Journalists and High Schoolers (was: Re: crocodylians, amphibians ...)

["Steve Brusatte" <dinoland@lycos.com>]

On Sat, 27 Oct 2001 13:43:54  
 David Marjanovic wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "chris brochu" <cbrochu@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>
>Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2001 2:33 AM
>
>> >[...] If it were that clearcut,
>> >then we would just have to keep educating the public about things
>> >they should have learned in school----spiders are not insects,
>> >mushrooms are not plants, ichthyosaurs and mammoths are not
>> >dinosaurs.
>>
>> Except that most of them don't learn it in school.
>
>Indeed. I did learn in school that spiders aren't insects, but I was taught
>explicitely that mushrooms _are_ plants ("ooh, strange plants they are, they
>can't photosynthesize, so they are forced to look for other ecological
>niches" -- their inability to photosynthesize was emphasized over and over
>again as a special feature, making it sound like an apomorphy. ). The (old)
>biology teacher I had at that time simply didn't believe me when I told her
>otherwise. I didn't learn _anything_ about ichthyosaurs, mammoths, dinosaurs
>or any paleontology simply because there wasn't enough _time_ and both
>biology teachers* decided that something else was more urgent. From what I
>heard from other classes of my school and from other schools it was largely
>the same everywhere.
>Evolution is taught, though :-)
>
>*Paleontology is supposed to be taught twice in Austria, in the 8th and the
>12th year of school. Teachers sometimes change.
>

Well, it's nice to see that Austria has at least a national plan to teach 
paleontology.  Try doing that in the United States and you'd be shot down...  

Unfortunately, in many places in the United States evolution is _not_ taught.  
Here in Illinois there is no law or school board decision forbidding the 
teaching of evolution, but at my high school parents frequently complain when 
freshman biology teachers (biology is taught to most kids as freshmen) do 
discuss evolution.  Therefore, most of the teachers have shied away from it, 
which is unfortunate.  

Personally, I have taken biology twice (both regular and "advanced").  In 
neither class we discussed anything related to evolution, and by that I mean 
_nothing_, even in the so-called advanced class.  In terms of fossils they were 
also never mentioned.  During freshman year we spent time discussing the basic 
principles of life, cells, etc., and then spent the duration of the year 
studying Linnean ranks (i.e., what is an echinoderm, what features constitute a 
mollusk, etc.).  

Perhaps it is for these reasons that high school students-and journalists-don't 
seem to have a good grasp of what a crocodile is and what a pholidosaur is.  
Not that pholidosaurs and such would be discussed in school explicitely, but at 
least talking about evolution wouldn't hurt.  I fear that most people in the 
general public don't know what _evolution_ is.  A few weeks ago I was talking 
to a few of my friends about science, religion, evolution, etc.  The two or 
three friends with whom I was discussing were all very knowledgeable people, 
but none of them knew that evolution involved mutations and natural selection!  
All of them had gone through freshman biology, and at least one had taken the 
aforementioned advanced biology course.  

As a high school student and part-time journalist, I would like to think that 
most students and journalists know what evolution is, what a dinosaur is, etc.  
However, this isn't the case.  I just hope that _science_ reporters, like 
Wilford and Michael Lemonick of Time Magazine (I think he teaches an 
astrophysics course at Princeton) will be able to differentiate between a 
crocodile and Sarcosuchus when they report the discovery.

Steve

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Steve Brusatte-DINO LAND PALEONTOLOGY
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