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.

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?

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.”

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.

I bet most of us here would answer yes. And so OKCupid’s analysis wouldn’t surprise us:

If your date answers ‘no’—i.e. is okay with bad grammar and spelling—the odds of him or her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1.

As someone who is not himself a believer, I found it rather heartening that tolerance, even on something trivial like this, correlated with belief in God, although I should’ve figured out that religious people are okay with small mistakes. Next to intelligent design, what’s a couple typos?

It’s also nice when two completely independent datasets corroborate each other. Last summer, we analyzed the profile text of half a million user profiles, comparing religion and writing-level. For every one of the faith-based belief systems listed, the people who were the least serious wrote at the highest level.

Teach teh controversy!

Faith School Menace? from Lucas Cantor on Vimeo.

Notes from the Vimeo site:

The number of faith schools in Britain is rising. Around 7,000 publicly-funded schools – one in three – now has a religious affiliation.

As the coalition government paves the way for more faith-based education by promoting ‘free schools’, the renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins says enough is enough.

In this passionately argued film, Dawkins calls on us to reconsider the consequences of faith education, which, he argues, bamboozles parents and indoctrinates and divides children.

The film features robust exchanges with former Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke, Head of the Church of England Education Service Reverend Janina Ainsworth, and the Chair of the Association of Muslim Schools, Dr Mohammed Mukadam.

It also features insights from child psychologists and key players in faith education as well as insights from both parents and pupils.

Dawkins also draws on his own personal history as a father, arguing that the government must stop funding new faith schools, and urges society to respect a child’s right to freedom of belief.

Edit: Sorry Daniel, we must have published simultaneously, I didn’t mean to tread on your toes!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration.

I’ve always known that people could download certain stock papers for a fee. I’ve also know that wealthy families could hire “tutors” who essentially do all the work. But this caught me off guard, because Dante claims that it’s a very organized and very lucrative field. He claims that their standard fee is $2,000, and that he’s on track to make over $60,000 this year.

But I’m having some trouble swallowing it all. One problem is that the tone and the story are just too perfect. In the framing story, Dante is writing a paper on business ethics for a student who can barely communicate: “did u get the sorce I send … please where you are now? … Desprit to pass spring projict”

Another bit that’s just too perfect:

I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America’s moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution.

In addition to money, he gets access to a great number of resources:

I have completed countless online courses. Students provide me with passwords and user names so I can access key documents and online exams. In some instances, I have even contributed to weekly online discussions with other students in the class.

Hey, Geds, if you still want Jstor access, this may be the job for you …

Does anyone know somebody that’s used a service like this? I’m still feeling skeptical.

It seems that the Texas board of education (who you will remember recently revised the curriculum to make Tea Baggers look better) have come up with another fine idea – banning books! Okay, that’s a little strong – they haven’t actually banned any books, but they’re voting on a resolution “urging publishers to keep ‘pro-Islamic/anti-Christian’ language out of textbooks”. Given the current make-up of the Texas board of education, I will be very surprised if that resolution doesn’t pass, and while it’s not an explicit ban, it will probably have the same effect – publishers won’t produce what they know the Board won’t buy.

The measure, on which the Texas Board of Education will vote on Friday in the state capital of Austin, is drafted by Randy Rives, a businessman and former school official in the Texas city of Odessa… “It’s the pro-Islamic, anti-Christian teachings in these books, that is what we are concerned about,” Mr Rives told the BBC. “We’re teaching double the beliefs and specifics about another religion than we are about Christianity, which is the foundation of our country.”

Oh dear… If it wasn’t for fine folks like LRA, I’d suggest that the rest of the USA could do itself a favour and make Texas secede from the Union…