Professor Michael Reiss Misjudged?

Posted on | September 13, 2008 | 4 Comments

Creationism is an absurdity, and anyone who retains, into adulthood, a belief in the creationist fable as an explanation for life, the universe and everything must be considered gullible and irrational.

And, as Ben Goldacre writes in his book Bad Science (derived from his brilliant Guardian column and blog):

“You cannot reason people out of positions that they didn’t reason themselves into.”

There is, however, a massive difference between dealing with adults and dealing with children and young people in this context. When it comes to dealing with this issue in school (and possibly even in further and higher education), on those occasions when we might come across a stated belief in creationism by a student, I find myself agreeing with the essence of the much-misunderstood intervention in the debate by Professor Michael Reiss, the Royal Society’s Director of Education.

The media (including the Guardian, who started their report on Reiss’s comments with: “Creationism and intelligent design should be taught in school science lessons, according to a leading expert in science education – which is not what he said) seem to have misquoted Reiss, or at least have failed to understand the detail and the basic humanity of the point he was making. He was not suggesting, in the slightest, that creationism should be taught in science classes. Rather he was making the entirely rational and compassionate point that, where teachers come up against children and young people who hold creationism as a viable tenet, they should be able and willing to discuss the issues involved and, indeed, should be able to:

“….explain to them why evolution and the Big Bang are scientific theories….how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis.” (quoted from the RS’s clarification above)

For a teacher to take any other stance – for instance, by simply ignoring the child who espouses such beliefs, or worse, by communicating through whatever means an impression that the child is stupid for holding onto such notions, would be to abrogate their responsibility as an educator.

The problem, I suspect, is that only a minority of teachers, across all disciplines (except, I would hope, science) will feel confident in their capacity to demonstrate the absurdity of creationism and to explain the logic and essence of the scientific method.

And this is precisely the reason why the science class (or, in a more modern pedagogy, a class in which one of the teachers is a scientist) is absolutely the right place for engaging wth the child or young person who endorses a creationist viewpoint. The last place that such an engagement should take place is in a religious studies class, or similar, where the metaphysics of the creationist myth is likely to be granted equal status to the ‘belief’ in science, and, in any case, where the expertise required to explain the scientific method might not exist.

So, creationism is an absurdity – on that all rational people can agree – but the responsibilities of the educator mean that we cannot choose simply to ignore creationism when we come across it in the classroom, nor, of course, should we ever play the game of denigrating the child who happens to hold such views on the basis of parental or community influence.

Technorati Tags: evolution, big bang, creationism, science, royal society, michael reiss, education, school

Category: belief, children, counterknowledge, education, learning, logic, media, pedagogy, religion, schooling, science

Comments

4 Responses to “Professor Michael Reiss Misjudged?”

John Sutton
September 13th, 2008 @ 6:14 pm

Exceedingly well put! I misread the BBC article about this yesterday and Tweeted in an outraged fashion http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7612152.stm – I think the title of the piece “Call for Creationism in Science” caused my mental faculties to shut down in rage!
David Gerard
September 14th, 2008 @ 3:35 pm

It’s fantastic comedy fodder, of course: http://tinyurl.com/6yqsy3
David Colquhoun
September 14th, 2008 @ 9:28 pm

Thanks for the link. The reaction of the Royal Society seemed fine, but now I’ve listened to the original recording, I think that Reiss went a good deal too far in the direction of ‘alternative world views’ for my taste. That, after all, is a favourite term of homeopaths, used in defence of their own batty beliefs
http://dcscience.net/?p=255#follow
John Connell
September 15th, 2008 @ 10:58 am

I hold no truck either for irrational beliefs, David, but my own main point stands, that teachers have a responsibility, as educators, to engage with any young person who expresses an ‘alternative world view’ in a rational and uncondescending way. To do otherwise would be break the relationship of trust that every teacher should have with their charges.

The problem, of course, is whether individual teachers have the knowledge to be able to deal rationally and in an informed way with such questions when they arise – which is why, when someone expresses a creationist view in particular, the absolutely right place to deal with it is in the science class.

If Michael Reiss is somehow ’soft’ on alternative world views, that is his (and the Royal Society’s) problem, but schools and colleges cannot choose simply to ignore or, worse, to denigrate those who express such views. Our role is to educate.

However, re-reading Reiss’s comments, you may well have good grounds for maintaining your suspicion of his position – I’ve added a question mark to the title of the post as a mark of uncertainty.