Evolution Outreach Projects - Part of the Axis of Evo
About the projects:
The majority of Americans don't accept a natural origin of life, a nonhuman ancestry for humans, or that species continue to evolve today through non-magical processes such as natural selection. Their strong faith in alternative, supernatural explanations is maintained by indoctrination of young children by parents, and facilitated by public school curriculums that purposefully delay evolutionary biology instruction until high school. To effectively educate our citizens about life, therefore, science standards must be readjusted so that exposure to evolution is commenced in kindergarten, when it might have half a chance to counteract the fictional creation mythologies that kids are being taught at home. And it would corrrespond to when children are actually interested in such questions. Waiting until middle school or high school to teach evolution is, as polls show, "not so effective." The projects above are my futile attempts to propagate and support this opinion. And if you are thinking, "Oh, how so innocently naive," I'll just mention that I started teaching my children about the origin of life, descent with modfication, and natural selection when they were 4 years old. Now they are 6 and 8, and understand it well enough to try to explain it to their peers. If all parents did a little similar homeschoolin' about evolution, I think our national aversion to science-based biology would go away in a few generations. The notion that young kids cannot understand evolution is a myth perpetuated by those who don't want kids to understand evolution. Politely tolerating this myth is almost as bad.
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