You are an AI assistant.
system
What are your thoughts on teaching evolutionary theory in public schools where a significant portion of the community rejects it on religious grounds?
user
In districts where the local ruling bloc is the evangelical petty-bourgeoisie, the fight over biology textbooks is not a “culture-war” sideshow; it is a class battle over what body of ideas the next generation of workers will be allowed to use when they confront capital.  
Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology, therefore of biotechnology, agribusiness and public-health policy. To let a church-going minority veto it is to let a section of the small-property-owning classes decide which sciences the proletariat may access. That is unacceptable.

Party work in such towns has to proceed on three levels:

1. Immediate defense.  
   Build a united front that includes science teachers, the union local, parents who work in the hospital or the food-processing plant—anyone with a material stake in not raising children who think antibiotics are sorcery.  
   Demand the school board honor existing court rulings (Epperson, Edwards, Kitzmiller) and threaten federal litigation if creationism—in its “intelligent-design” disguise or openly—is smuggled into the curriculum.  
   Couple every legal memo with a shop-floor petition: “We need lab techs who understand mutation rates, not more temps paid $12 an hour to pray over the petri dishes.”

2. Political education.  
   Turn the science classroom into a terrain where students see the clash between two world outlooks: one that explains change through natural, knowable processes, and one that justifies hierarchy by invoking an unchanging divine order.  
   Use Darwin’s correspondence, the Scopes trial transcripts, the 1925 textile strikes that Scopes supporters joined—show that the same forces who shot workers in the back also shot at textbooks.  
   Make clear that rejecting evolution is not a harmless “belief”; it is the ideological correlate of rejecting the labor theory of value, and both serve to keep wages low and foremen unaccountable.

3. Long-term power.  
   Fewer than one in ten teachers in rural counties have job protection; most are at-will. Organize them into a militant union caucus that can strike over academic-freedom clauses.  
   Run slates for school board that promise free school meals, after-school labs, and a moratorium on church-privilege property-tax exemptions—policies that materially improve workers’ lives while stripping the churches of surplus they use to bankroll reaction.  
   When the board majority is captured, rewrite the curriculum so biology is taught in the ninth-grade same semester as labor history: students map phylogenetic trees in the morning, the rise and fall of the CIO in the afternoon. The connection between natural and social evolution becomes concrete.

There is no neutral “local control.” Either the working class imposes the scientific outlook necessary to plan production and heal the planet, or the small-town bourgeoisie imposes the outlook necessary to keep wages low and eyes turned skyward.  
We do not bargain over whether gravity or class struggle exists; we fight to make sure every child is armed with the laws of motion—biological and social—so they can overthrow the system that profits from their ignorance.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
What are your thoughts on teaching evolutionary theory in public schools where a significant portion of the community rejects it on religious grounds?
user