A fundamentalist Christian who dismisses evolution as “just a theory” has persuaded a Pennsylvania school board to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design” in high school science classes, to “balance” lessons on evolution:
When talk at the high school here turns to evolution, biology teachers have to make time for Charles Darwin as well as his detractors. With a vote last month, the school board in rural south-central Pennsylvania community is believed to have become the first in the nation to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design,” which holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by an unspecified higher power.
Critics call the change in the ninth-grade biology curriculum a veiled attempt to require public schoolchildren to learn creationism, a biblical-based view that credits the origin of species to God. Schools typically teach evolution, the theory that Earth is billions of years old and that life forms developed over millions of years.
The state American Civil Liberties Union chapter is reviewing the Dover Area School District case. Its Georgia counterpart, meanwhile, is fighting a suburban Atlanta district’s decision to include a warning sticker in biology textbooks that says evolution is “a theory, not a fact.”
“What Dover has done goes much further than what’s happened in Georgia,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the Pennsylvania ACLU. “As far as we can tell, Dover is the first school district that has actually mandated intelligent design.”
The district enrolls about 2,800 students. It encompasses the small, rural community of Dover borough, about 20 miles south of Harrisburg, and a patchwork of farmland and newer suburban developments in several surrounding townships.
The revision was spearheaded by school board member William Buckingham, who heads the board’s curriculum committee.
“I think it’s a downright fraud to perpetrate on the students of this district, to portray one theory over and over,” said Buckingham. “What we wanted was a balanced presentation.”
Buckingham wanted the board to adopt an intelligent-design textbook, “Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins,” as a supplement to the traditional biology book, but no vote was ever taken. A few weeks before the new science curriculum was approved, 50 copies were anonymously donated to the high school.
Although Buckingham describes himself as a born-again Christian and believes in creationism, “This is not an attempt to impose my views on anyone else,” he said.
Two of the dissenting board members, Carol Brown and her husband, Jeff, were so upset that they resigned after the 6-3 vote on Oct. 18.
“We have a vocal group within the community who feel very strongly in an evangelical Christian way that there is no separation of church and state,” Carol Brown said. “Our responsibility to is to represent the viewpoints of all members of the community.”
If this becomes a trend, expect to see a whole new crop of home-schooling parents: those who want to ensure their children receive a reality-based education, rather than thinly veiled religious indoctrination.