The point is that if a high school offers n biology courses, one in ninth grade and one or more in later grades, the sum total of all the material in the courses will have the effect of preparing the student for college-level biology. As long as all the material gets covered before the student leaves high school, the student will be ready. And any student, even a fundamentalist, if he/she is thinking of maybe medical school down the line and a biology or biochemistry degree before medical school, will want to stock up on high school biology courses, to be as ready as possible for college biology. So the kind of student who is going to have something professionally to do with the life sciences is going to get evolution in high school whether evolution is taught in ninth grade, or deferred to a higher grade.
So if there are pragmatic reasons for swapping units around, moving some other biology back to ninth grade, and moving the evolution unit forward to an upper grade – and by pragmatic reasons I mean getting a million angry parents off the schools’ back about evolution – I see no reason why such a swap of elements couldn’t be arranged. All the students who have any real interest in the life sciences would still get their evolution instruction before leaving high school, and most of the objections to teaching evolution in the high school would be gone.
Why should a fundamentalist parent care if a school teaches evolution in the upper years if her daughter, who is planning to be a hotel manager or commercial artist, has no interest in biology and isn’t planning to take it again? The only reason the fundamentalist parent cares about evolution in her daughter’s school is that the daughter is made to take science in ninth grade, and science in ninth grade is usually biology (in most jurisdictions, anyway), and if evolution is part of the ninth-grade biology curriculum, her daughter will have to sit in class and be taught that evolution from a primordial blob of slime to man is a fact as certain as the law of gravity. But if her daughter can get through the science requirement without learning evolution, the mother will have no interest in what other students might voluntarily take in upper years. So most of the opposition would dissolve.
90% of the fight in the country is over a two- or three-week unit in one science course, in one grade. And it’s absurd that millions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and volumes of rage and abuse, should be generated by one tiny component of the overall science curriculum, which in turn is only one component of the whole high school program. Every single statement taught in ninth-grade biology about evolution today could be taught almost without resistance in eleventh- or twelfth-grade biology, and this would reduce the culture war over evolution in the schools to a pale shadow of its current self. So I’m simply making a very practical suggestion.
Of course, there are some who will say, “It’s important that even those students who will never take another science course in their lives, and will be involved in walks of life that require no scientific training, are taught that evolution from a primordial blob to man is as certain as the law of gravity, and by gosh, we’re going to make them all learn it, whether they or their parents like it or not!” Well, if that’s the attitude, then the culture war over evolution in the schools will never end, because millions of Americans will react against being bullied into submission in that way. So the question is: How badly does one want the culture war over evolution in the schools to end?
