Students cannot be required to hold any particular belief about the age of the Earth and the origins of species. They can, however, be required to know what the overwhelming majority of scientists believe about those two things. They should understand the theory of evolution but whether or not to personally accept it is their own business.

I refer you to a previous comment of mine in this thread:

“That said, when you take a class in history, one of the unstated assumptions is that you will buy into (or at least act as if you will buy into) the idea that the historical record as we understand it has some understandable and discoverable relationship to the actual history.”

A fair number of my middle school students can’t tell time or multiple single digit numbers.

Science? Hahaha! I try to teach it, but…yeah.

We can say anything we like, as can anybody else.

Being a bit more cooperative with what I understand you to mean, we can say that the available scientific evidence strongly supports the evolution of humans after dinosaurs (and most other sauropods) were no longer about. We can further say that there is no credible scientific evidence to contradict this theory. (I have said that or similar things at tedious length to real, live young-Earthers.)

All of those statements only work within the framework of the scientific method, however. It happens that I find that framework quite useful, and haven’t found any evidence that would cause me to discard it (a recursive scientific method, I suppose). But that’s (at least largely) because I think that Occam’s/Ockham’s razor is a useful and intellectually satisfying philosophical tool.

Discard that tool (which is not, and is not intended to be, falsifiable) and you are left with a more difficult philosophical dilemma. Many people do not believe (a judgment based on my observation of their actions) that truths (or “truths” if you prefer) revealed in sacred books need to be falsifiable to be credible or important. And given arbitrarily complex starting conditions, it is impossible to prove that the universe existed in the instant before you read this, much like it is impossible to prove anything about the existence of anything outside the memory of living beings or anything that has yet to happen.

That said, I’m willing to bet quite large sums of money that the sun will rise tomorrow even though I won’t be able to prove it will until it has, because I assign a probability to that event high enough to be functionally indistinguishable from 1.

As noted, I find the sort of arbitrary complexity required by young-Earth “theories” both inelegant and not useful, but that doesn’t make my preferred philosophy true, just often predictive and normally quite satisfying to me.

That said, when you take a class in history, one of the unstated assumptions is that you will buy into (or at least act as if you will buy into) the idea that the historical record as we understand it has some understandable and discoverable relationship to the actual history. The same would apply if you were to take a job as a company historian (or whatever).

If somebody random calls you up while you are making dinner and wants to take up your time with intrusive questions about history, however, there should be no assumption that you have the same worldview.

But, that said, I don’t think that possibility has much to do with the issue here. Absent more evidence, I assume that the results are mostly a result of sampling error, stupidity, and possibly a significant number of respondents choosing the most entertaining answer out of perversity. (I include that last possibility because I find it personally attractive; if I didn’t just routinely hang up on surveyors, I’d probably do it myself.)