Teaching School Genetics in the 2020s: Why "Naive" Mendelian Genetics Has to Go.

Abstract

Whereas Mendelian genetics is an important research program in the life sciences, its school version is problematic. On the one hand, it contains stereotypical representations of Gregor Mendel's work that misrepresent his findings and the historical context. This deprives students from gaining an authentic picture of how science is done. On the other hand, what most students end up learning in schools are extremely simplistic accounts of heredity, whereby alleles directly control traits and phenotypes, and thus exclusively depend on which allele an individual has. Such oversimplifications of Mendelian genetics as those that we still teach in schools were exploited by ideologues in the beginning of the twentieth century to provide the presumed "scientific" basis for eugenics. This paper addresses these problems of the school version of Mendelian genetics, which I call "naive" Mendelian genetics. It also proposes a shift in school education from teaching how the science of genetics is done using model systems to teaching the complexities of development through which heredity is materialized.