The Onion October 2005
There’s another of those scary science stories in today’s NYTimes: Split Outcome in Texas Battle in Teaching Evolution.
The real scary part is such ignorance is still alive and kicking, and not just in Texas.
And when it comes to textbooks – as Texas goes, there goes the nation.
Meanwhile next month we celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth.
I’ve been dipping into some of Darwins letters and notebooks describing his earliest memories, his experiences aboard the Beagle and his adventures in South America
They are all available here The Complete Works of Charles Darwin.
Fascinating.
Darwin thought that his friendship with his professor John Henslow was the most important and influential of his life. Henslow, a botanist, was a very popular professor at Cambridge. Quoting from the web site http://darwin.gruts.com/:
Henslow’s popularity as a teacher was due largely to his progressive teaching techniques, which relied heavily on field- and garden-work, and on encouraging his students to make observations of their own, rather than simply having them spoon-fed….
We’ll never know if Darwin would have developed the concept of natural selection as a major force of evolution without Henslow’s influence. But, Darwin’s acknowledgment of his professor’s influence certainly serves as a reminder that how we teach is as important as what we teach.