidence-Based Practice

 
Finally, schools and parents must consider the value they place on evidence-based teaching practices employed by instructors. The American Institute of Biological Sciences suggests that “the science classroom should be used for the presentation of scientific methods and theories. Science is the acquisition of new knowledge based upon observations, hypotheses, experimentation and the study of physical evidence and is based on the fundamental assumption that observations of the physical world can be explained by natural causes.”

 
We remember from 5^th grade science that the purpose of the scientific method is to design experimental studies with repeatable steps with predictable results, thus proving or disproving proposed hypotheses. The other purpose of 5^th grade science is, of course, the vital and valued skill of designing three-sided poster board with decorative stenciled lettering.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the federal courts determined that the teaching of intelligent design was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The court went on to rule that intelligent design, at least as posited at the present time, is not science. Evolution, however, has stood the test of scientific exploration and testing.

This is not to say that proponents of intelligent design should not continue to fight for its veracity and inclusion in the science class. But just as Alfred Wegener rebuffed his critics by scientifically proving the theory of continental drift, so should the science of intelligent design be explored and tested. However, until it is found to be proven in theory, it should not be included in the classroom. Never missing a learning opportunity, the exclusion of intelligent design from being taught in theory in a public school classroom is an example for the virtue of the pursuit of truth.

Proposed interventions

Ultimately, when a student feels strongly that their faith is not being integrated, or in some way is in dissonance with the classroom material, there is most likely a learning opportunity present that should not be stifled. Unfortunately, previous harsh treatment of faith in public schools may discourage a teacher from taking advantage of the learning opportunity.

Change made to the Education Code:

A provision that would provide protection for (1) the school system and personnel who wish to foster a student’s learning; (2) the personally held beliefs and faith of the student; (3) and the right to religious freedom in the classroom for all the students and teachers in a class.

A possible protocol could be:

1. Student raises a question regarding the integration of faith into the scientific theory being taught.
2. Teacher recognizes question and DOES OR DOES NOT offer objective summation of the positions held by proponents of the faith perspective. This decision must be made by the instructor based upon their ability to competently engage the entire class and display sensitivity to each member of the class.
3. Teacher refers students with deeper questions and concerns regarding the integration of faith perspectives into scientific theory taught in class to school social worker or counselor.
4. Under the protection of licensed social work practice, student can explore own personal beliefs and feelings with social worker.
5. Social worker and student should make a plan to discuss student’s concerns with parent or guardian. If a student feels strongly that their faith is not being integrated, or in some way is in dissonance with classroom material, this is a learning opportunity most likely due to active parenting in the home environment. – strengths perspective

Additional thoughts

Mark Noll (1994) has written a rather stark appraisal of the impact Evangelical America has made on the last century.

            “Creation science has damaged Evangelicalism by making it much more difficult to think clearly about human origins, the age of the earth, and the mechanisms of geological or biological change. But it has done more profound damage by undermining the ability to look at the world God has made and to understand what we see when we do look. Fundamentalist habits of mind have been more destructive than individual creationist conclusions. Because those habits of mind are compounded of unreflecting aspects of nineteenth-century procedure alongside tendentious aspects of fundamentalist ideology, they have done serious damage to Christian thinking.”

If this is true, it is at least some consolation that we can instill a value for the pursuit of truth by insisting that intelligent design be excluded from the classroom until such time as it can reach the merit of scientific rigor that the theory of evolution has attained.