I did Indiana public schools in the mid 90s and there was no mention of evolution (or creationism). They talked about biology but no evolution. i wonder if there is some policy in the state, or it is just a coincidence.
I didn’t learn about evolution until college biology.
Northern California. Public schools. Born in '78.
I knew about and accepted evolution for as long as I can remember; probably picked up reading some of Carl Sagan’s books (my grandparents had a bunch of them and I read them vociferously).
I think college was the first time that I recall even hearing that some people didn’t believe in evolution. It was like hearing that some people believed in a flat Earth. It just never came up before then, and the idea that evolution was controversial, let alone that some people didn’t believe in it, was somewhat astonishing to me.
I had some mild Catholic instruction in junior high/high school, but evolution was never brought up there, either.
Graduated HS in 75. Public schools grades 1-8 I don’t recall studying it, but it was something everyone knew (or didn’t discuss if they disbelieved.). The school system was reasonably liberal so I doubt it was repressed.
Private military HS in FL, complete with required weekly chapel & a Christian but typically military chaplain in that all faiths were supported. It was more about tradition and character than theology. Biology was taught by-the-book and the book was decent; one month/chapter on evo per se, and it implicitly underscored a lot of material in other chapters.
I remember a lot of it, including things we’ve revised. Nobody mentions Miners and Botista today that I’m aware of, and I doubt archaebacteria were mentioned. “Ontology recapitulates phylogeny” was raised only to be dismissed as wrong, without a nod to how much ontology does illuminate both phylogeny and evolution.
The book was decent but was probably not very up-to-date.
I wasn’t aware that sane intelligent educated people were creationists until the late 90’s when a guy at work discussed it. He knew he was the iconoclast in that setting, and discussed it pretty sensibly, presenting argument and defending them without getting defensive. In the early 2000s I decided to seriously research (as in armchair research) the subject & got a shelf of books and collected web links. I discovered that the creationists had diverse contradictory theories, there was no credible hypothesis other that god of the gaps, and that nearly every seemingly credible proponent wasn’t following the rules of discourse (eg, if challenged on a point of fact, they’d repeatedly promise to follow up with data but fail to, and would repeat arguments that they couldn’t back up.) They failed the basic credibility tests, just like a lot of discredited scientists.
Hey a fellow Los Alamosian! Although it sounds like you left the school system just as I was entering (1976-1989). I second your impression that for a town filled with scientists there were a huge number of churches.
you seem to have a much better memory for what was taught. I don’t exactly recall where I learned what, since much of what I learned about any given subject was from outside of school. We learned that the earth was billions of years old, Dinosaurs didn’t overlap with humans, humans were descended from apes etc. I seem to recall ridiculing the idea of Lamarckian evolution so we must have covered the Darwin’s theory. But I also recall that we didn’t get around to covering it in High school biology. With any big textbook, for the fun of it I would check what was covered on page 666, and found that in my biology text book it was Evolution, which seemed ironically appropriate.
[QUOTE=Buck Godot]
…humans were descended from apes etc.
[/QUOTE]
See? They taught you wrong! Humans aren’t descended from apes (leaving aside that humans ARE apes, of course). We are descended from a common ancestor. 
But the Roswell thingy? Totally true. I’ve been to the Alien Museum on main street, so you know it’s got to be true!
Yeah, I thought that someone might quibble with that but that’s what we were taught. We were also taught that Ben Franklin discovered electricity, that Columbus was unusual for thinking the world was round, and that electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom like little planets.
Basic lies to childrenstuff.
Wait…are you saying the Earth is ROUND??? 
And I totally think that electricity didn’t exist in any form before Ben, um, got his kid to fly a kite in a thunderstorm and, um…it didn’t actually get hit by lightning and, er…well, he made the story up.
Ok…maybe you’ve got a point about that whole Earth is round thingy after all. But, still, we weren’t descended from apes (well…not the apes from today. We were descended from OTHER, um, say proto-apes…which would have been apes at the time I suppose. Oh, ok…we were descended from apes…but not TODAY’S apes!). Plus, those damned dirty apes destroyed the Statue of Liberty!! I saw it in a documentary a few decades ago…
I had a strange experience with it. I went to high school in a small, blue-collar Rust Belt town in the 1980s. Most parents simply didn’t care what was being taught in school, and most of the kids never paid attention anyway. They were all going to get great jobs at the screen door factory or whatever, straight out of high school.
Our biology teacher did a good job with anatomy and physiology, but he completely skipped evolution. One day, however, he cued up a silent film loop, telling us that he was just showing us the film for entertainment and not to draw any conclusions from it. The film was a cartoon of these funny-looking creatures emerging from a sea and going through evolution. Then he shut off the projector and we went back to dissecting frogs. I’ve Googled for the name and origin of the film but to no avail.
No idea what to conclude from this. Was he a creationist and trying to satisfy some kind of requirement to teach something about evolution without actually teaching it? He really didn’t seem the type. Was he worried about kids complaining to their parents about being taught evolution? Like I said, I just cannot see this happening. Nobody would have cared.
Younger readers, I wanted to provide a link so you could understand what a film loop is, but couldn’t quickly locate anything. Google if interested.
Learned it in great detail from kindergarten on (Southern California public schools, 1962-17). It helped that my father was a high school Biology teacher. But all of my classes in science covered it and made no reference to any crack-pot idea as an alternative.
Minnesota, early 1980s, public school
The Science curriculum wasn’t GOOD - it was pretty basic (and my high school Physics text book said someday man might walk on the moon) - and evolution was taught at that sort of basic level.
My son got Biology last year - evolution, and with a lot more technical science than I got. No mention of creationism that I know of, but he wouldn’t have said anything. But nothing in the study materials.
I think I saw this cartoon too, but I haven’t been able to find it either. I remember an amoeba-like thing driving a tractor. It was really funny, IIRC. But in my case it was just a brief part of a unit which took two or three months.
You had a TIME MACHINE?? Cool!
I really don’t remember any evolution, OR creationism, when I was in elementary school. There was a play in which some people traveled back in time to the time of dinosaurs, but that’s it. I wasn’t science minded, more into history than prehistory, and I did like math and literature.
Ditto. I remember a teacher in elementary school mentioning off-hand that you don’t inherit acquired traits-- this was a public school teacher, and said something about people not knowing this a long time ago, and thinking that if they cut off rats’ tails, they could get them to produce tailless off-spring.
I had a teacher in Jewish school explain that people made dogs. HaShem made wolves, and people bred dogs from wolves, and made different breeds of dogs for different purposes, the same way HaShem made wheat, and people made bread. So, I actually got a closer look at the mechanics of evolution from a religious school teacher than any public school teacher.
When I worked in a public school, the biology teacher whose class I worked in said outright that she skipped the chapter on evolution, because she didn’t need the aggravation. She used to try to teach it, and she had people calling her at home, leaving angry messages, and she was over trying to deal with it.
Personally, I intend to leave some angry messages if someone skips the chapter of evolution when my son is in high school.
I already knew what evolution was by the time I was four or five, from being taken to museums, and reading books from the library (or having them read to me); I can’t imagine studying all those things in biology without knowing about evolution.
Teachers skirt the word. They teach all the components, but they never tie them together. It’s all there, but unorganized. It’s like getting an egg, some flour, some sugar, some baking powder, a stick of butter, and some cocoa powder in a bowl, with a candle stuck in it, and someone saying “Happy Birthday.”
Chicago (White, middle/working class) suburb, born in 1974, graduated high school in 1992, attended public school the whole way.
I don’t recall anything coming up in elementary school. I don’t think it entered our minds at all. We were fascinated with dinosaurs, as all kids are, and visited the Field Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Science and Industry once a year on field trips, but I don’t recall anything about evolution.
Jr. High Biology was when I first saw a Punnet Square and learned about fruit flies and peas, and the Survival of the Fittest theory. Darwin and the finches and all that.
I can’t recall if it was in Jr. High or High School that Punctuated Equilibrium and Lamarckian Evolution were brought up. Both were only brought up to be immediately shut down as things that people used to think, but we now know aren’t so. Now we know (we were taught) that evolution is a very slow process due to random mutations being slightly advantageous that gradually create different species - except when it isn’t, like those soot colored moths. I know know that Punctuated Equilibrium is both newer and not so thoroughly debunked as we were taught, and that it’s a form of gradualism, not its opposite. So, they kinda got that wrong (or I learned it wrong.)
The paragraph on Lamarck contained an illustration of a rat and a rat with a cut off tail, woodcut style. Funny how I can still see that in my mind’s eye.
I did believe in a God at that point, but never questioned evolution. I believed in God the Watchmaker, who stirred the primordial soup and gave it the spark of life and then sat back to see what happened. Nothing I was taught invalidated that, but neither did it encourage it.
Creationism? Never mentioned. Like others, I was shocked sometime in college to discover that there were real Creationists. Then I thought they must be a sliver of a fraction of a minority. I’m still shocked every time I read something like 42% of Americans are Creationists. I mean…really?! Yes, exactly like finding out that people still believe the world is flat.
I don’t recall if it was something I was told, or something that I figured out on my own, but I assumed growing up that the “days” in Genesis were very long days. Or rather, that God was beyond the human concept of time, so He could make a Day as long as he needed. (Similarly, I believed that the centuries that some of the really old dudes lived in the Old Testament were similarly fuzzy measurements of time, because God doesn’t use our calendar.) I was not raised religious, but was very interested in The Bible, so read it on my own.
I forgot to say where I went to school. I went to a Jewish day school in Manhattan pre-school through 2nd grade, then public school in Queens 3rd through eighth. I went to high school in Bloomington, Indiana, which is a very blue town in a very red state, but the high school serves not just the city but the whole surrounding county, so you have the kids of the professors at Indiana University there, but you have kids from very fundamentalist families there as well, and they are the squeakiest wheels. The professors just think of high school as a stepping stone to whatever college their kid can get into, but it’s the end of the line for a lot of families, and whatever their kids learn there will stick. These are kids who go to VBS from age five until they are old enough to be counselors, and no one ever has to explain to them what VBS is (vacation bible school).
The high school where I worked is the same one I went to as a student.
Junior high through high school was early to mid 80s. I was in Northwest Ohio in a Catholic run school. We got taught about both evolution and creationism. Evolution was taught in science class. Creationism was covered in religion classes covering what some other religions believed in. Creationism was also covered in history class when we discussed the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Basically that animals evolve due to environmental stresses. Like how a giraffes long neck was so that it could eat leaves on top of the trees while the other animals could not.
Fairfax County, VA public schools, early 1990s: I think we got a pretty good overview of evolution in ninth-grade biology; we may have gotten something earlier, but I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure we also had to write a paper about whether schools should teach alternative theories in that same ninth-grade biology class, and if so in what context, so I guess the teacher would have had to introduce the idea of the existence of said theories, but I don’t really remember the details of what she said.
We definitely had to read the Book of Genesis (all of it, along with Exodus, Job, the Song of Songs, all four Gospels, and Revelation), but it was in AP English, assigned alongside Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, and presented as “you really need to know about all this stuff in order to make sense of the last two thousand years of Western literature.” My high school was pretty awesome.
Small town parochial minnesotan high school in the early-mid 2000s.
My two strongest memories re: high school and evolution are of my ninth grade biology teacher skipping the chapter on evolution because “as catholics we believe Jesus created the world” and a conversation with the Bio II teacher about macro and micro evolution which I shared with my mom that night who snorted disdainfully and explained that there is only evolution and the teacher was/is a nutbar.
Since my only college science was the intro to chemistry class, evolution is one of the biggest areas in which I lack any real formal education. What I know about evolution, I learned from my mother, books by people like Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley, and conversations here on the dope.