You know, I was looking over this Scientific American piece debunking creationist (sorry “ID”) arguments and found myself wondering, how much would creationists really like it if public schools were to genuinely “teach the debate” in public schools? That is, what if after presenting the theory and massive evidence supporting evolution, biology teachers were to note that, opposed to vast majority of scientists who agree that evolution is the best available theory, there are an incredibly tiny coterie of scientists, mostly religious ideologues in the orbit of the Discovery Institute, whose arguments have been throughly rebutted and overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific community?
As it stands, students can still maintain a kind of doublethink, learning what they need to in order to pass their bio tests, while sustaining their belief in special creation—maybe even aware there is an ID “debate” of sorts, but not how incredibly outgunned the creationists are. It would, in other words, probably tend to exaggerate the conflict between Darwinian and theistic worldviews, in favor of the former. If curricula were changed to “teach the debate” in an honest way, I rather doubt the creationists would like the result.