Still, I was floored when Banff resident Scott Rowed, a member of the Centre for Inquiry, told me his daughter graduated from Grade 12 in Alberta without ever hearing the word “evolution.”
“The underpinnings of our life sciences courses, our curriculum, are all based on the assumptions of evolution,” said the Alberta Department of Education’s Kathy Telfer. But evolution itself is not part of the core curriculum in most Canadian schools.
“It’s not unheard of, in fact [it] may be quite common, for students to go through their entire public education without hearing about evolution,” Jason Wiles of McGill University’s Evolution Education Research Centre told me.
