Is the teaching of evolution really necessary to understand science or other academic subjects?
You can certainly learn mathematics, physics or chemistry without learning anything about evolution, but it is not possible to make sense of biology without understanding it. Evolution is a fundamental “backbone” which makes biology hang together. The comment has been made that previous to evolution, biology truly was more like stamp collecting — organisms and biological mechanisms were collected and described, but there was no way to understand how or why things worked the way they did. The science could not have become a rigorous, fully described “hard” science without an understanding of evolutionary principles enabling people to start designing experiments. There are still people who teach and study biology and life sciences while subscribing to creationism, but they are in a very small minority; even if one’s work does not require the use of evolutionary principles, the evidence of their existance and operation in biology is so pervasive that it takes a real commitment to ignore
