Have some faith in the kids
AS A CHILD, I attended a fundamentalist Christian school in St. Petersburg, Fla. At Keswick Christian School, the Bible was our textbook. We pledged allegiance to it every morning, and it was a daily subject of study, like math and English; we memorized lengthy passages of Scripture and were tested on their meaning.
On the first morning of my fourth-grade science class, I was told to open my King James version of the Bible and read from the book of Genesis: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
It was the early 1980s, and "intelligent design" was not yet in fashion; instead, we learned creation science. My teacher taught us that God had created the Earth and everything on it in six days, resting on the seventh, and we learned that we were all descendants of that first living, breathing couple, Adam and Eve. We made mathematical calculations based on Genesis that proved that the Earth was not billions of years old but a mere 6,000, and I learned that the Grand Canyon had been created by the biblical Great Flood.
My science textbook was Christian, and it bolstered these lessons with warnings about the lengths to which evolutionists would go to prove their theory. We were likely the only schoolchildren in Florida who knew the details of the Piltdown Man fiasco, in which human remains found in a Sussex quarry early in the 20th century were used, in an elaborate hoax, to prove the existence of evolution's "missing link." We watched film strips, with titles such as "God of Creation," that reminded us that the natural world disproved Darwin's theory of evolution. I found books in the school library with titles such as "Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No!"
Browsing the shelves of our public library, however, I found different books -- books that explained Charles Darwin's theory in more detail and offered scientific analyses of the age of the Earth that made no mention of Genesis or the Great Flood. When I asked my teachers about this, they tried to offer guidance. But puzzling through these contradictions marked the beginning of my first serious questioning of fundamentalism, a questioning that eventually led me away from the tenets of fundamentalism and to a secular life.
