School Assembly Goes Off the Rails

March 16, 2012 By vorjack 29 Comments

Former Conservative ran across this story, and mentions that it hasn’t gotten enough attention. I agree, so here’s my part. From HuffPo Education:

Students and staff at a high school in Dunkerton, Ia., were shocked when an assembly intended to address drug and bullying issues instead featured anti-gay messages that offended many students, staff and parents, the Lacrosse Tribune reports.

“They told these kids that anyone who was gay was going to die at the age of 42,” parent Jennifer Littlefield told the Lacrosse Tribune. “It just blows me away that no one stopped this.”

The group also told students that girls who aren’t virgins at their weddings will have mud on their dresses, according to the paper.

I went to school in a little fly-speck town in North Carolina. I clearly remember the fledgling garage bands that would come through and do concerts in the gymnasium. Each one would pause in between covers of Van Halen and Bon Jovi to announce that they were Christian and hoped that we were to.

My guess is that the administration thought that this group would be more of the same. Someone didn’t do their homework:

Junkyard Prophet, the Minnesota-based traveling band that was brought to Dunkerton High School to discuss practices for good decision making, is part of the You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Christian youth ministry that holds assemblies in public schools.

[...]

Superintendent Jim Stanton told the Lacrosse Tribune that the group received good feedback when they performed at the school in the past, and that they must have changed their message since then.

Here’s a portion of the assembly, where they engage in some bashing of Sir Elton:

Filed Under: Christianity, Education, Videos 29 Comments

Creationism barred from UK science classes

January 15, 2012 By Custador 44 Comments

One of the major concerns secularists and atheists have with the UK’s program of free schools has been that faith-based schools have effectively been free to teach whatever they want as science – Including Creationism and Intelligent Design. But not anymore.

From the Guardian website:

“Leading scientists and naturalists, including Professor Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, are claiming a victory over the creationist movement after the government ratified measures that will bar anti-evolution groups from teaching creationism in science classes.”

The measure is not a complete ban, but it confirms that UKgov will not fund any free school that teaches any theory of origin except Darwinian evolution in science classrooms.

“Several creationist groups have expressed an interest in opening schools in towns and cities across England, including Bedford, Barnsley, Sheffield and Nottingham. Critics say they seek to promote creationism, or the doctrine of “intelligent design”, as a scientific theory rather than as a myth or metaphor.”

Well, if they want to do that now then they need to pay for it themselves.

Filed Under: Creationism / ID, Education, News 44 Comments

Devil's Advocate in the Evolution Wars

September 3, 2011 By vorjack 28 Comments

There’s a new blog wading into the evolution wars, the aptly named I Love You but You’re Going to Hell. The author is a history professor at SUNY Binghamton who focuses on American education, so he’s well positioned to talk about how the evolution debate has played out in the classroom.

The goal of the blog appears to be playing double devil’s advocate, trying to explain both sides to each other. While he is an evolutionist, as an educator he’s dealt with both camps.

The pro-evolution stuff we already know, but the underpinnings of the creationist stuff could be interesting. In his first post about creationism he talks about how the shift in American education after the Sputnik scare brought the teaching of evolution more strongly into the classroom through new textbooks.

And why should we care about textbooks? Because this shift from textbooks that usually downplayed evolutionary ideas to textbooks that made evolutionary thinking one of their guiding principles was the most obvious educational marker of the breakdown in moral values that plagued America in the late twentieth century. It doesn’t take any conspiratorial thinking to notice the correlation between the increase in evolutionary education and the utter collapse of public morality.

If you’re like me, a part of your brain is screaming “correlation does not equal causation,” but that’s beside the point. The point is that this is an article of faith among millions of Americans. You can show that there never really was a golden age of public morality, that the radical 60s were caused by other factors or that the change was not that great, but none of that will have any impact. The belief that evolution causes the downfall of society will remain.

One of the reasons that creationists will cheerfully spout bad scientific arguments is that science really isn’t the point. But then how do you get around the science had have a discussion about the underlying problem? And how do you convince them that the teaching of evolution in the classroom is not the reason that kids are so uppity these days?

Filed Under: Education, Evolution 28 Comments

Perry on Abstinence Education

August 22, 2011 By vorjack 76 Comments

Rule 1: Abstinence education works.

Rule 2: In situations where it doesn’t appear to work, see rule 1.

That’s the read that people like Steve Benen are getting from this clip of Rick Perry:

YouTube Preview Image

From Benen:

The problem here isn’t just that Perry has the wrong answer. The more meaningful problem is that Perry doesn’t seem to know how to even formulate an answer. He starts with a proposition in his mind (abstinence-only education is effective), and when confronted with evidence that the proposition appears false (high teen-pregnancy rates), the governor simply hangs onto his belief, untroubled by evidence. As Jon Chait put it, Perry seems to struggle “even to think in empirical terms.”

Filed Under: Education, Politics 76 Comments

UK Faith Academy Schools

June 17, 2011 By fatemeh 18 Comments

Who said “Get them while they’re young and they’re yours for life”? It’s a marketing strategy that’s been successfully used to sell things as diverse as burgers, tobacco and faith – So religious groups in the UK must be rubbing their hands together and giggling with glee, following Michael Gove’s announcement that the last government’s Academy Schools policy (which allowed secondary schools – high schools to Americans – to opt out of government control and manage themselves, including budgets, curricula, hiring and admissions) is to be extended to primary schools (grade schools).

The reality of Academy Schools is that they are mostly religious schools. As it happens, I live on the same road as a Catholic Academy school and the Catholic church that runs it; I can’t park in my own private car-park on a Sunday because of parents with school-aged children driving to the church. None with pre-school aged kids. None with kids older than school-aged. Very few (other than the elderly) with no kids at all. Why? Because Catholicism is part of the admission criteria for the school, and they’ll kick kids out if they and their parents don’t go to church.

I’ve always been opposed to religious groups running schools because it frees them to teach outright lies; many Muslim Faith Academies, for example, still teach creationism, and it’s notoriously difficult to get any of them to say bad things about Sharia law as it pertains to murdering apostates and cutting bits off of people. Worse, not only do faith academies encourage (indeed demand) sectarianism, some of them actually breed extremism – and the government knows this!

So, what we have in reality are schools run by religious groups, who will only allow children to attend if they and their parents profess to their particular religion, which will only hire staff if those staff are of that particular religion, and which can set their own curricula to weed out inconvenient facts and favour their own flavour of woo. What’s even more frightening is how open this all is; the governments own DirectGov website spells it all out very clearly:

“Church or faith schools may ask for confirmation of attendance at a relevant place of worship”
“Your child or family [should be] of the particular religion or faith served by the school”

And now this is being extended to cover primary schools. Be afraid, my fellow Brits. Be very afraid.

Filed Under: Education, News, Politics 18 Comments
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