Fully one-fourth of science teachers are teaching creationism or intelligent design in U.S. classrooms, according to a recent survey:
US COURTS have repeatedly decreed that creationism and intelligent design are religion, not science, and have no place in school science classes. Try telling that to American high-school teachers – 1 in 8 teach the ideas as valid science, according to the first national survey on the subject.
Michael Berkman, a political scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, and his colleagues found that 2 per cent of 939 science teachers who responded said they did not teach evolution. A quarter reported teaching about creationism or intelligent design, and of these, nearly half – about 1 in 8 of the total survey – said they taught it as a “valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species” . . .
Sixteen per cent of the total said they believed human beings had been created by God within the past 10,000 years. The teachers who subscribed to these creationist views, perhaps not surprisingly, spent 35 per cent fewer hours teaching evolution than educators with more scientific views, the researchers found.
Read it all here. The full report can be read for free here.