Teaching Of Creationism In Public Schools example essay topic

As far back as people were on this earth, our culture has struggled to adapt a reason of how we came about. Seventy-five years ago, on July 10, 1925, the American Civil Liberties Union represented John Scopes in the historic "monkey trial", the landmark case that established that evolution could be taught in the nation's public schools. The case, which is among the most famous in America's history, also brought the ACLU to the public's attention for the first time and placed the organization in the forefront of the debate over the separation of church and state and, the teaching of creationism in public schools. In the late nineteenth century Charles Darwin came up with a theory on evolution. He suggested that all organisms were related to one another at some point. Although some scientists during the early nineteenth century accepted that life on earth did existed for awhile, but they were discouraged from developing ideas other then species were fixed for all time.

Scientists and ministers had been used to seeing the world as God's creation, but Darwin challenged their views. John T. Scopes, a young 24-year-old teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was brought to trial for teaching the theory of evolution to his high school science class. His teaching of this subject violated a state law, which had just been passed, that prohibited the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible". Two major factors led to the development of anti evolution movement of the 1920's.

First, the post World War I social changes created a sense of cultural crisis among conservative Americans. Behaviors such as public dancing, which usually were looked down upon, became acceptable among most of the public. Second, high-school education became available to a large number of people who had even wished to learn more than reading and writing. As a result people came into contact with new subjects, such as evolutionary biology.

Young teenagers were look at as fresh meat, and vulnerable to spiritually. Fundamentalist who opposed to evolution probably would have remained disorganized and lost if they hadn't found a leader in William Jennings Bryan. Bryan who had demanded the direct election of senators and helped push women's suffrage into the Constitution, called for public schools to only teach by the standards of the Bible, and to virtually sweep evolution from American textbooks through legislative action. Bryan concluded that the theory of evolution was responsible for a remarkable decline in moral standards among students.

Bryan started speaking publicly against Darwinism in 1921. Both speeches argued that Darwinism didn't follow the traditional Bacon ian definition of science as a process of explaining facts, but rather drew conclusions from observed similarities. Clarence Darrow, a famous attorney who agreed to lead the Scopes defense. Darrow and Bryan were two famous it was inevitable that the trial who catch the attention of the media right away. The trial started in July of 1925.

The most famous part of the trial had to be when Darrow called Bryan as a witness for Biblical literalism (to his fellow prosecutors dismay Bryan accepted the challenge), then proceeded to humiliate him. Darrow had planned his attack on Bryan very carefully and succeeded. He strayed away from the questions about human evolution and from the more sensitive points of the New Testament. Darrow's strategy was more about quizzing him on what he new about "the more extravagant miracles". Many of the Fundamentalists regarded Bryan as having betrayed them during Darrow's questioning. "New papers across the nation printed verbatim accounts of the cross-examination, and many editorialists agreed that "it has brought about a striking revelation of the fundamentalist mind in all its shall depth and narrow arrogance". (.