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Wired magazine's Geek Dad blog has a good point about the need for parents to insure that their children are being taught early about evolution, along with links to resources to help them do the job themselves, since there is a good chance the public schools won't be, despite official standards to the contrary.

Colin Purrington of Swathmore College is quoted to the effect that there is:

... a very large literature about when, exactly, children start to develop theories about the origin of life and the origin of adaptations. This literature shows that kids are "primed" to learn evolution even before first grade.

At his website, Purrington says:

Waiting until middle school or high school to teach evolution is, as polls show, "not so effective." ... And if you are thinking, "Oh, how so innocently naive," I'll just mention that I started teaching my children about the origin of life, descent with modification, and natural selection when they were 4 years old. Now they are 6 and 8, and understand it well enough to try to explain it to their peers.

As to leaving it to the schools, Geek Dad cites to the studies reported in the New York Times showing that about one-third of American biology teachers support the teaching of creationism or Intelligent Design. Add to that the number of teachers who either don't teach about evolution at all or water it down in significant ways because of the pressure they feel from parents and school administrators, and the odds of getting good instruction in evolutionary theory in the public schools are obviously not good.

Under those circumstances, as Purrington notes, every parent is, by necessity, a homeschooler when it comes to evolution.
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