Humans evolved from monkeys.

Ask you students if the above is true. Poll the kids vote anonymously. Heck, ask other teachers in your building.

Human blood in veins is blue.

Here's the trick--I can "teach" them otherwise, but as soon as I lean down to tie my shoe or take a moment to blow my nose, the kids go right back to their previous beliefs.

We all do.

Trees get most of their mass from soil.

Teaching "facts" wastes time--my students have been trained, trained by us, to be credulous. Many, alas, believe anything I say.

Humans are more evolved than earthworms.

We live in a fantasy world. We lie to our kids. We reward them for parroting our lies. And then a few of them wake up and don't believe anything we say. Not good, either.

***

A good chunk of American do not "believe in" evolution. I do not "believe in" it--it's not a belief system--but I embrace it as the core of biology.

Darwin did not come up with evolution--the concept is much older than him. Darwin realized, however, that natural selection could by itself explain the great diversity of life on Earth. No guiding intelligence is needed.

Just about every shred of evidence examined since Darwin's On the Origin of Species strengthens his underlying thesis.

In a 2007 Gallup Poll, over 60% of Americans agreed that it is "definitely" or "probably true...that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."

Sigh.

***

Here's a problem, a big problem--just about all of my kids are passing tests on evolution. A good chunk do not accept it but pass anyway. I'm not worried about their beliefs, really not my business. My business is teaching kids how to think.

I am very concerned about a system that rewards kids for spouting off what they themselves consider to be nonsense. We need to come up with a way to assess children as they wrestle with evidence, children who were told less than a decade before that Santa Claus exists.

Until we do, however, we'll continue to produce kids who believe in astrology, who blindly follow leaders who lie, and who put this Great Experiment, our republic, at risk.

The Darwin cartoon is old enough to be in the public domain.
Every bold blue statement is false. Really.