An Alabama bill aimed at discrediting evolution and sound science by promoting the teaching of creationism in public schools died in late March when the state legislature adjourned.
House Bill 258, if passed, would have allowed public school teachers to teach “the theory of creation as presented in the Bible” in classes that included mentions of evolution.
The purpose of bringing creationism into the class, according to the bill, was “affording students a choice as to which theory to accept.”
Sound science education advocates pushed back against the bill. In a post that ran on SciComm, a science blog, Amanda Glaze, an Alabamian who teaches at Georgia Southern University, wrote that the bill would “seriously harm efforts to improve science literacy.
“One of the greatest disservices we can do to our students is to remove science from the science classroom,” Glaze wrote. “Cherry-picking the science that one agrees with and discarding the science that challenges religious faith is not only wrong, it will dramatically decrease science literacy in a generation of students. We are at war for science literacy, not at war against faith.”
