I attended public school in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, USA from 1967 to 1977 (1st through 10th grade). We were taught that life had evolved over time. I read voraciously from the start, several grades above my level, and had a great interest in paleontology, anthropology, history, archaeology, and the like, so I had a pretty good grasp of science. (This was in spite of attending a rather conservative / fundamentalist type church, the so-called “Church of Christ”).
I always assumed that evolution was accepted by all the “smart kids” who actually read books outside of the required reading for school. That was usually the case. I knew that several kids and their parents didn’t believe “that they came frum no stinkin’ monkeys”, and that included several of the people who attended my local “Church of Christ” congregation. Some of the conservative Baptist folks felt the same way. But they were looked upon as being not very bright – certainly not truly educated!
When we moved to Nashville in the Fall of 1977, my mother insisted that I attend the “Church of Christ”-run private school. The people there seemed nice enough in their own way, but considered evolution to be a lie perpetrated by “thee ol’ debbul”. But I suppose that is a different story, altogether…
Fairfax County, VA Public Schools - Late 90s. Pretty much the same. But I also took AP Biology. There was a heavy emphasis on evolutionary mechanisms. Not even a whiff of creationism. I did not take AP English (and wish I had). They had a great curriculum.
It didn’t come up until seventh grade pre-AP “Life Science,” where our teacher explained that evolution wasn’t this evil thing, and just meant that organisms change, and that we didn’t need to bring religion into it at all.
Then we just discussed older animals that were extinct and how they evolved, covered the genetic squares, discussed natural selection, but didn’t get into speciation. Though we did disprove Lamarckism.
By the time I took AP Biology, we did all that again, but didn’t really go any further. We wound up skipping a lot of chapters in the book, and since I don’t remember what was in them, I don’t know if it was a time issue or a content issue.
Graduated 2003, so 2001 and 1997-1998. Smallish town in Northern Arkansas. Public school.
(I did got to a private Montessori School up to fourth grade, but we didn’t really cover evolution or even much science.)
I was on the textbook review committee for our school district when they redid biology texts. I had less than an hour to look at them so I just looked at how they handled evolution. The book for the continuation school over-simplified things, but the rest were very good, with the text used for Honors classes having a full page interview with Richard Dawkins. The texts were chosen by a committee of biology teachers.
I don’t know for sure how evolution was taught, but the material was there at least,
Grew up in rural Southern Indiana and attended high school in the early 90s. I went to a private merit-based school and was taught evolution in great detail. I was told, “Some people think evolution is false, but it is actually true. The notion of evolution is not incompatible with religion; if you think about it, most religious stories are metaphors or didactic mechanisms, so if you use basic common sense, evolution happened and the world was NOT created in 6 days.”
From what I can tell, my public school friends went into Darwin and Mendel, but more in a “history of science” way rather than, “this is evolution, genetic variation exists for these reasons and is actually a good thing” manner.