The primary argument against faith schools is that of the autonomy of the child. Here’s how the BHA puts it:

The main educational argument against faith-based schools is a simple matter of principle: the proper role of publicly-funded schools should be to prepare children for adult life as citizens of a complex, pluralist society. Schools should take care to be impartial, fair and balanced when controversial subjects are discussed, and it is as wrong for publicly funded schools to promote particular religious faiths, making claims for their truth that are heavily disputed, as it would be for them to promote particular political viewpoints. Schools should respect the autonomy and rights of their pupils, preparing them in due course to make their own mature decisions about their beliefs and values. We recognise that parents generally wish their children to adopt their own values and beliefs and, sharing that attitude ourselves, we respect their wishes. However, we also respect the autonomy of the individual, even when young, and we deplore the way that some parents seek to close rather than open options for their children, and to keep them in ignorance of, rather than to inform them about and help them appraise, alternatives.

There are, in the UK, a wide variety of faiths and non-faiths. While adherents to any particular viewpoint, myself included, may well be convinced of the inherent veracity of their own ideas, the fact remains that there are strong disagreements. We can all agree, however, that nobody should be indoctrinated: in a free and open society, religious or non-religious belief should be adopted autonomously and voluntarily. Children are in no position to make that decision before they have full information on the wide range of faiths and non-faiths available. Children are not mentally equipped to reject indoctrination of any form, and to take advantage of this is clearly immoral, by any standards. I would argue that the right of the child to be educated in a fair and open manner as to the complexities of the world trumps by far the so-called ‘rights’ of parents to indoctrinate their children, but even if you disagree, it is clearly not the role of the state to assist parents in this endeavour.

I’m sure that there are strong evangelists who would claim it doesn’t matter how the person comes to see ‘the truth’, simply that they do. This is clearly a violation of individual rights, and I suspect most religious people are far too reasonable to think this way. As well as being a fundamental human right, individual choice based on full information is surely the only reasonable way to approach the situation in which we find ourselves - that of a multi-faith, and no-faith, country and world, with strong disagreements on all sides.

To be clear, this is very different from the ‘teach all sides’ argument often applied to the teaching of creationism/evolution. Creationism is demonstrably wrong. The Humanist Philosopher’s Group draws a distinction between the idea of evidence as it relates to science, the arts and religion. Science is the process of the scientific method, and the strong evidence-based claims that requires. The arts are entirely subjective - you cannot teach the rights or wrongs of, say, literary interpretation. Although religious believers and non-believers claim arguments and evidence above that of the subjective, the fact remains that there is no consensus, the evidence does not match that required by the scientific method, and a multitude of faiths have incompatible beliefs. Rational people disagree, with no side able to provide acceptable proof one way or another. Children must be shown that the questions of faiths and non-faiths - whether there is an afterlife, god etc. - are open and heavily disputed. They can in this way make an informed decision.

The obvious objection is that faith schools are not necessarily incompatible with this view. They could strive to be objective and to teach about all religious faiths and non-faiths, and in this way can educate children to become autonomous. This is unlikely, and is the subject of the next post.

#2 of 6

The Education and Inspections Bill 2006 establishes the concept of ‘trust schools’. These are entirely publicly-funded and run by an external governing body which controls admissions, owns the assets and has freedoms to innovate in the National Curriculum. Where the school is deemed to have a ‘religious character’, government admissions policy grants schools the right to give preference to pupils of a particular faith. There already exist a relatively small number of Foundation and ‘Volutary Aided’ schools, which differ on minor details but are very similar to the proposed trust schools. These are collectively known as ‘faith schools’ as the governing body is invariably religious in nature.

This topic was recently discussed on Paul’s blog and generated much discussion in the comments, generally all in favour. I knew little of faith schools and didn’t want to wade in, so have spent the last few days reading up on the concept and the various arguments for and against. I came out firmly against them, but not for reasons I expected. I’m going to split the arguments into various posts, and in the next I’ll discuss what seems to be the primary argument against the establishment of such schools.

The most interesting conclusion is that I see no reason for the religious and non-religious to disagree on this.

#1 of 6

Somebody called Mark left this comment on the below post about Doctor Who:

You are of course free to post about Doctor Who on your own blog.
However, my concern as with lots of otherposts on blogs listed on “bloggers for Labour” is the impression this gives to passing possible Labour voters and how it makes us look to our opponents.
At present it makes us look like sad geeks, our opponents must be pissing themselves.

I was unaware that passing possible Labour voters, as well as opponents, still think in moronic playground cliché.

When I was seven or so, somebody bought me The Ali Bongo Book of Magic. It was full of easy magic tricks using everyday objects. I loved it. Magic became my main interest. I’d practice card tricks and card sleights until I had them perfect. I discovered Davenports magic shop in London, and spent most of my spare money picking up wonderful little illusions. In hindsight, I wasn’t bad. I performed annual shows at my secondary school. I won awards at the borough talent show. I was on stage at the Midlands Arts Centre. I won the British Magical Society’s Young Magician of the Year award (not as prestigious as it sounds, but not bad), and performed for the BMS senior section. I really enjoyed being on stage and delighted in entertaining. Then, I hit puberty.

There’d always been people who made fun. That’s what happens at school. For a good number of years it didn’t bother me, but once puberty kicked in I began to care what people thought. I realised that people weren’t poking good natured fun, they were genuinely being spiteful. For anybody who said they liked the magic, there’d be two popular jocks who’d hurl insults as all their friends laughed. I began to take it to heart. It didn’t matter what anybody else said - these were the people everybody liked, the cool crowd, and they hated me.

It happened very slowly, such that I didn’t really notice it, but I began to associate the magic with being ’sad’, or ‘pathetic’. I stopped caring about it so much. I think my parents realised what was going on, but peer pressure is almost impossible to fight. My school magic shows in years 7 and 8 (when I was 13 and 14) were, in hindsight, pretty good. But years 9 and 10 were dodgy. I hadn’t put in the practice. On the final day of school I cut my least favourite teacher’s head off with a guillotine, and I entirely relied upon the illusion - the surrounding act wasn’t up to much. I remember hearing the abuse as I carried the guillotine across the playground after the show, and thinking that it just wasn’t worth it. After secondary school I dropped out of my fortnightly magic club, and never really took it up again.

It was odd. All through school I wanted to keep doing the magic, as I enjoyed it, but I became ashamed of myself for doing so. Even now when I pick up a pack of cards there’s a behind-sense of shame, that people will justifiably laugh at me, that I’m a bad example of how to be.

Sad geeks? For liking Doctor Who? Screw you. It’s seven years since I left school and I can see this attitude for what it is. The implication is that normal, intelligent people do not like Doctor Who, nor anything else that may be ‘geeky’. I should rid myself of my likes and dislikes and conform to some dreary grey gob of nothingness. But it’s not normal, intelligent people who think this. It’s people too brainless to see beyond their own perspective, or who are so afraid they might be missing something that they resort to I’m-more-popular-than-you insults. I let people rip the joy from being a magician, but now I’m older, wiser and stronger. I’m not going to pander to this miserable short-sighted crap, whether it’s from passing Labour voters, opposition readers, or Guardian columnists - and I strongly suspect that most of these people do not, in fact, think in the way suggested. You think my liking Doctor Who gives the Labour party a bad name? I think it’s that kind of attitude that belittles politics in general.

I like Superman, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Firefly. I like sci-fi novels, comics and fantasy. I like toys. I like cartoons and superheroics. I like computers, technology and science. If you think these are unworthy and something that should be mocked, the problem lies with you. Anybody who uses ‘geek’ as a term of abuse demonstrates their lack of thought. I revel in my geekery, and good-natured ribbing is fun, but cross the line and you reveal your own ignorance. To call such an attitude childish is an insult to children. It’s just stupid.

Perhaps Mark was genuinely trying to offer advice, but the last sentence sounds spiteful, to me. You want to criticise me for my political opinions? Go ahead. Want to argue religion? Fine. But attacking me for taking pleasure in that which I enjoy is pathetic.

I was very glad for the break in the weather today. I don’t want to complain about the sunshine, but over the weekend my flat was a kiln. Although marginally cooler outside, opening all the windows did nothing at all; thermodynamics is therefore a pack of lies.

There’s a new beta of Google Earth out, with a revamped interface and support for textured 3D buildings with textures (via a new version of SketchUp). This builds upon GE’s massive imagery upgrade last week. The beta is a little slow for me, although obviously your mileage may vary.

24’s running times may, it seems, be partly determined by the font of the advert-break clock.

Skuds spotted a 10-foot unicycle chained to a lamp-post.

Has anybody else picked up the new Keane album? It seems very different from their first and not particularly my style, to be honest. I’m hoping it’ll grow on me - it only came out on Monday, after all.

Tom Morris has a good post that mentions the abysmal state of education when it comes to technology and IT. Why are spreadsheets and databases the most exciting things we learn about at school?

I don’t like the complete credulity in this article on John the Baptist’s hand:

Vladimir Mastukov, a pensioner who lost the use of his legs after a stroke five years ago, bent down to kiss a display case housing the hand. Moments later he cast aside his crutches and skipped out of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in central Moscow.

“Skipped”. Yeah, of course he did. Either there’s information missing, it was a con, or the whole thing is a lie. What the hell is the Telegraph doing publishing such crap? Have they been watching too much Fox News?

Speaking of Fox News, this clip of their presenter going ballistic at a rather despicable anti-gay zealot demonstrates…something.

Finally, the Astronomy Picture of the Day is a sun-halo. I saw one of these when I was in Australia, nine years ago now, and this is the first decent explanation I’ve read.

BoingBoing reports that Coventry university is now offering a degree-level course in Parapsychology. From the BBC News article:

The 15 post-graduate students starting the first course this autumn will look at the paranormal using several scientific methods.

For instance, some will investigate haunted houses, looking at statistics on which parts of buildings provide the most sightings.

Extra-sensory perception - where two people seem to communicate without using sound, vision, touch or smell - will also be looked at.

The skeptic side of my brain is suggesting that this is a big waste of time, but even accepting that…

Dr Lawrence said: “We’ve got to look at what people are experiencing.

“No one has bothered to look, so people’s view of the world has been divided into two components: the secular and humanist, and the religious.

That’s manifestly untrue. Of course people have bothered to look. There have been claims of ghosts and ESP since the scientific method was first suggested, and who wouldn’t want to properly investigate ghosts? It’s just that every single time anybody has looked, nothing has been found. Plenty of scientists have looked at both ghosts and ESP, and concluded that the existing evidence is flawed, and nothing supports the claims. The normal response is that mainstream science simply ignores the evidence, but given the sheer number of people convinced of the existence of both phenomena you might have expected a practitioner to seek fame and fortune by providing said evidence on the Internet, for example. Show that ESP exists and that’s a guaranteed nobel prize, an easy $1,000,000, plus nigh-on eternal fame. But nobody has. Of course this doesn’t mean that there’s definitely nothing there, but it does suggest it very strongly, and it’s very different from “no one has bothered to look”.

The psychology of parapsychology is far more interesting to me. To take just one tributary, the best so-called practictioners of ESP are actually experts, whether they know it or not, in cold reading, which often involves picking up on very subtle clues in body language and speech. It turns out that humans are actually very, very bad at hiding their true feelings, for good evolutionary reasons involving the eradication of ‘cheats’ who would fake emotion for their own personal gain. In fact, the Facial Action Coding System details the meanings of involuntary facial muscle reflexes, and trained users can invariably determine when people are lying. This is all wonderful to me. I’d be as happy as anybody if ESP was proven to be real, but with no reason to suspect it beyond hearsay I’m more than happy to follow the evidence.

Do you ever come across something that seems completely nonsensical? Normally I can see both sides of arguments; even if I strongly disagree, I can see why somebody would think the way they do. I can even understand something this crazy:

A federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of lawsuit filed by a Rankin County adult store, which challenged the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that bans the sale of sex toys.

I think it’s stupid, but I imagine that arguments used are the standard moral corruption, depravity, children might accidentally see a dildo and explode, that kind of thing¹.

Then there’s this:

The Kansas Board of Education voted 6-4 Wednesday to change the state’s health education standards to mandate parental consent for sex education courses.

I just couldn’t figure it out. Why would you not want your child to have any kind of sex education? Aside from the practical implications (does the knowledge magically pop into their head at 16?) I just can’t see why you would object to the knowledge. Is the very concept of sex a corrupting influence, in some people’s eyes? Then, though, everything became clear:

Hysom is more concerned about a proposal to require abstinence-only sex education.

So it’s a stepping stone. Don’t you just want to scream?

1. incidentally, I find the ‘right to privacy’ counter-argument somewhat strange, too. It’s probably the only way to fight in court, but it does seem to be saying ‘yes it’s depraved, but it’s up to me’ rather than ‘there’s nothing wrong with it - maybe you people need some help’ [↩]

I’m not at home right now, and don’t know whether I’m blowing this out of all proportion, but a story just appeared on BBC News saying that the UK science education is going to contain creationist teachings. Specifically, the OCR syllabus says:

Teachers are asked to “explain that the fossil record has been interpreted differently over time (e.g. creationist interpretation)”.

Um, why?

A spokesperson for the exam board said candidates needed to understand the social and historical context to scientific ideas both pre and post Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“Candidates are asked to discuss why the opponents of Darwinism thought the way they did and how scientific controversies can arise from different ways of interpreting empirical evidence,” he said.

“Creationism and ‘intelligent design’ are not regarded by OCR as scientific theories. They are beliefs that do not lie within scientific understanding.”

The National Curriculum, meanwhile, says the following:

Classes should also cover “ways in which scientific work may be affected by the context in which it takes place (for example, social, historical, moral, spiritual), and how these contexts may affect whether or not ideas are accepted.”

I can see their point, but the language seems a little lax. If this is just a matter of mentioning that before Darwin the favoured explanation was from design, but that the theory of evolution has rendered this null and void, then fair enough. But “the fossil record has been interpreted differently over time” leaves the door open for post-Darwin arguments, which have no evidence and should most definitely have no place in the science classroom.

“[H]ow scientific controversies can arise from different ways of interpreting empirical evidence” is more sinister. If this is a direct reference to creationism “vs” evolution, then I don’t like it at all. That particular debate is not a scientific controversy if you define this as meaning a disagreement within the scientific community. Science says evolution - full stop. It’s other people saying that creationism has any basis, and they do this entirely outside of the scientific method. Graduated evolution vs. punctuated equilibrium would be what I think of as a scientific controversy. Saying that fundamentalist religious claims contribute to ’scientific controversy’ is dangerously close to the “teach the controversy” argument used in the US to try to force intelligent design into the classroom. By that argument I could claim that gravity is caused by invisible monkeys holding us on the ground, argue with a scientist about it, then demand it be discussed in the classroom.

I don’t think I like this very much. I haven’t read OCR’s syllabus properly yet, but the BBC article suggests the language is weak. If so, it’s a foot in the door for anti-science campaigners.

Via J-Walk blog, I discovered this article.

AN exorcist has carried out a ritual on a Sandwell school where seven members of staff have been struck down by a mystery illness, it was revealed today.

Sandwell? That’s not all that far away. You don’t generally hear about this kind of nonsense in the UK…

Sandwell Council education spokesman Coun Ian Jones revealed today that the exorcist had tried to clear the school of any malevolent presence. He said: “We are keeping an open mind on the situation and any theory put forward will be carefully considered.

Ooh! I know what it is! It’s chipmonkeys! Chipmonkeys are tiny mites that live in woodwork, excreting dangerous gases. Nobody knows about them but me, but I’ve been ostracised by the scientific community, just like Einstein and Newton were at first, because my theory is too radical. It’s very complex, but Chipmonkeys are produced through the energy fields of mirror-reversal quantum vibrations. It’ll overturn the scientific paradigm - just you wait! My unique knowledge means I am the only person capable of getting rid of the Chipmonkey infestation. The only cure, I have discovered through my stunning research, is to negate the mirror-reversal energy field by an outflux of cash. £5,000 ought to do it. I can work from a distance, too!

There’s such a thing as having too open a mind¹. The article then adds its own useful contribution to the public understanding of science:

Cambridge-based electronics engineer Alasdair Philips, founder and director of independent research organisation Powerwatch, claimed that interactive wireless technology within the school could be to blame.

“There will be low-level radiation but we are very much against this sort of technology in the classroom, where children and staff are very close to it.”

Nice. Has there ever been any evidence that wireless network radiation can make you ill? I don’t know of any. Perhaps if we changed the word ‘radiation’ to ‘bunnies’ it’d help². Incidentally, Powerwatch as an organisation seem utterly paranoid, it looks like they ignore all scientific evidence that disagrees with their claims, and are debunked as part of this.

1. incidentally, the stats are that seven teachers have become ‘unwell’ in two and a half years. From what I remember of teacher turnover, that’s quite good going! [↩]
2. Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners used to be known as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners, until it was discovered that people heard the word ‘nuclear’ and ran a mile, presumably thinking they might end up accidentally distintegrated, or something [↩]

How come nobody ever asks me these questions?

More than half the British population does not accept the theory of evolution, according to a survey.

Furthermore, more than 40% of those questioned believe that creationism or intelligent design should be taught in school science lessons.

As a Pastafarian, this distresses me. Why should the Teachings of Our Noodly Master be excluded? They’re ignoring the evidence, I tell you!

The survey was done for an episode of BBC2’s Horizon. The editor responded with this:

“This really says something about the role of science education in this country and begs us to question how we are teaching evolutionary theory.”

That is indeed the problem, because, as far as I’m aware, schools aren’t teaching evolutionary theory. In five years of science classes, I were given a rough outline of evolution toward the end of the biology syllabus. It took maybe half an hour and the only point was to provide us with the example of the camel and the polar bear, which was all exam papers ever asked about. It wasn’t until I read popular science books after school that I started to understand what it was really all about.

In hindsight I don’t see the logic behind the way we were taught. As I see it, biology only really makes any sense when based on the foundation of evolutionary theory. Why are animal and plant cells different from each other? The answer wasn’t quite so bad as ‘who cares, just learn the labelled diagrams’, but it’s impossible to answer the question without a fair bit of background, so it never happened. Biology became a fact-learning exercise which, to be honest, I found dull and uninteresting, in complete contrast to my opinions now. The sheer wonder is somehow extracted from the system. It’s really odd.

The sad thing is that I know my science teachers were enthusiastic about science is a topic. On our final days at school one teacher even bought popular science books, including The Selfish Gene, an excellent introduction to evolutionary theory, for some of the top pupils in the class (not including me, sadly.) Is that even officially permitted under school rules?

Is it the fault of the syllabus? The exam system? I don’t know. I can’t find recent figures, but there used to be a scarily high percentage of the population that think the sun orbits the earth.

The findings prompted surprise from the scientific community. Lord Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, said: “It is surprising that many should still be sceptical of Darwinian evolution. Darwin proposed his theory nearly 150 years ago, and it is now supported by an immense weight of evidence.

“We are, however, fortunate compared to the US in that no major segment of UK religious or cultural life opposes the inclusion of evolution in the school science curriculum.”

For now, maybe. I personally see no reason why US-style evangelist groups shouldn’t gain a foothold over here - Christian Voice already get coverage for their every press release. A savvy PR-operative could probably work wonders, and based on the above figures it might not be too difficult. Hell, the first mention of pedophilia and logic goes out of the window, so why not something else?

Cynical cynical cynical. Sorry. It just worries me.