Steve Brown, a Las Vegas masonry contractor, has filed an initiative petition proposing a constitutional amendment that would require Nevada teachers to tell their students that questions remain about the theory of evolution.
Mr. Brown, who has three school-age children, admits he has no organization to help him gather the 83,184 signatures he would need to acquire by June 20 to get his proposal on the November ballot. (To amend Nevada's Constitution, he'd have to win voter approval this year and again in 2008.) Instead, Mr. Brown says he's seeking volunteers.
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"I just want them to start telling the truth about evolution," Mr. Brown explains. "Evolution has occurred, but parts of it are flat-out unproven theories. They're not telling students that in school."
The petition says students must be informed before the end of the 10th grade that "although most scientists agree that Darwin's theory of evolution is well supported, a small minority of scientists do not agree." The proposal says several "areas of disagreement" would have to be covered by teachers, including the view by some scientists that "it is mathematically impossible for the first cell to have evolved by itself."
Students also would have to be told some scientists argue "that nowhere in the fossil record is there an indisputable skeleton of a transitional species, or a 'missing link.' " And Mr. Brown would require that students "must be informed that the origin of sex, or sex drive, is one of biology's mysteries."
Mind you, this would all be carved in stone as a constitutional amendment.
Mr. Brown is hardly as "over the top" as some of his companions in evolutionary skepticism. But placing a requirement in law that children be taught something is "mathematically impossible" brings to mind the short-lived attempt of the lower house of the Indiana Legislature, in 1897, to simplify the task of Indiana schoolchildren attempting to solve for the area of a circle by enacting a statute declaring that pi should equal 3.2, precisely.
Ongoing squabbles over evolution in certain pockets of the country are a predictable outcome of the domination of American primary and secondary education by tax-funded schools. State schools fall naturally into teaching a standardized curriculum, and some parents will inevitably object to some part of that standardized subject matter.
But the United States has done amazingly well in avoiding religious strife by keeping religious teaching separate from law, thanks to a federal Constitution that bars government from imposing the doctrines of any one religion. We would run an enormous risk in tampering with such success by turning that tradition on its head, setting a precedent for micromanagement by imposing what amounts to religious views via lengthening chains of warring constitutional amendments.
Will history find that everything being taught in our schools today is 100 percent correct? Of course not. Science is an ever-evolving field. Just as no medical school today would teach the old doctrine of the "four humours," so will the scientific understanding of today doubtless be demonstrated to be incomplete, and in some cases, just plain wrong.
But we must teach science as best we know it, in order to train succeeding generations of chemists, doctors and engineers. And despite the word games that allow a fundamentalist minority to insist that "evolution is just a theory," it is a scientific "theory" that has been vetted and refined over more than a century.
Religious believers who take exception to the teachings of the public schools are free to home-school their children or to send them to private academies that inculcate any doctrine they please. Should tax credits or some other form of relief be found to make such alternative schooling more affordable for those who otherwise find themselves "paying twice" to support public schools they neither endorse nor use? Sure. But that's a separate issue.
The question here is whether the need for "curriculum reform" has reached such a state of clear and present public crisis that we now need to micromanage our classroom teachers through the vastly unwieldy process of constitutional amendment.
