Evolution is college-level material, at best. Teaching it to kids is malpractice. It's like teach calculus to kindergartners. Besides, how is evolution going to help students live better lives? They'd get more out of calculus.
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Evolution is college-level material, at best. Teaching it to kids is malpractice.
Besides, how is evolution going to help students live better lives?
EDIT:
he education system as a whole is the image of waste. Very little of it is the result of someone asking "how is this going to help students live better lives?". Most of it comes from either "how is this going to make more people agree with me?" or nebulous mumbo-jumbo completely detached from reality like "we need a culture of well-rounded individuals". "Don't teach them more than you absolutely have to!"
It's a lot easier to learn evolution if your head is not filled with lies that contradict the science. I don't think there's any religious movement to redefine mathematics, so it doesn't face the same handicap. Evolution is perfectly easy for a fourth-grader to understand, but like any subject, there is plenty more college-level stuff to learn eventually.
Basics, like heritable traits, are easy enough to teach in the 2nd or 3rd grade. Middle school you learn the mechanisms, by high school you can pretty much understand evolution without needing a textbook.
Modern education is built on steps: you teach basic arithmetic, then algebra, then geometry, then trigonometry, then calculus. It’s a process. Saying “wait until college” undermines the entire way education functions.
You know that the whole idea of evolution has subtly influenced not only biology but also informatics, medicine and even society as a whole? It's the most improtant underlying principle of life as we know it and understanding it has so many possible uses that we are barely scratching the surface right now. It also influences how we look at the world at large, which of course is what you really care about, since it doesn't mesh with your own preconceptions.
Also, by moving it to college you are excluding everyone from this knowledge who doesn't go to college. Just admit that you want to keep nonacademics uninformed as to better manipulate them.
Teaching cretinism to kids is what's malpractice; it's keeping them stupid and ignorant.
They need both calculus and basic biology to get on in life.
Biology, including evolution, is helping students to stay alive AND to live better lives, with the production of vaccines, medical procedures, medications, nutritional tips, etc.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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