Does It Matter?
Today, the Scopes Trial is most remembered for its cultural cachet during the Roaring ’20s, a decade when turn-of-the-century morality and postwar skepticism were at loggerheads. That tension found its way to the classroom, making the trial an opening salvo in our ideological disputes over education. It began with a fascinating premise: Should religious faith or empirical science take priority in educating children, and who decides? As happens in most culture-war conflicts, that premise evaporated in the heat of battle, leaving just advancing and retreating armies and ultimately ending in a stalemate.
Essential questions were not resolved by the Scopes Trial, and concerns about what students learn in school lingered. Should the evidence of biological science be accommodated at the expense of earnestly held personal convictions? Is it in the interest of children to have their baseline values thwarted by dogmatic rationalism? From students to parents, teachers to administrators, policymakers to citizens—everyone has a stake in the outcome of these arguments.
The Scopes Trial matters because, a century later, we are still engaging in these debates—between faith and science, church and state, private and public, merit and equity, national pride and self-recrimination. In the absence of either permanent victory or durable compromise, this is what the exercise of democratic control over public schools inevitably looks like.
It matters because it is right to question what students are learning and yet still concede that more knowledge is almost always better than less. Recent research, first published in Education Next, shows the repeal of evolution teaching bans (as the Butler Act was in 1967) has promoted understanding of the theory without undermining religious commitment and even made students more likely to pursue careers in STEM fields (see The Cost of Canceling Darwin, features, Summer 2022).
And it matters because even spectacles like The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes can lay the groundwork for future litigation and, in so doing, produce more consequential cases about fraught topics in schools. Mahmoud v. Taylor not only puts a tidy bow on a century of curriculum controversy but also bears a fascinating contrast to its predecessor. The dispute in Montgomery County, Maryland, was ignited not by attention-seeking townspeople but by a district swept up in cultural zeitgeist. The transgression was not against state law but against the religious convictions of a group of parents. The desired outcome was not a ban on or removal of classroom materials but the option for families to recuse themselves from exposure to them. And the conclusion was not meaningless but rather gave a voice to those who should have one and a reason for policymakers to do some soul-searching about their decisions.
It only took a century to get there. Call it the theory of educational evolution.
