Is there anything left to be said about the vote on Aug. 12 by six members of the Kansas State Board of Education to lobotomize K-12 science education in the name of literal biblical creationism? Here are two observations and a possible solution.
OBSERVATION 1: It's not just about evolution. The purging of evolution from the science standards hogged the headlines as the defining educational and emotional issue. But the new standards gut the rest of science as well. The first casualty is the geological history of Kansas.
As reported in the Journal-World, publishers of a new Kansas history textbook deleted the chapter on the state's geology and paleontology in response to the new science standards. Banished from Kansas are its rocks and fossils -- for example, the world famous chalk beds in western Kansas, a graveyard of fossil plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs and fish that swam in the great inland sea that covered Kansas 80 million years ago. Goodbye, rock chalk, Jayhawk.
The new science standards were influenced by the Creation Science Association for Mid-America in Missouri and its president, Tom Willis. His contributions, according to the Journal-World, reflect an Earth formed in six days and no older than 10,000 years of biblical begats. Anything older than 10,000 years is now apparently heretical to the teaching of science in Kansas.
The implications for Kansas students are chilling. How well will they understand astronomy without reference to the Big Bang birth of this universe 14 billion years ago? How well will they understand chemistry without learning that radioactive elements such as Uranium-238, Rubidium-87 and Potassium-40 are natural clocks, steadily ticking off atoms that date the rocks on Earth and moon in the thousands, millions and billions of years?
In a time-challenged curriculum, how well will Kansas students grasp oil exploration? Or the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth documented by millions of fossil bacteria, plants and animals in museums worldwide? Or Earth's continental plates drifting at half an inch a year for the past 200 million years to create the Atlantic, the Pacific, Hawaii, the Rockies, the Alps, the San Andreas Fault and the recent tragic earthquake in Turkey?
And how well will they master anthropology and the skulls, bones and stones that tell the 5-million-year genealogy of Homo sapiens -- a recent Time magazine cover story.
One answer is provided by Willis. According to the Journal-World, he would have Kansas 12th-graders learn that the Grand Canyon was gouged out in a few hours by a Mount St. Helen's-type of volcanic eruption. It apparently doesn't matter that every river gorge on Earth has been carved by a river. Or that there is massive geological evidence for 8 million years of downcutting and erosion by the Colorado River through Arizona's stacked layers of rock. Welcome to non-heretical science.
OBSERVATION 2. The Kansas economy: No sooner had the six board members voted to cleanse science education than a software firm from Oregon announced it would not open a research and development shop in Kansas. Can you blame them? Employers -- especially high-technology firms -- want to recruit employees with a first-rate science education, and employees want a first-rate science education for their children. The vote to dumb down science sent a message that the Kansas curriculum will be good for neither.
Kansas may reap in economics what it has sown in education. Reactions of corporations and venture capitalists have led to worries that investments in Kansas may shrivel, at least in the near term. When it comes to economic development, impression and confidence are everything. Kansas' new reputation for yokel science will give corporate and private investors long pause before sending companies, jobs and dollars to the state. According to Kansas historian Robert Bader, the board vote "enhances the hayseed or backward image of Kansas as a place that used to be important but isn't anymore." And hayseed reputations, deserved or not, die hard. After 75 years, Tennessee is still tainted by the Scopes trial.
Kansas, of course, is neither backward nor hayseed, notwithstanding the misguided vote of six members of its board of education. Other states have their fair share of embarrassments. The Kansas University Natural History Museum and its associated academic departments are hailed as being among the best in the nation in evolutionary biology -- one of the ironies of the board vote. Across the state, communities and institutions can herald similar excellence in science, the humanities, the arts, education, agriculture, industry, philanthropy, political life and athletics. The task now is not to allow the vote of six board members to tar the entire state.
SOLUTIONS: One obvious solution is the ballot box. A representative democracy is only as good as its elected representatives and the participation of the electorate.
A more immediate solution is to circumvent the six board members by demanding and providing the best for every Kansas student. The best, in this case, is the real science curriculum produced by the board's 27-member committee of scientists and teachers. It reflects comprehensive national standards established by the nation's premier scientific organizations and is available in print or on the Internet.
What if every school district, school board and science teacher demanded the best? What if they chose to implement the committee's real science standards in every school and science classroom? What if students came prepared to answer questions on evolution and the Big Bang that will not appear on assessment tests but will prepare them for life, university and career? It would tell the nation that Kansans cherish an enlightened education in an enlightened state. Parents, students -- all Kansans -- should demand it.
-- Leonard Krishtalka is director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center.
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