“Busy year in the statehouses” for fending off science denial
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8210
Two committees of the Idaho state legislature (capitol building seen here) voted to temporarily omit climate change from school science standards.
JSquish, CC BY-SA 3.0
“We live in a golden age of ignorance,” declares Stanford University historian of science Robert Proctor , who studies how ignorance gets produced. He and others call that research field agnotology . It’s regularly associated with study of efforts to spread doubt about tobacco’s dangers or anthropogenic climate change. Lately, though, media reports have been suggesting a heightened agnotological dimension to science-policy discussions and decisions in US state legislatures.
State lawmakers aren’t passing every science-ignorant law or resolution that appears, and some measures remain in this or that stage of the legislative process. But within that process, legislators have been expending lots of energy. A 9 March editorial in Nature summarized the problem:
Last week, state legislators in Iowa introduced a bill that would require teachers in state public schools to include “opposing points of view or beliefs” in lessons on topics including global warming, evolution and the origins of life. It’s the latest in a surge of what advocacy group the National Center for Science Education calls “antiscience” bills introduced in US state houses in recent weeks.
Since last month, Indiana, Idaho, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma and Florida have all introduced and discussed similar tweaks to the way in which they want to educate their children.
The Washington Post reports that in the last three years, “at least 60 ‘academic freedom’ bills—which permit teachers to paint established science as controversial—have been filed in state legislatures.” In February, Ars Technica predicted “a busy year in the statehouses” for science education. Ars detected “a large collection of state bills that seek to protect educators from what has been termed ‘teaching the controversy.’” If the bills were to pass, “teachers would be immune to punishment for using outside material in instruction, as long as the teacher believes the material is scientific—even if it has overtly religious origins.”
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE), in Oakland, California, says a measure under consideration in the Oklahoma senate “would empower science denial in the classroom.” Ars Technica says the measure “follows the script” being written in other states: “the State Board of Education, school district boards of education, school district superintendents, and school principals” would all be “forbidden from disciplining teachers who critique the ‘strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories.’” This means that “even if teachers spout pseudoscientific nonsense, if it’s phrased as a scientific critique, nobody would be allowed to stop them.”
A February news report in South Dakota shared that legislators there had “defeated a bill that would have allowed teachers to address strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories like evolution and climate change.” The bill’s supporters were “Republican lawmakers, anti-Common Core groups, conservative advocacy groups and concerned parents.” They argued that the measure would let teachers “explain potential flaws in theories like evolution and climate change.”
The Idaho Statesman reported later that month that in a temporary decision, that state’s legislature had approved school science standards that omit climate change . A permanent decision is scheduled for next year. Concerning the existence of a human impact on climate, legislators reportedly see more than one side and therefore seek “more balance” in the standards . The newspaper quoted the NCSE’s Glenn Branch: “I can confidently say that in no other state has the legislature taken it upon itself to engage in such a wholesale deletion of content about climate change from a proposed set of state science standards.” Earlier in February, the Statesman had reported that House Assistant Minority Leader Ilana Rubel, Democrat of Boise, had “blasted” a legislative committee’s decision “for suppressing facts.” In a prepared statement, she said: “Not only do we owe it to our children to teach them 21st century science, but we owe it to the farmers, foresters and citizens of Idaho to take this issue seriously and not bury our heads in the sand.”
A 3 March news article in Miami, Florida, described a proposed state law that would empower curriculum critics to force protests to be considered in formal review processes. The legislation would also mandate, ambiguously, that instructional materials “provide a noninflammatory, objective, and balanced viewpoint on issues.” Opponents of science ignorance reportedly see in it a threat of classroom promotion of doubts about human-caused climate change and evolution. NCSE agrees .
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported on 7 March that the state school board had approved a standards change that, by reminding teachers that they may use “supplemental materials,” encourages them to “challenge evolution.” This was a concession to the antievolution faction’s insistence on “teaching the controversy.”
At the Washington, DC, political publication The Hill, the 27 January article “New wave of anti-evolution bills hit states” quoted Branch about the antievolutionists’ political tactics: “They’re no longer trying to ban teaching evolution. They’re no longer trying to balance teaching evolution. They’re now trying to belittle evolution.” The article adds this:
Proponents of the measures say they do not allow teachers to inject religion into science classes. Model bills make clear that teachers are to question theories in an “objective” manner by focusing on “scientific information.”
“Good science is based on critical inquiry, not unthinking dogmatism,” said John West, vice president of the Discovery Institute, a group that advances the idea of intelligent design. “If we want to equip today’s students to be tomorrow’s innovators, we need to teach them how to be out of the box thinkers who know how to sift and analyze competing explanations in light of the evidence.”
Science groups worry that the new measures will be more difficult to challenge in court.
In late February, Fusion published Rebecca Boyle’s article that also appeared at Grist under the headline “States are trying to bring science denial to the classroom” and at Mother Jones under the headline “American kids are about to get even dumber when it comes to climate science.” Boyle observed that “bills percolating through state legislatures across the US are giving the education fight a new flavor, by encompassing climate change denial and serving it up as academic freedom.” She reported Branch’s judgment that denial of the human cause of climate change aids the antievolution cause. She added,
Science defenders like the NCSE say science denial has three pillars: That the science is uncertain; that its acceptance would have bad moral and social consequences; and that it’s only fair to present all sides. All three are at work in the latest efforts to attack state and federal education standards on science education, Branch said.
According to a survey published last year, this strategy is already making headway. The survey , in the journal Science, found that three-fourths of science teachers spend time on climate change instruction. But of those teachers, 30% tell their students that it is “likely due to natural causes,” while another 31% teach that the science is unsettled.
Can such a media report as this one end without mentioning the agnotological elephant in the room?
No.
At Fusion, editors gave Boyle’s article the headline “Politicians are fast learning how to bring climate denial into the classroom under Trump.”
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.