On the battle for academic freedom.

In Science Education, Academic Freedom Makes Progress Across America
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

In a new ID the Future podcast, Sarah Chaffee surveys progress across the United States in enacting academic freedom (AF) legislation. Despite energetic disinformation campaigns by Darwin-only propagandists, the truth about the value of teaching critical thinking in science class is appreciated by more and more legislators, educators, and activists. Download the episode here, or listen to it here.

Miss Chaffee spoke to AF proponents in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas. Her interviewees stress the importance of “refraining from prohibiting teachers” from challenging their students with “more science not less,” of protecting educators from frivolous lawsuits and other career penalties, because “students have a right to know that there are a lot of deep questions here.”

Biologist Ray Bohlin, on the ground in Texas, makes a great point. Everyone always repeats the mantra about how “We need more scientists, We need more scientists, We need more scientists…” And that is true. But what about those students who can’t shake the intuition that life exceeds what Darwinian orthodoxy can explain – as, in fact, many professional scientists are coming to think?

Rather than make fools of those young people and tell them such doubts have no basis in objective science, why not admit the truth – that their insight is being borne out by research, including in mainstream evolutionary biology itself? Admit to them that the question of origins is complex: evolutionary theory has strengths, but also weaknesses.

Surely, in partly confirming what they already sense to be the case, that will have the effect of exciting their curiosity and encouraging them to consider science as a career in their adult lives. And that’s what we all want, says Dr. Bohlin, right?