Michael Reiss Steps Down from the Royal Society

More on the creationism controversy:

Britain's national academy of science parted company with its director of education yesterday after a furore over the teaching of creationism in schools.

Michael Reiss, a professor of education at the Institute of Education in London and an ordained Church of England clergyman, agreed to step down from his position at the Royal Society, which claimed he had unintentionally caused damage to the organisation's reputation.

Reiss was widely reported to be in favour of teaching creationism in school science lessons after a speech he gave in Liverpool last week, but the following day he issued a clarification arguing his comments had been misinterpreted.

The Royal Society announced Reiss's resignation in a statement yesterday. It said: "Some of Professor Michael Reiss's recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society's director of education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society's reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately as director of education."

In his speech, Reiss said that while creationism had no scientific basis, science teachers risked alienating pupils who believed in the idea by dismissing it out of hand. "They should take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis," he said.

Comments

[Richard]

Read his speech. Made me think he was pro Creationism. Badly done, Emma.

[Vicki Baker]

Who's Emma? Seems sad that Reiss has to resign for making a sound pedagogical point, but it's not really about the kids,is it?

[Ruchira]

Come on Vicki! That is way too much "empathy." How much time is enough to expend arguing this in a "science" class? What other cobwebs in a student's brain must receive equal time before a teacher can proceed with the actual lesson plan? Unless of course, you are implying that creationism *should* be in the lesson plan. Perhaps we can also exempt some students from science classes altogether, as has been suggested by school prayer proponents to accommodate those who are non-subscribers to Christianity?

It really is about the kids in the long run.

[Vicki Baker]

"They should take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis"

Oh, yes, rampant pandering. Students shouldn't be allowed to be disruptive, but I think you could spend at least one lesson on why creationism isn't science. Get tough on exit standards and college admissions standards.

[Nick Smyth]

The problem here is straightforward: "why creationism is not a science" is not a topic for a science class. It's a topic for a philosophy class, to be given during the "Philosophy of Science" section.

In other words, the actual question here is not "should we talk about creationism in high schools", but "should we talk about philosophy in high schools?"... a question school boards across North America have resoundingly answered.

[Ruchira]

I agree with Nick. Science teachers should not be burdened with answering this question - it's not their bailiwick. Also Vicki, not all science teachers may know enough about "creationism" to conduct such a forum - especially those who are not of the Abrahamic persuasion. Of course we could ask them to take a "sensitivity" training and waste some more time - time they could spend in setting up higher standards for college admissions.

I also agree that American schools are remiss in not introducing their students to philosophy in high school. My daughter, a philosophy grad, tells me that her 4 years in a jock filled suburban high school would have been more palatable had the curriculum offered an elective course in philosophy.

[Elatia Harris]

Interesting that Prof. Reiss is stepping down because he appeared to come out for a half measure, pleasing no one, when that's often just the maneuver to help one hold onto one's job.

Nick and Ruchira are right, I think, in that no science teacher of any stripe should have to propound the creationist p.o.v. in class, even if it's a deeply religious science teacher who believes the creation myth is a metaphor. If this is philosophy, however, isn't it that branch where they study possibility and counter-factuals? Is it philosophy of science, pure and simple?

Vicki, if what you mean is that the teacher gets nowhere on an educational mission by coming out swinging, I agree with you. If a child from a horribly religious background gets into a science class and listens enough to disagree -- well, isn't that a teachable moment? If a teacher is careful, friendly, and relentless, then some of the tools of rational analysis have a chance to be transferred even to a student who thinks he doesn't want them. I don't know about the UK, but in this country many fundamentalists home-school their kids in order for such exposure never, ever to take place.

[Chris Schoen]

Ruchira,

I honestly don't see what's objectionable about Reiss's remarks. He said he thought that when a student raised the issue of Creationism, a biology teacher should be empowered to engage that student on why Creationism is not scientific. That's the whole of it.

These children are being taught by their parents that ID *is* a science. Where are they going to hear otherwise, if not in biology class? As Nick wrote, there are no philosophy classes to send them to.

[Vicki Baker]

Chris, I don't see how else you can read "They should take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis"

I think that an explanation of "how science works" would benefit all students. It's sad that students can reach high school not knowing how science works, or how to write a paragraph, but there it is.
Challenging students to think is always risky, much safer to stick to memorizing facts. We're forgetting that the main lesson of school is how to sit quietly and follow instructions.

[CriticalMassI]

Elatia writes: "I don't know about the UK, but in this country many fundamentalists home-school their kids in order for such exposure never, ever to take place."

nytimes

This is true, but the flat earthers aren't the only ones who are homeschooling due to the sorry state of public schools, insistence on dosing children with Ritalin and so on, ad infinitum.

Many "progressives" are also homeschooling and unschooling, with parents, kids and those in alternative education settings basing learning on principles espoused by everyone from A. S. Neill to John Holt and Daniel Greenburg, founder of the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts -- now a model for similar schools that are springing up around the country.

educationrevolution

Vicki writes: "Challenging students to think is always risky, much safer to stick to memorizing facts. We're forgetting that the main lesson of school is how to sit quietly and follow instructions."

Sitting still and following instructions, yes! Assembly-line lessons in how pass tests. How to get good grades in order to get into a good college in order to get a good job and become a good wage slave in the corporate world.

Taking the lead from Dr. Wicked Wit, Justin E. H. Smith, do we really need those with a Doctorate in Education designing curricula? Or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation planning something spiffier than No Child Left Behind?

I regret never getting a Ph.D. in philosophy or anything else from Columbia, but I like the democratic atmosphere here. I'm allowed to write in these little blog boxes without a Ph.D.

CMI

[CriticalMassI]

I'm sorry. I meant to type Daniel Greenberg.

That's almost as quirky as typing Massachusetts Massachusettes.

I need to proofread more carefully.

[Elatia Harris]

CMI, there are good reasons for home-schooling children, and good methods of doing it. In my home town, a large city in the South, my high school English teacher was called upon to help with home-schooling of 12th graders who were kept out of the school system because their parents, a group of fundamentalists with money, didn't want them learning anything Godless. However, they were allowed some literature to read, which was where my teacher came in. Technically, he was a tutor, not a home-schooler. What he saw was scary. We should be afraid of this trend, because these children are not being protected from bad education, but from education.

[Ruchira]

Elatia, I have a friend in Houston who was called upon to help home schoolers of fundamentalist households with English lit. Her experience was similar to your teacher's.

I may be the only one here who actually was a science teacher in high school long ago, in another incarnation. I can assure you, in my class at least, it wasn't about "keeping quiet and sitting still in an assembly line" although the subject being chemistry, some memorization was required - there is no way around it. By the way, the advantage of a sharp memory should not be dismissed off hand in the learning process, provided of course you understand what you memorize. While I was the kind, friendly and relentless teacher that Elatia wishes all educators to be, I had neither the time / inclination nor the training to debate theology with my students. Literature, history, politics, movies, sports and even the occasional love life of a teenage boy on the other hand, was not difficult to accommodate around the discussion of chemistry.

[CriticalMassI]

Well, I think we should welcome the trend. The religious fanatics are going to be fanatical in any case, and at least kids raised in such a home environment may grow up without possible brain damage due to the thus unknown long-term effects of Ritalin. How can it be that all of a sudden so many youngsters are afflicted with ADHD and ADD?

It reminds me of the soaring Cesarean birth rate that seemed to rise dramatically with the introduction of higher tech medicine and higher legal liability in childbirth. One standard reason for the increase in C-sections was that the birth canal was too narrow to accommodate the baby. Some sort of anatomical mutation? Or C-section safety and convenience for doctors?

Now, all of a sudden, children's brains are too defective to allow compliant classroom behavior?

Also, how is the home religious indoctrination any different from the education in traditional parochial schools? OK, I admit that the Jesuits and nuns don't believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, but think of all the other religious dogma that is taught in private religious schools that I bet it's safe to say you and I don't agree with.

Do you really think that public schools, with exceptions in the wealthier burbs such as Scarsdale, New York, or Newton, Mass., help educate versus shut down critical thinking and other human capacities needed for adult life outside the Dilbert cubicle? Of course, public schools in these neighborhoods are also subject to most of the same ills as the "average." In any case, I think the decision must be left to the parents on how to educate their own children, unless the children are suffering neglect and physical endangerment.

Many homeschool "graduates" are now being accepted at very good colleges. Some are also outscoring public school students on SATs and other exams.

I think spending the first years of one's life in public school is a dreadful introduction to the world. Regimentation, standardized everything, emphasis on competition and grades, being confined to a classroom indoors . . . Boredom, boredom, boredom. And, since No Child Left Behind, the testing mania has grown even worse. Do children learn how to read books and to benefit from independent reading or do they merely learn to read for the sake of passing a test?

The big problem I see as more and more middle-class people withdraw from public schools is the fate of less affluent children who may not have access to good education resources.

However, rich people have always been able to send their children to private schools that have accreditation. There's no democratization of intellect, but I believe that all families should be able to exercise the same private school prerogative that their wealthier neighbors have always enjoyed, even if the private school is in the home.

[Vicki Baker]

Ruchira:
I too was a teacher in another life, though in foreign language and not science.
The way I see it, a biology teacher who refuses to duck the challenge of teaching evolution in one of our more Bible-plagued areas, must expect challenges to her authority. This is simply the case, however we may wish it to be otherwise. She or her must therefore consider the implications for classroom management. A teacher's authority consists of institutional authority, person or moral authority, and expert authority. To the extent that he or she relies on institutional authority, the other sources of authority are undermined, and the effectiveness of his or her teaching reduced. If I were in the situation of teaching evolution to a class primed with creationist propaganda, I would want to head off trouble at the beginning by taking one or two sessions to "explain how science works", how evolution is the key concept underpinning the study of biology. Expert authority. I would acknowledge that some people find this subject scary, but be clear about what sorts of discussions are acceptable in science class, that no one would be required to profess "belief" in evolution but no one would be excused from understanding the concepts. (moral authority) I would consider it a defeat to rely too heavily on institutional authority to keep the class on track.
At least, that's what I hope I would do. Probably if I had no reasonable expectation of support from the administration, and no clear requirements from the state about what to teach, I might just sort of try to reach evolution lite and not even go into human evolution, which is what happens more often than not.

[Vicki Baker]

OK, last word from me, I promise: in the above situation, I would feel obligated to at least explain to students why they are going to fail if they persist in cribbing their answers from the book of Genesis.

[CriticalMassI]

I'm posting Rupert Sheldrake's site to call attention to the fact that Bible Belt religionists are not the only ones guilty of dogmatism. In establishment science, Sheldrake doesn't pass the heresy test.

sheldrake

[Elatia Harris]

Not only a biblical literalist, but Stephen Wolfram, has ideas that contrast with evolutionary biology as it is now taught. I don't claim to fully understand them, but it's interesting to try to follow how his ideas might one day supplant what is now Chapter and Verse. Teaching those ideas as a way of showing scientific forms of disagreement might -- all by itself -- have the effect of persuading a wretched child from a fundamentalist family that science is for the curious, literalism for the inert.

[Sir Harold Kroto]

The Reiss Affair – a Matter of Intellectual Integrity
Various letters, such as that from the Bishop of Lincoln (Guardian) etc, contain a significant amount of self-righteous criticism of the Royal Society with regard to the Rev Michael Reiss’s position as Director of Science Education. It is clear that there is almost total ignorance about the fundamental issues involved and an abysmal understanding of Science – the culture that created the modern world – from anaesthetics and penicillin to jet engines, mobile phones and the Internet. Of course “The Origin of the Universe and Living Organisms” is a perfectly respectable question for the Science lesson (perhaps the most exciting and fundamental one) - as long as someone with Intellectual Integrity is there to answer it! There is a major problem however for the religious person, scientist or otherwise, in answering this question and it involves, first and foremost, Intellectual Integrity.

Let me clarify the fundamental philosophical issue - The Scientific Mindset: Science is based solely on doubt-based, disinterested, examination of the natural and physical world. It is entirely independent of personal belief. There is a very important, fundamental concomitant - that is to accept absolutely NOTHING whatsoever, for which there is no evidence, as having any FUNDAMENTAL validity. A lemma: One can of course have an infinite number of questions but only those questions that can be formulated in such a way that they can be subjected to detailed disinterested examination, and when so subjected reveal unequivocally and ubiquitously accepted data, may be significant.

The plethora of more-or-less incompatible religious concepts that mankind has invented from Creationism and Intelligent Design to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Scientology, Hinduism, Shinto, Shamanism etc., etc., etc., are all basically indistinguishable, from the Freethinker’s perspective. It really does not matter whether someone believes a mystical entity created the Universe five thousand or ten thousand million years ago - both are equally irrational unsubstantiated claims of no fundamental validity. Unfortunately Michael Reiss who is, according to reports, a nice guy, was just in the wrong job. He, together with all religious people – whether they like it or not, whether they accept it or not - fall at the first hurdle of the main requirement for honest philosophical scientific discussion because they accept unfound dogma as having fundamental significance. Note that I did not say value (positive or negative!). In the Jeffersonian sense Church and State (including education especially on Sundays) must be separated - otherwise our democratic freedoms are undermined. A secular socio-political framework is an absolutely necessary (though unfortunately not always sufficient) condition to guarantee freedom of religion - as well as freedom of non-religion.

I do not have a particularly big problem with scientists who may have some personal mystical beliefs - for all I know the President of the Royal Society may be religious. However I, and many Royal Society colleagues, do have a problem with an ordained minister as Director of Science Education – this is a totally different issue. An ordained minister must have accepted that there is a creator (presumably more intelligent than he is?) and thus many of us (maybe 90% of FRSs) cannot see how such a person can pontificate on how to tackle this fundamentally unresolvable conflict at the science/religion interface. An ordained minister cannot have his religious cake in church on Sunday and eat a scientific one with intellectually vulnerable kids in the classroom on weekdays. This is where the Intellectual Integrity issue arises – and it is the crucial aspect in the Reiss Affair.

I suggest that the Rev Reiss, the Bishop of Lincoln and any others who presume the authority to dictate how religious issues should be handled in the science classroom read from Sam Harris's book "Letter to a Christian Nation" at their Sunday sermons. Then perhaps some of their flock may understand what Intellectual Integrity and true humanity actually involve. Furthermore I suggest that this wonderful little book be a set text for young people at Sunday School, so they recognise that the really dangerous people can include the religious who are hell-bent on dragging us back into the Dark Ages, rather than the Freethinking Humanists who are struggling to save the democratic freedoms of “The Enlightenment” for our grandchildren. The Pope is the 21st Century disciple of Cardinal Bellarmine.

[Chris Schoen]

Intellectual integrity; that's rich.

Kroto's comments are so orthogonal to the actual issue of Reiss's dismissal as to be Rovian. Reiss did not resign from his post because he holds religious beliefs, or because religious beliefs contaminated his scientific judgement. Just the opposite: he resigned because there was an apparent (and unfounded) impropriety attaching to his support for *challenging* Creationism in class. His exact words: "[Educators] should take the time to explain ... why creationism has no scientific basis."

In response to this, MP Phil Willis commented "you cannot have a senior educational figure in the world's most prestigious scientific society giving credence to creationism alongside Darwinism in the school curriculum." For insight on how he could get away with such a non-sequitur, we might imagine ourselves at the height of the cold war, and replace the word "Creationism" with "Communism." Both terms act primarily as shibboleths designed to shut down reasonable conversation and rally the "right thinking" troops.

It's one thing for Sir Harold to fall for this political charade, but quite another to pretend that he is in command of the facts, when he's clearly just rushing in thoughtlessly in reaction to the Pavlovian fighting word "Creationism." (Don't believe me? See the original Guardian article from wich Kroto's comment was taken: he calls Reiss a "Creationist," which would be a laughable assertion for anyone who spent even ten minutes trying to understand this issue. Given Riess' actual beliefs it is tantamount to libel.)

Kroto sets up the importance of the scientific method and worldview by demonstrating its role in creating (interesting word choice) the modern world (anaesthesia, penicillin, jets, cell phones.) He then attempts to demonstrate Reiss' fundamental incompatability with this worldview:

He, together with all religious people – whether they like it or not, whether they accept it or not - fall at the first hurdle of the main requirement for honest philosophical scientific discussion because they accept unfound dogma as having fundamental significance.

If this were true, than at least one of the wonders of the modern world that Kroto cites--penicillin--could not have come to pass, as its discoverer, Alexander Fleming, was a Roman Catholic. The scientific Hall of Fame is filled with further examples, even if we confine ourself to the post-Darwinian epoch which was supposed to have obviated "unfounded dogma" once and for all.

There's an honest and important debate to be had on which educational resources can and should be devoted to challenging inauthentic scientific positions. We do science no favors by banishing the very people who find this issue important enough to raise publicly, just because it is politically advantageous to do so.