Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Posts Tagged ‘faith schools’

Please Don’t Label Me

Last night I was discussing my opinions of religion with some friends. I made it clear that, contrary to what it might appear from what I write, I don’t actually want religion banned. I believe that people should be free to believe whatever nonsense they like. There are, however, three conditions that need to be met. You can belief whatever you like as long as you do it a) in private, b) amongst consenting adults and c) never in front of the children.

I think that these are three very important conditions. The first would curtail the effect that religious groups have on public life, the second would prevent anyone from forcing their religious beliefs on anyone else and the third would stop parents from forcing religion onto children while the children are still gullible enough to believe anything their parents tell them.

And completely coincidently, I see today that the people behind the Atheist Bus Campaign (was that really a year ago?) have launched a new campaign and that the subject of this campaign is faith schools – which neatly addresses my third point.

The “please don’t label me” slogan of the campaign comes from a theme that Richard Dawkins covered in The God Delusion. Speaking at the launch of this campaign, he said:

We urgently need to raise consciousnesses on this issue. Nobody would seriously describe a tiny child as a ‘Marxist child’ or an ‘Anarchist child’ or a ‘Post-modernist child’. Yet children are routinely labelled with the religion of their parents. We need to encourage people to think carefully before labelling any child too young to know their own opinions and our adverts will help to do that.

This campaign is initially being funded from money left over from the Atheist Bus Campaign, but there’s a page where you can donate more money if you like.

I firmly believe that the majority of religious people only have those beliefs because they were indoctrinated as children. If people decide to follow a religion when they are old enough to make up their own mind then of course I have no objections to that. But forcing children to believe the same fairy stories as their parents is clearly wrong and should be stopped.

No More Faith Schools

This all comes a as a bit of a surprise. But a very welcome one.

The Government has decided against backing more faith schools, the Children, Schools and Families Secretary, Ed Balls, told MPs.

In what is being seen as one of the most significant policy shifts of the post-Tony Blair era in education, he told a Commons select committee:

“It is not the policy of the Government nor my department to expand the number of faith schools. We’re not leading a drive for more faith schools.”

The report also includes this interesting titbit:

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment at the University of Buckingham, said it had been wrong to argue that church-school pupils did better in exams because of a religious ethos. It was because they could be more selective on admissions, he said.

I can’t find a transcript of the meeting (TheyWorkforYou doesn’t seem to cover select committees) but the minutes will probably appear here at some point.

What with this and the potential abolition of the blasphemy laws, it seems there’s an outbreak of sanity in the government.

Update: It seems that TheyWorkForYou do, in fact, have plans to cover select committees. But they’ve been hampered by lack of funds. So why not pop over to MySociety (the people behind TheyWorkForYou) and bung them a bit of cash. I’m going to sign up for a tenner a month.

Faith Schools Petition

I mentioned this when I signed it a year ago, but I’ve just noticed that today is the closing date for the petition to abolish faith schools.

There are currently 19,063 on the petition. It would be great if it could get to 20,000 by the end of the day.

So if you’re the kind of sensible person who doesn’t believe that children should be taught fairy stories as fact and you haven’t already signed the petition, then please get over there and sign it today.

Illogical Thought

Today I’m mainly quietly seething about illogical and superstitious morons who want to destroy the relatively sophisticated view of the world that we’ve built up over the last few hundred years. And, no, I’m not talking about muslims (though they certainly fit the bill). In this case I’m talking about christians.

It started this morning when for some reason I was reading on Wikipedia about faith-based schools. I was surprised to read how many of them there are in Britain (6,955 christian, 36 jewish, five muslim and two sikh). I got angrier as I read about how the Emmanuel Schools Foundation teaches creationism (or “intelligent design”) to its pupils and that the Prime Minister is happy with this. I was reminded of a piece that Richard Dawkins wrote in the New Statesman about his programme The Root of All Evil?. In this programme Dawkins looked at Accelerated Christian Education, a christian school curriculum that is being used in a small number of private schools in the UK. Dawkins wrote this:

One of my TV locations was a London school that follows the (American) Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) syllabus. The day after watching my show, three colleagues told me they had interviewed, for a place at university, a young woman who had been taught (not at the same school) using ACE. She turned out to be the worst candidate they had ever encountered. She had no idea that thinking was even an option: her job was either to know or guess the “right” answer. Worse, she had no clue how bad she was, having always scored at least 95 per cent in exams – the National Christian Schools Certificate (NCSC). Should my colleagues write to Ofsted about ACE and NCSC? Unfortunately, Ofsted is the organisation that gave a rave review to Tony Blair’s pet city academy in Gateshead: a Christian school whose head of science thinks the entire universe began after the domestication of the dog.

Then Candace pointed me at this piece about how unacceptable it is to call yourself an atheist in the US.

You can be elected as an openly gay politician in this country, but you can’t be elected as an openly atheistic one

That’s bloody scary. I know it’s about the US and not the UK, but there’s a worrying trend for us to follow the Americans’ lead in matters like this.

The Today programme this morning contained an interview with “John Henry, a professor of mathematics, who wants to see intelligent design taught in schools”. How you can be a professor of mathematics and support something as illogical as intelligent design, I really don’t understand.

So it’s all very depressing. It’s like the Englightenment never happened and we’re plunging back into the Dark Ages.

There was one piece of good news, the American Association for the Advancement of Science have issued a statement calling for mainstream religious communities to support the teaching of evolution in US schools. but I can’t see it having much effect and I’m becoming less and less convinced that this religious resurgence can be stopped.