If a student’s parents were absolutely opposed to the idea of evolution and didn’t want their son or daughter to be taught about it, could they opt out of public school science courses and have those units made up at a private religous Junior High or High School or have those units made up by home-schooling with textbooks that represented their beliefs?
On a similar note, suppose I just didn’t believe in algebra? Could my kids have opted out of math class?
On a more serious note, I never did believe in volleyball, could I have been excused from gym?
I guess part of it would depend on if they wanted their child to get into college.
In my high school phy ed (gym) class, there was a short section on dancing. Several students from a very conservative religion brought notes from their parents, and got excused from that part of the class. But they didn’t just get waived from the whole class, it was a requirement for graduation.
P.S. For the excused students, the teacher pulled out some ping-pong tables and had them play ping-pong for the length of the dancing section. After the rest of us saw what kinds of dancing they were teaching, heard the music they were playing, and discovered that we were randomly matched with someone from the girls phy ed class, we wanted our parents to write similar notes. But it was too late!
The teachers taught the dances that were popular when they were young, using the music from that era. Which was at least 20 or 30 years ago!
There is a big difference between having a class requirement waived, and making it up in other ways: it’s pretty common in my school for the super-competive class-rank kids to “test out” of health so that they can take another AP course–for certain courses, if you can pass a test (equivilant to the final, and the health one is notoriously easy) they will give you credit. A lot of the biligual kids do this fast forward through their foreign language requirements. Other kids take various courses through coorospondence high schools for whatever reason–and you can take anything that way–I technically graduated from a coorospondence high school. I suspect you could pass the biology course from such a program even if your parents ripped the sections on evolution out of your textbook and you just didn’t do those assignments. Our school will take a private school credit from anywhere that is accredited, but I have no idea if a private school can get accredited if they don’t teach anything about evolution. But I * strongly* suspect that you can.
However, I don’t think you can graduate from a Texas High School without getting a credit for biology from somewhere.