There has been a recent movement to ban the teaching of intelligent design and creation science in general from public schools.  According to ibtimes.com reporter Roxanne Palmer, “One of the more pitched battles in this struggle started in 2004, when the school district in Dover, Pa., required intelligent design to be presented as an alternative to evolution.  Eleven parents sued the school district.  Judge John E. Jones, a conservative Republican, ruled in December 2005 that the Dover school board’s intelligent design policy was unconstitutional.”
   College student Zack Koplin is currently combating the teaching of creationism in Louisiana public voucher schools.  According to huffingtonpost.com, “Koplin launched a campaign in 2010 to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act, which allowed teachers to incorporate intelligent design and creationism in Louisiana public schools.”
    I do not want to discuss the constitutionality or the theological ramifications of teaching creation science in schools, but I would like to discuss the relationship of creationism to science education.  The people mentioned above are principally concerned with their particular reading of the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights that disallows religious opinions in the public education system, but what concerns me is the goal and execution of science education.
      I think that teaching creation science is a bad idea.  Let me explain.  Firstly, what is the goal of science education in schools?  At the higher level the goal is usually to produce scientists, researchers or competent engineers.  At lower levels science education is often for personal benefit, general education or to help flesh out a worldview.
Secondly, how is science education executed?  Too often science is taught through tedious topical explanations and long lists of facts, though at the higher level it becomes more analytical and focuses more on lab techniques and the scientific method.
    I interviewed Bill Henry, associate professor of inorganic chemistry with the Mississippi State Department of Chemistry, to get his opinion on the goal and execution of science education.  Henry says science education should be focused on delivering skills and material to students.
   “Information… facts… theories… and critical thinking should be given,” Henry said.  For him, the most important skills that we can be taught in school are problem solving and critical thinking. “Increasing problem solving and critical thinking would benefit this country greatly,” Henry said.
       Henry’s opinion about a good education in science is generally that memorizing facts and being given the answer all the time is not ideal. But we should understand the reasons behind whatever is going on.  I agree with this, and I think this understanding of science education has important ramifications for creation science. 
    The particulars of creation science and intelligent design are often at odds with currently accepted scientific theories.  What immediately comes to mind are arguments based on the definitions surrounding the words “currently accepted,” “scientific” and “theory.”  But let us assume for now that a “theory” is something for which there has been no evidence to the contrary and adequately describes the phenomena; “currently accepted” means that as far as we can tell the theory is better than all currently postulated alternatives; and “scientific” means the process of deciding the theory has gone through the normal rigors of scientific research, peer review and is based on natural, repeatable phenomena. 
      In my opinion, once these criteria have been satisfied, a topic is worth being taught as science to students who are learning what the scientific process has done in the past and how to do it in the future.  Unfortunately, creation science does not fit into the definition of a currently accepted scientific theory very well.  Creation science should therefore be supplementary, introduced as a possible alternative to what the scientific community has independently derived without the assistance of any scriptures, which I have previously argued are not valid as scientific resources.
     In my opinion, teaching creation science is similar to just teaching a group of facts and explanations to students instead of trying to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills.  Once again, the goal of science education is not just to give us a list of facts about the world around us, but more importantly a set of skills to engage the world around us, even outside of the scope of science.
          A student who is taught creation science is going to be hard pressed to reconcile the facts they have been taught with what they come to recognize as logically necessary truths.  It would be just as much a disservice to teach a student creation science as it would be to simply give them a long sheet of theorems and facts about chemistry or physics without ever giving any background history, methodology or explanation at all.  Neither force-feeding scientific facts nor teaching creation science produces the logical thinking skills necessary to engage material beyond the scope of the class.  Therefore any positive change in science education will affect more in the classroom than just the teaching of creation science. Sadly there is the additional aspect with creation science of the marriage of religious convictions to scientific facts. This only serves to attach a certain level of dogma to science that should hopefully be unbiased.
  Ideally teachers should not teach students what to think, but teach them how to think and to effectively put their problem solving and critical thinking skills into practice whenever they are confronted with challenges.            
Teaching creation science that is attached to religious dogma and without attention to developing thinking skills is a disservice to students of science; it is bad not necessarily because the ideas being taught are absolutely right or wrong, but because, as with any poor science education, thinking is severely hindered.