Here is what happens when you expose schools to fundamentalist religions such as Islam, fundamentalist Judaism, or evangelical Christianity.
0-4 Child born, is immediately given a magic bath and trained to pray at night in case they die.
4-6 years enters school, with a fair degree of reasoning still remaining, taught to pray
7-11 years begins to loose sight of reality in favour of bronze age fables and fairy tales
12-16 years taught to replace reasoning with faith and an unfounded conviction that God will see that all will be well, so long as you give him money and don't masturbate
17-18 too busy not having sex
18+ Join army, join church, get married vote for an idiot because he or she says they stand for god and country, and/or old fashioned morals that advocate killing whores, gays, troublemakers, foreigners and scare people who are the wrong colour .

Governments like nothing better than a pliable, unquestioning workforce, who accept any old rubbish as true, which is why they still won't tax churches as they provide exactly this in bucket fulls.

Yes, the dumbing down of America is downright scary. The far right has gotten control of numerous state boards of education and in some cases have legislated that if evolution is taught in the classroom then creationism, or "intelligent design", must also be taught AS A SCIENCE. Consequently, many biology teachers have simply refused to teach evolution at all rather than be so dishonest. The home-schooled are rarely taught evolution either, or if they are, are taught very erroneous versions of evolution. The evolution questions asked on Quora are usually so bizarre and ignorant that experts have trouble even answering them because they have to dispel about a half dozen false assumptions first.
The portent for the future life scientists of America is dismal because so many of our high school students are so unprepared for college. This is probably the main reason our graduate schools are so full of foreign students, who are so much better prepared for professional careers.
BTW, I was taught creationism in religion class and had no problem with it. But, when science and religion marry, both are bastardized.

I agree. That comment of the biology teacher is appalling and idiotic. And the way some religious folk are doubly ignorant in equating the phrase "survival of the fittest" to a belief that Atheists subscribe to a cold-hearted Eugenicist outlook is frustrating They wrongly believe that phrase means only strongest and most intelligent survive, when actually it means that the most adaptable survive, and that much of it is a crapshoot, dependent on ever changing environmental variables, and some dependent on pure luck. And then they wrongly conclude that it would logically follow that Atheists would subscribe to an outlook in favor of allowing the less "fit" to perish in order to strengthen and better perpetuate the species. And I even had a contentious exchange with a condescending asshole on this site, who by all indications was an Atheist or Agnostic (I know that all on this site are not), whose attitude to a comment I made was apparently due to his surprisingly inaccurate view of why sex is a biological imperative. It is not some "instinct" we have to perpetuate the species. It is because those in whom there was a strong drive to have sex (driven by pleasure) were the ones which reproduced, thereby selecting for that trait.

I doubt people in general have read The Origin of the Species. I just pick up bits of knowledge along the way. If I was asked to explain something like 'the god of the gaps', I couldn't.