Creating an educational problem

Where in the course of education information, speculation, analysis or assertion is presented to students, it may be right or it may be wrong – or maybe just debatable. But it will not be right or wrong because legislation tells us so. Therefore it was inappropriate for the Tennessee legislature in 2012 to enact a law that protects the teaching of creationism and teaching that attacks global warming theory. Legislators have no special scientific or general scholarly insight that equips them to declare or indeed debunk received wisdom.

But before we get all indignant and superior about Tennessee, let us look at something closer to home, right now. The Scottish Secular Society has been lobbying politicians to do the reverse of Tennessee, that is to issue guidance to prohibit the teaching of creationism, or as the Society puts it, ‘evolution denial’. Interestingly, this move has been resisted by the trade union Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS).

Law or government action should never entrench a view as being ‘correct as a matter of law’. Whether something is right or wrong should be left to analysis and debate, and nobody should ever be told that a particular perspective, even where this perspective is rejected by society as a whole or parts of it, may not legally be addressed in schools or educational institutions. If today government can prohibit any reference to creationism in education, then tomorrow it could use the law to prohibit the teaching of other matters it considers to be uncomfortable. Truth needs to be discovered and tested, not declared to be truth by state power.

I do not myself regard creationism to be valid science (as distinct from theology), but I trust the teaching profession to handle this appropriately. If the enforced teaching of creationism is wrong (as it undoubtedly is), then so is a legal or governmental order that prohibits any reference to it in schools or colleges. Finding the truth is an intellectual pursuit, not a legal one. The Scottish Secular Society should be robustly resisted in this matter.

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