Survival of the Fittest

California educators, following the lead of Charles Darwin, are insisting that only the best scientific treatments of evolution will survive their review of textbooks for the state’s junior high school students. Like the reaction to Darwin’s ideas, this state policy will be controversial, but it is an enlightened call for excellence that deserves wide public support.

As part of the regular textbook review that occurs every six years for each field, a 16-member panel of teachers and school officials appointed by the state Board of Education has been reading new junior high science textbooks. The panel found than more than 20 books omitted or provided too little information on the theory of evolution. It recommended that, unless publishers made changes in the text, the books not be used in the schools.

One book, for example, credits Darwin only with “developing a theory that explains why there is a great number and variety of plant and animal species,” adding that scientists still raise questions about his theory. That is too bland for students who must learn to think in order to survive.

Moving on from groundwork that others had laid, Darwin essentially wrote the modern theory of evolution. After years of systematic work, he realized that in nature “favorable variations (of animals and plants) would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed,” resulting in the formation of new species. Darwin unleashed a storm that continues to this day, with much of the opposition coming from religious groups believing that evolution challenges their beliefs on the nature of creation.

“Ducking an issue in textbooks because it is controversial doesn’t do the children any good,” State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said. He added that state officials have been meeting with major publishers, school district leaders and curriculum specialists to stress the need for top-quality textbooks and to urge the panel to fulfill that need.

The next procedural step is a public hearing in Sacramento on Sept. 12. The board will be asked the next day to approve the panel’s recommendation against using textbooks that do not measure up. The board should do so with the same unanimity displayed by the textbook committee.

California public schools spend about $115 million a year on new textbooks. With their statewide approval system, they can be a major force for change in textbooks whose ability to challenge students experts say has been steadily declining. The publishers have been producing “bland books because they think they’re safe and they can sell them,” Honig said. But these books “don’t give the kids the spark to interest them. They don’t have the depth, the challenge, the beauty of some of these ideas.” There is beauty, also, in the idea of demanding quality even in the face of controversy.