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Anti-scientific attitudes can impose substantial costs on societies. Can schools be an important agent in mitigating the propagation of such attitudes? This paper investigates the effect of the content of science education on anti-scientific attitudes, knowledge, and choices. The analysis exploits staggered reforms that reduce or expand the coverage of evolution theory in US state science education standards. I compare adjacent cohorts in models with state and cohort fixed effects and conduct fine-grained placebo tests to rule out scientific, religious and political confounders. There are three main results. First, expanded evolution coverage increases students’ knowledge about evolution. Second, the reforms translate into greater evolution belief in adulthood, but do not crowd out religiosity or affect political attitudes. Third, the reforms affect high-stakes life decisions, namely the probability of working in life sciences., Center for Law & Economics Working Paper Series, 2022 (08)

Benjamin W. Arold prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that address various aspects of how school curricula affect students in the classroom and beyond. Chapter 2 demonstrates that the abolishment of compulsory religious education in Germany does not only affect religiosity and gender role attitudes, but also affects the high-stakes choices of getting married, having children and participating in the labor market. Chapter 3 provides evidence that the content of science education standards in the US does not only affect related knowledge of students and adulthood attitudes, but also translates into high-stakes occupational choices. Chapter 4 exemplifies that school curricula reforms can also have unintended consequences by showing that a reform of education standards in math and English has negative spillovers on student achievement in science. Finally, Chapter 5 highlights the fundamental role teachers, the transmitters of educational content in school, play in the formation of human capital even in dimensions generally thought of as genetically determined.