What's the matter with science education?

The Christian fundamentalists are at it again, trying to get creationism into the science classroom. The Chicago Tribune ran a front-page story about this in yesterday's edition. The story includes a poll, which I found rather disturbing:

Teach both, say most Illinois poll respondents

A recent Tribune/WGN-TV poll found that a majority of Illinois voters favor teaching both evolution and creationism in public schools.

Should creationism, evolution or both be taught in public schools?

Only evolution: 15%
Only creationism: 6%
Both: 57%
Neither: 11%
Don't know / no opinion: 11%

Does teaching creationism violate separation of church and state?

Does violate: 26%
Does not violate: 58%
No opinion: 16%

Note: Questions are paraphrased for brevity.
Source: Market Shares Corp. survey of 1,200 Illinois registered voters conducted May 5-10. Margin of error is +/-3 percentage points.

What the poll demonstrates is not that both creationism and evolution should be taught, but rather that the general public lacks a basic understanding of science. In addition, it is infuriating to think that science curricula might be influenced by poll numbers -- you can poll all you want, but it doesn't change the way the universe works.

There must be something wrong with the way science is taught in our society. I admit I haven't studied the problem, but I'd surmise that there is too much emphasis on the rote learning of facts and formulas, and too little on the scientific method and critical thinking. From this it would follow that five years out of school, when F = ma and SUM(dE) = Q - W are forgotten, people really wouldn't have any understanding of science.

Now, if someone wants to say that there are religious or folkloric traditions that attempt to describe natural phenomena in non-scientific ways, fine. But it's still not science. And pre-modern mythology, having been devised at a time when human knowledge was much more limited, generally does a poor job of describing the natural world.

As for violating the separation of church and state, Christians might consider substituting something from a different tradition and see if they still have no objection. Should the myth of Pangu's cosmic egg, evolution, or both be taught in public schools?