OK, sounds like the guy was not only somewhat imprudent, but way over the line. Still, a person violating the curriculum in a left-wing or atheistic direction would not have been punished this severely.
There is a simple grandeur in the view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or few forms, and that whilst this our planet has gone circling according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of change, have gone on replacing each other, that from so simple an origin, through the power of gradual selection of influential changes, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been evolved."
-Darwin
Furthermore, Darwin himself, later in life, stated basically that beauty does not actually exist - and current science states that we all must keep in mind that design is also non-existent --- nature merely displays the appearance of design.
I am not a creationist nor do I think id should currently be taught in high school, but I see no reason why students should not be allowed to explore the questions (or simular questions) above in class. I would think this is especially true considering what they will be exposed to in college biology.
As posted previously:
Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism
---Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5
Consider consciousness
Is it merely an "emergent property" of natural selection? If so, where does the material complexity of human thought and the qualitative pieces for beauty and grandeur exist? Is human thought nothing more than the liver producing bile (see Huxley/Cabanis)? Until naturalism can reduce the qualitative properties of human consciousness into material things, the arguments based on naturalism are as immaterial as any other argument.