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A NYTimes article of August 24, "A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash," purports to be one teacher's struggle to teach evolution to his mostly fundamentalist Christian students in his high school biology classroom in Orange Park, Florida. The teacher, David Campbell, is fully aware of what he is up against and employs every teaching stratagem he can muster to bring his resisting students around to some minimal understanding of Darwin's theory.

The reader admires the teacher's efforts but by the end of the article is not sure whether the students have even heard let alone understood what was being taught. All we can take away from the article is the knowledge of how this sensitive and intelligent biology teacher tried to teach the subject of evolution to his students. The article gives us no hint as to how successful he was.

We suspect he wasn't very successful. For we know from any number of surveys taken during the past 25 years that nearly half of American adults believe that God created all living things in their present form, sometime in the last 10,000 years. Given then the number of adults who believe this, and the number is probably much higher in Orange Park, Florida where Campbell teaches, is it any wonder that the children are not going to be greatly influenced even by one highly likable biology classroom teacher?

Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, some 20 years or more after he was probably clear in his own mind as to how new species were formed by descent with modification from old species over long periods of time, millions of years and more. While arousing resistance at first his theory was soon accepted by the scientific community as being no less true than the theory of gravitation or the earth's rotation on its own axis and around the sun.

In fact, a common reaction to Darwin's idea was, and still is, "what a simple idea, why didn't I think of that myself?" And in fact right from the beginning it seemed like such an excellent interpretation of the fossil evidence. This was an idea that for the first time would fully and satisfactorily tie together in a single theory the huge amount of fossil evidence of earlier life forms piled high in the rooms of the museums of the world.

Why is it now, some 170 years after Darwin's great discovery, that most Americans, probably most of the students in Campbell's high school biology classroom, still refuse to see man as one among hundreds of millions of evolving life forms on the earth? I take that back. One understands their refusal. But one doesn't understand their refusal to confront the evidence.

Perhaps we've made a big mistake. Perhaps in our classrooms we ought not to have begun with evolution, which for too many immediately implies descent from an ape. For very few probably want to think of themselves as descendants of an earlier ape like creature. Certainly not the children of fundamentalist Christians.

Perhaps instead we ought to have begun with teaching the history of the earth. For that in itself is perhaps less threatening to one's vision of man. Furthermore, that's how Darwin himself began his own studies. And without his own initial grasp of the great age of the earth by his study of geology, of rocks, he might never have written his Origin.

The science of the history of the earth teaches us, not the theory, but the fact of the great age of the earth, nearly 5 billion years. It also teaches us that the first single cell life forms date from 3 billion years ago, and that man's recent appearance and time on the earth is, of course, only a tiny fraction, one thirty thousandth, of that huge span of time. Perhaps as much as a few hundred thousand years, but probably much less than that, man's actual history representing only a few tens of thousands at the most.

Those who would have us teach creationism or intelligent design in our biology classrooms should be made to first of all confront the indisputable fact of the great age of the earth, the fact that for most of these hundreds of millions of years of earth history, not man, but other widely disparate forms of life, have been the sole inhabitants.

The more fundamental conflict is not between creationism and evolution, but between creationism and the history of the forms of life. For if in fact life began by a single act of God at a single point in time it would have to be that God's creation was a single celled creature, not man. For all other life forms are subsequent to the original microbe and are clearly related to one another by all sorts of anatomical, physiological, and microbiological evidence.

Again, perhaps if we were to concentrate on first teaching the history of life on earth, as well as the history of the earth itself, creationists and intelligent design proponents would not even attempt to introduce their own explanations into our public school classrooms. For their "theories" have little or nothing to say about the great age of earth nor about the huge numbers of earlier life forms as evidenced by the fossils.

The greatest argument for Darwinian evolution is that it fits with the history of the earth and the history of life on earth. In this respect creationism and intelligence design seem completely oblivious to the facts of this history. And haven't we made it even easier for the proponents of these "theories" by not highlighting, by not pinpointing the inadequacy of their explanations in this regard?

Take the land masses themselves. We know that some 300 million years ago today's continents were just one land mass, Pangaea, over which the dinosaurs freely roamed, and that hundreds of millions of years earlier there was Gondwana and before that Rodinia. And going back a billion years or more there were probably only chains of volcanic islands on which microbes roamed, or rather remained fixed in place. 

Darwin's theory fits nicely into this history of the earth's crust. Intelligent design doesn't. What if those kids in David Campbell's class were given a course in the history of the earth, for which there is plenty of evidence? Then they could be asked which explanation, Darwin's or the creationist's, fit this history best. Wouldn't they then have to adopt that of Darwin? Again, isn't that how Darwin himself reached his conclusions, by beginning not with the descent of man but with the geological history of the earth?

Certainly some ultimate educational values seem forever to be eluding the Americans. At great effort and expense they send an extraordinary proportion of their young to colleges and universities; but their young, when they get there, do not seem to care even to read.
(Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter, 1962, p. 301)

Long  ago, there were people who believed the Earth was hollow—a thin outer shell and a void in the center. There are still people who believe in this void, except they say creatures from outer space live there. Others have different fears. in the 1960s, the Congress of the United States was considering legislation to finance the drilling of a test well under the ocean in an effort to penetrate the ocean floor and sample the underlying material. Several concerned people wrote letters telling their senators and representatives
that if such a hole were bored, it would unplug the stop so to speak,
and all the ocean's water would drain away into the middle of the
Earth!
(The Five Biggest Ideas in Science, Charles Wynn and Arthur Wiggins, 1997, p. 65)

There are separations, wide separations between peoples living in different parts of the world today. What great distance, for example, separates Maulana Fazlullah in the Swat Valley, a picturesque region in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and Karmel Larson, a suburban Mom living in a no less picturesque region in Provo, Utah.

Both Fazlullah and Larson are deeply troubled by what they see as the miseducation of today's youth resulting from their being subject to an ubiquitous media that is overly dominated by images of sex and violence.

Fazlullah directs all his energies against schools for girls, education being for him not a positive and freeing influence on their otherwise closed lives, but an open door to all that is bad in modern life.

At the outset of his crusade, in 2006, Fazlullah decreed that women should remain within the four walls of their homes and refrain from attending school. During his nightly radio broadcasts he routinely announced the names of female students who had stopped attending school and promised them a high place in paradise.

"Girls' education," he said, in one of his many radio sermons which can be heard within a 40-kilometer radius of his base of operations, "leads to obscenity and vulgarity in the society. Schools for girls are a conspiracy of the United States and other 'infidel' nations to deviate our younger generations from the right path of Islam."

Karmel Larson takes aim, not at our public schools, but at the sex and violence that children are exposed to daily on television, seeing today's children as "a generation of children for whom the road to success is paved with drugs, violence and sex."

She reminds us that "on MTV every 38 seconds, children watching these programs are exposed to sexually charged images, explicit language, violence, drug use or sales, or other illegal activity. As a mother of four children, I feel a need to take action and invite others to do so as well … because our children are watching!"

In both situations, in Pakistan's Swat Valley, and in Provo, Utah, the underlying problems that Fazlullah and Larson are confronting may not be so very different. It's kids growing up, and how little while they are growing up we can protect them from the noxious influence of the life around them, and in particular an untrammeled media.

But it seems to me that in both situations their solutions are the wrong ones. Or at least that neither solution will ever have the result intended. Eliminating schools for girls will do little or nothing to strengthen to path of young girls to Islam. On the contrary, it may even take them further from that religion.

And in Larson's case as long as sex and violence are big sellers voluntary controls to limit the amount of one or both on MTV and cable television will have little or no effect. In any case that's sort of what has been happening for a long time now. Preaching restraint, while admirable, does very little or nothing to change the sex and violence content of our popular media.

How would American suburban Moms respond if they were told that their girls would have either to accept not attending school and while in public wearing the veil, or be in possession of a freedom of choice and movement that would constantly expose them to sex and violence, on television, on the internet, and in their contacts with sexually precocious and bullying peers in their schools?

It's probably a good thing they don't have that choice. For if they did we might find in our own country that the differences among us would rapidly leave the discussion and argumentative stages and go on become the kind of violent clashes among different peoples that we see in so many regions of the world today. 

It's a fact, however, that we probably won't change the content of our media, but continue to live with it as harmful as it is, go on muddling through as we raise our children. But we will continue to help our children, our girls, get safely through a minefield of poisonous influences while they are growing up. We will not adopt Fazlullah's solution and keep our girls out of school, nor probably we will adopt a program of media censorship. And somehow we will progress.

Many of my idea cards during the 1980s came from my own reading, and in particular from my own "teach myself" biology readings. From the beginning I was probably the best biology student in our school, probably also one of the best math students ("best" meaning attentive), and along with the other teachers just one of the best students — our school, as the best schools everywhere, was most of all a place for our teachers to be the life long learners that we're always talking about for our students, but that our students, and students in general, rarely become.

I always came to school every day wanting to learn. As the years passed what I wanted to learn would change and evolve, but during the 80's, the time that I'm writing about, it was calculus (and I had visions of doing a Jaime Escalante with all our students, having them all take and pass the AP calculus test… but that never happened) and it was evolution and in particular the history of the earth that most got my attention. When I had a great day in school it was because I had succeeded in bringing the kids along with me in my own excitement and enthusiasm. And when I didn't I didn't.

Then, and well before then, and later, and now, I have always known that most of what is and was being taught, anatomy in my first year at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Greek that I taught while a tutor at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD, literature and Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, the subject of my Master's essay for the graduate English department at Columbia University, Darwin's theory descent with modification in the Waring School biology class, most of all that the students were mostly not ready to learn.

We teach important things because they are important, but we pay little or no attention to whether the students are learning them, or better, whether the students are growing in their own understanding of the subject matter. We know that only lifelong learners will ever learn the important things, yet we go on pretending that our students are doing so while in school. Of course they're not.

So in the 80's, in the Waring School, I was teaching, and learning. I'm still not sure what the students were doing, what role the school had in their lives. I am sure that if I were to talk about the school with them now they would have little, or nothing to say about the math, humanities, science, language and other classes that preoccupied the teachers.

They probably would have more to say about some of the things they actually did, play lacrosse, the choral singing, certainly the theatrical productions, maybe even the idea cards and  journal pieces that they wrote and shared with their fellow students in tutorial. And they would have much to say about things of which I was probably not even aware at the time. Would that I could have them now, again, in class and ask them now what our school was all about then.

Perhaps because my own educational background and teaching experience was predominately language and literature I gave much more importance in our school to math and science, things that I didn't know as well myself. Somehow what I was less familiar with became most important and I spent most of my own preparation time with developing our math and science programs, perhaps not very successfully because of my own deficiencies in these areas.

Between the math and science programs math turned out to be the easiest of the two because right from the beginning I discovered and immediately adopted for our school a text, the School Mathematics Project, an original "new Math" program out of Cambridge University. And it was more than enough in our math classes to follow the text, for this was a great program. I still feel that way although probably for good reasons the Waring School has long since adopted a more traditional math program.

The SMP, as it was called, outlasted me in the school by some five years. At the present time it is no longer used, not only at our school, but in schools in England where it was first adopted. Things change and math educational ideas move on, not necessarily to something better. If I ever go back to teaching I'd look for the modern equivalent of the SMP that was first developed in the freedom of 60s. Are we less free today than we were then?

In any case, unlike in most every other subject matter class in our school, in math we had only to follow the text. In that sense what a relief it was to go to math class, open the book, and do the problems. And the texts  A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, (taking you all the way up to pre calculus) had neat stuff. At least I thought so anyway, from the day I discovered it, in the late 70s in Foyles Book Store in London.

There were the usual arithmetic, algebra, and geometry sections, but there were in abundance many other math topics, including probability and statistics, matrices, and my two favorites, applied mathematics mostly the mathematics of physics, and problem solving which included math games and puzzles that I never got tired of and turn to even today with my grandson.

We had always, even before the SMP, made much of word problems in our school. That might have been how we would start the day. The problems were always interesting and to some of us, at least, a delight, while probably a bane, and not a precious one at that, to others.

Word problems, probably better than anything else, will reveal the mathematically talented kids. And they will show others of us, just how much we are lacking in math thinking skills. I was one of the latter but I never lost my interest in the problems. Sort of like the game of chess that quickly separates those who can from those who cannot think several moves ahead. In math there seem to be those, the few, who can rapidly detect the connections among the variables, and those who cannot.

In our science classes we mostly didn't use text books. Science, and in particular biology, always seemed too vast to be encompassed in a text book, or because of this the textbook too big. For when the text books did do justice to the subject they became impossibly long and for that and other reasons totally unsuited to our school. Furthermore science subject matter, in contrast to math, is constantly being revised as new discoveries come in from countless researchers worldwide. Science news seemed to me at least as important as the science text book, and often more relevant and more interesting for the student. As a result I would try to make our students aware of what was at the moment, not only of what had been discovered in the past.

I'm not sure I feel any of these things as strongly today as I did then. Looking back now on our school, I think now I should have done many things differently. Certainly in regard to biology, and in particular the history of the earth and evolution, those subjects that have been ever since I began to study them in the 70s, the first years of our school, such a large part of my own intellectual life.

It was just the other day when I happened to read an article in the New York Times that I began thinking about all these things again. The article was about the teaching of evolution in a sophomore Biology classroom in Orange Park, Florida. The thrust of the article was mainly concerned with the stratagems employed by the teacher, David Campbell, to get his students, mostly from Christian fundamentalist families, to listen to his presentation of the evidence for the validity of Darwin's Origin of Species argument….

School Culture and Declining Resources

The principal problem confronting today's educators is how to raise the achievement of poor and otherwise disadvantaged youngsters in our public schools. This is the issue that dominates the waking lives (perhaps their dreams also) of New York City's Joel Klein, Washington's Michelle Rhee, Paul Pastorek and Paul Vallas in New Orleans, and probably just as many other inner city school superintendents as there are out there, all trying to replace the classroom failures of too many poor and minority children with successes.

It is this so far seemingly intractable problem that has given rise to all, or nearly all of the educational reform efforts of the past generation. In particular and most importantly it has accounted for the remarkable growth of Princeton student Wendy Kopp's 1990 Teach for America program, that which has by itself brought tens of thousands of young, idealistic college graduates into needy minority inner city classrooms.

And it has accounted for the creation of a new type of urban public school, schools such as the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, the Amistad Academy in New Haven, the Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago, the KIPP Academy in New York's South Bronx, the District's SEED Public Charter School, the MATCH School in Boston, and the University Park Campus School in Worcester, all described by David Whitman in his recent book, "Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism."

Now these two, as well as other urban school reform movements, have come accompanied by the voices of those who would deny them their legitimacy, in particular the voices of the leaders of the teachers' unions and any number of educational writers, including Gerald Bracey, Richard Rothstein, David Berliner, to name just three of the more well known among them.

These voices say that first teacher salaries (and thereby the prestige and attractiveness of the profession) have to be raised. And they say that first the other needs of kids, including medical services, proper parenting at home, the presence of adult role models, safe neighborhoods etc. have to be met.

The people of the Whitman or “no excuses” schools don't deny the existence of the "other needs." They say, however, that if they waited for these needs to be met, say by probably costly public policy initiatives, they would lose this and probably future generations of children during the waiting.

And they have a point, don’t they, when they say that, Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Paul Pastorek, the founders of KIPP, MATCH, Achievement First, Aspire, Edison, Green Dot, IDEA, Imagine, Noble Street, and Uncommon Schools?

So what can we do? Are we forever to be divided regarding what to do first, discipline in the classroom or neighborhood policing, between doing nothing and not doing enough? I began thinking about all this while reading an American Interest interview with David Landes, the author of "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations."

The opposing points of view of Landes and Jared Diamond, the one emphasizing culture, the other geography as the principal explanation for differences of prosperity among peoples, might profitably be compared to the opposing points of view, say, of Michelle Rhee and David Berliner, of Michael Goldstein and Jonathan Kozol, the ones emphasizing discipline, structure, motivation (what we might call cultural features of schooling), the others community and neighborhood support services and such (what we might call the resources available to the kids).

During the AI interview with Francis Fukuyama Landes repeats again that a nation's prosperity can most of all be attributed to the strength of a nation's culture. The location along a river, access to a natural port, richness of land and natural resources, all those things that he calls the luck of the draw, may very well account for an initial prosperity. But only those nations whose cultures are strong will continue to prosper long after the luck has gone.

According to Landes past national failures have been much more failures of culture than failures of resources. I would say the same about school failures.

Without entering into the argument that opposes the thinking of Landes and Diamond I think we might draw some relevant and profitable conclusions to the analogous situation opposing the present educational reformers and educational writers, especially those among the latter who are defending the educational status quo.

Couldn't we say that the lives of too many of our poor and minority youngsters are totally without the abundant resources of our middle and upper class, mostly suburban youngsters? And that most of all these resources may be summed up by these youngsters having well off parents and other caring adults in their lives, those who bring them to doctors' appointments, music lessons, after school band and soccer practices, to all and any other such enrichment activities, those who travel with them, send them to summer camps, take them to cultural events of all sorts?

Just as Easter Island can no longer count on the return of its wealth of trees and forests, Texas its abundant oil reserves, Georges Bank its cod fishery, these kids in our inner city schools can not count on, and are not going to suddenly have, caring, capable, and relatively affluent adults in their lives to take care of all those physical and emotional needs otherwise clearly not being met.

So what do we do? Do we go on lamenting the fact of the absence of vital support resources, while looking to hypothetical efforts by state and federal governments to provide them? Or do we seek to otherwise replace with something else the long absent and yes vital resources that these kids are without? I don't think we have a choice.

When the land and the other natural resources have been exhausted there remains the culture of the people. If the culture is strong, as it has shown to be in many nations, Japan, for example, throughout the past 150 years, Finland since the early 1990s, following the collapse of its primary trading partner the Soviet Union, Israel almost since its founding in 1947, and the United States, perhaps, in the future, as its own wealth of natural resources goes further into decline — if the culture is strong the nation will survive, and survive well.

Now for too many of our underprivileged kids we have only the schools as a resource and we have no choice but to strengthen the learning culture therein. We have to make the schools into places that provide if not replace many of the essential things that kids need and don't have in their lives outside of school.

The group of schools, described in Whitman's book and now numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands, are doing just this. They are providing a culture of achievement, emphasizing the importance of student motivation, the work ethic, the working towards a goal, good teaching, sufficient time on task and the like, all those “cultural” traits that will enable these kids, who are mostly without, to be with and to succeed.

These schools are telling us that a strong school culture can go a long way towards replacing the absence of caring and capable adults as well as material resources in these kids' lives outside of school.

Above, Mr. Solzhenitsyn working at Stanford in 1976.

See the article in today’s New York Times by Michael T. Kaufman, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dies at 89.

This great man’s great life deceived us all at the end, why? He seemed to only be able to identify what was wrong in the society about him. When the big correction was made, when the Soviet Union collapsed, in no small part due to his own efforts, he seemed totally unable to identify and build on what was right.

Instead, Solzhenitsyn immediately turned his sharp and unforgiving gaze onto first the Godless Western world, where he was living in exile, and then onto the new Russia to which he had returned, and where he identified only crass materialism and physical pleasure seeking. Oligarchs and the lives they represented, those of Russia as well as those of the West, were now the principal target of his wrath and scorn.

And he didn’t stray from this hardline position during the 14 years, dating from his return to Russia in 1994 until his death today. With the fall of the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn’s own greatness seemed to have deserted him, leaving quite an empty shell behind, one totally without its former heroic occupant. And nothing remarkable, nothing real and human ever took its place.

David Remmick knew Solzhenitsyn well during the Soviet years when the writer was making history.  According to George F. Kennan,
the American diplomat, this Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipelago, which led to his expulsion from his native land, was “the greatest and most powerful
single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern
times.”

Remmick also knew Solzhenitsyn during his obscurity, and visited him near the end of his life. Remmick cites Solzhenitsyn’s prose poem, “Growing Old,” and quotes the writer as having told him, “I’m not working with the old speed. In the evening I feel tired and go to bed fairly early. In the morning, I feel strong, but this strength doesn’t last as long as it used to.”

This is the Solzhenitsyn that the public never new. Too bad. There is so much that he could have told us. So much other than what was wrong with first his world then ours. He could have written more about that strength he felt, even as an old man, in the morning hours. And he could have written about his own family, his wife and children, evidently a remarkable family in its own right. From his books we don’t know that he was a man like all of us. And that is our loss.