Paul Sims on the ‘faith’ schools documentary fallout
Richard Dawkins’s documentary, Faith School Menace?, was broadcast last night on More4 (you can watch online here), and its contents have raised some serious questions about the role played by faith schools in British education. Perhaps most eye-catching of all was the discovery that some school are presenting creationism to pupils as scientific fact, albeit in RE lessons, with Dawkins meeting a 60-strong year 10 science class at a Muslim secondary school who all believed the Qur’anic creation story.
In response to this, the Guardian Comment is Free Belief desk have commissioned Erfana Bora, a science teacher at a Muslim school in Leicester, to explain why she doesn’t see a problem with children being taught scientific and religious explanations with equal weight. It’s fine, she says – the kids learn about scientific explanations in science lessons, and then head off to religion lessons to be taught the creation stories:
So, what’s the problem? In Bora’s view, it’s no different from what happens in a regular, non-religious state school:
“The funny thing is that pupils in state schools are taught the same curriculum content in science lessons – and ask the very same questions. Pupils with a faith background will learn the lesson content in a state school while holding their own viewpoints – and will then attempt to integrate two worldviews – inevitably reaching differing points of “belief equilibrium”, as it were. Pupils in faith schools do exactly the same.”
Well, in my view, that’s not entirely correct.
Continues: http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2010/08/dawkins-documentary-raises-worrying.html
The British Humanist Association campaigns against ‘faith’ schools and their various privileges in teaching, employment and admissions. They are raising money to fund and resource their ‘Faith’ Schools officer for another year of dedicated campaigning on religion and schools. See Faith Schools: Just Say No.
I find it curious that education, especially primary and secondary education has anything to do with what pupil’s think. I don’t count my education to have been anything other than abysmal, but I was never asked by any of my teachers what I thought. I was asked to recite what I had learned in class, what I “knew”, and then I was expected to apply it to some problem or other.
For instance: I was told that when you add 1 to another 1 you get 2, and that on such occasions when one might encounter 1+?=2 one can safely say that the missing number is 1. I was never asked whether I believed 1+1=2. Never indoctrinated into alternative mathematics. I was never asked my opinion.
I was taught facts, how to reiterate them and how to apply them to some extent to the wider world; I was never expected to hold an opinion about them and if I did so, I could expect a lengthy discussion on the matter after school. (Detention, as it was popularly known; because it detained you from doing something you wanted to do.)
I’m not holding my school up as a good example, but when did education start giving pupil’s the option of believing what their teachers told them? In my day, the ’90s, it was assumed that what teachers told you was true; because it got you a good mark in exams (that’s all that really mattered).
Now, faith schools are creating – or expanding – this dissonance between what is “true” and what is “correct”. The former being religious truth (a synonym for non-sense) and the latter being the correct way to achieve a good mark in an exam, to the satisfaction of those heathen scientists.
Give me strength, faith schools are actually bring up pupils to be politicians; duplicitous, two-faced morons completely detached from reality. It makes you wanna weep!