I didn’t have many other opportunities to learn about humanity’s origin. The pastors at the evangelical youth group I attended—outside of school—told me it’s possible that dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time. We can’t know for sure, they said, because carbon dating is not to be trusted.

My experience was far from unusual. While only 13 percent of teachers said they advocate creationism or intelligent design in the classroom, based on a survey of 926 public-high-school biology teachers done in 2007, the most recent data available, the majority do not explicitly advocate either creationism or evolutionary biology. This “cautious 60 percent,” write the Penn State political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer in their 2011 article on the topic, “are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives.” (Plutzer is in the process of conducting a new survey now; he told me preliminary data suggest little has changed since 2007). And there are recent examples of school administrators doubting the value of teaching evolution. In Arizona last year, three of the candidates vying for state school superintendent wanted students to be taught intelligent design, the Arizona Daily Sun reported. In 2017, a Utah school-board member nicely summed up the concept of “teaching the controversy” when she suggested “maybe just teaching theory and letting both sides of the argument come out—whether it’s intelligent design or the Darwin origin.” Except that people who study evolution also tend to believe there is no scientific controversy.

Some educators in this ambivalent 60 percent tend to teach evolution only as it applies to molecular biology, Plutzer said, but not the macroevolution of species. (This seems like what happened to me.) Others distance themselves from the material even as they tell students it will be on a standardized test. “Their primary concern is not offending the students or their parents by characterizing the science in a way that seems to be challenging religious faith,” Plutzer told me. “I think that in some cases, the teachers themselves have doubts.”

Additionally, some teachers expose students to different “theories” about evolution and encourage them to make up their own minds. “But does a 15-year-old student really have enough information to reject thousands of peer reviewed scientific papers?” Berkman and Plutzer write in their article.

Some of these teachers might even introduce evolutionary ideas such as natural selection and microevolution. But they skip the part we skipped—the monkey part. The reason is perhaps unsurprising: Creationists “are not invested in whether evolution affects the sizes and shapes of the beaks of finches in the Galápagos,” says Glenn Branch, the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, which supports teaching evolution in schools. “They are worried about whether people were created in the image of God himself.”