should creationism be on the science syllabus

[zippitippitoes]

\link{http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2078747,00.html\ Interesting article}

Nor would I ever consider saying that, as it would be pretty damned offensive.

I don't have a-level maths. I am doing a degree module in stats though, and I think that actually that's pretty easy to understand.

RE teachers don' teach fact versus fiction. they teach 'some people believe that...'

Nor would I ever consider saying that, as it would be pretty damned offensive.
Agreed, and the essence of RE in practice, as opposed to it's ideals is to avoid offending anyone. That's a big difference to science or even history where errors that people made are a big part of the discipline. We don't avoid teaching the holocaust because of fear or offending Germans or flaws in pre Galilean physics so as not to upset Greeks.

I am doing a degree module in stats though, and I think that actually that's pretty easy to understand.
Well thank you, stats are a big part of my work and we ask questions like that of people we interview for banks. You are unusual most RE teachers don't do stats. Exceptions abound. The priest who married us was a world class knife fighter, yet could talk of love and forgiveness.

RE teachers don' teach fact versus fiction. they teach 'some people believe that...'
I interpret that as you teach the fact that "some people believe that..." And of course I agree that these are pretty hard facts.

But do you do stuff like tables comparing and contrasting the different religions ?
In any other subject that would be standard, comparing characters in literature, or chemical elements, "Compare and Contrast" is a standard question in all disciplines.
Would you keep your job if you did this ?

I'm not for one second saying you lack intellectual integrity, but that the hysterical need not to offend any superstitious group, or more accurately not allow the leaders of a group to go on TV sounding offended to me makes the use of the term "education" inappropriate to a subject where you dont' have criticism or comparison.

Firstly can I point out I am training towards RE teaching, not actually doing as yet.

Compare and contrast- it depends what you are comparing. I did an essay today on Muhammad. I mentioned that whereas the Bible is the tale of Jesus's life, the Qur'an is upposed to be the word of God dictated (or recited). That does compare.

I don't have a need not to offens any group but I don't make judgements on who is wrong and right- I can't, I don't know. I am not a follower of any faith.

I do think it constitutes education though. If pupils then know the meaning of Ramadan, Passover, Diwali- these are all useful things in life, especially as our world widens. I also think that knowledge / understanding and tolerance go together.

I'm going to Parp myself now on this, not to offend you but because I know I can get pretty much stuick on my soap box! I do take your views into account and will do when I am in a position to use them. I do know what you mean about the maths too- I end up helping a lot of my fellow students and i think it should get a lot more focus, stats are so useful in every part of life.

But what will you teach ?
You doing compare and contrast as you've done for your previous 20ish years of education. But will you do it for your pupils ?

I mentioned that whereas the Bible is the tale of Jesus's life, the Qur'an is upposed to be the word of God dictated (or recited). That does compare.

I don't have a need not to offens any group but I don't make judgements on who is wrong and right- I can't, I don't know.
But you can point out that they are inconsistent.
Will you cover the position of women under Islam ?
The racial views of Judaism and Sikhism ?

I can't imagine anything I call education leaving kids without the ability to make judgements.

I hear the logic in the idea of knowledge of understanding building tolerance. I can't guess what it's based on though. In Northern Ireland they knew very well each other's beliefs, indeed the whole sorry sage of 500 years of Christians murdering each other in horrible numbers was not based upon ignorance was it ? Jews and Moslems also understand each others beliefs. The nastiest civil wars like the Russian, British, Chinese and American all were fought between effectively identical groups who understood each other pefectly.
My view is that by pandering to superstitions by pretending it has a role in education outside the study of mental illness is to promote the very things that have caused more human misery than anything else.

I will teach the curriculum Domini, as I will have to.

You say northern Ireland- well yes, but there are other examples. For instance where I come from (AKA the sticks) there is virtually no-one not born there, so when someone with a Hijab or turban or whatever comes it causes real problems- people don't even know what religion goes with what. So I firmly believe that knowledge would make a difference there, yes. I used to work very much in the community and when asylum seekers were destined for the area there were huge outcries- mostly on unfounded rubbish.

You may say the racial beliefs of Judaism, but you ahev to remember Reform Judaism. I have to say Sikh international policy has not been raised yet, but according to my Professor (an expert in Indian religions) their religion is very tolerant, if you take into account all the crap thrown at them over the years.

Will I cover the role of women uner Islam? unlikely in the scheduled time. Would I like to? Oh yes. Lots of open debate please, because none of the Muslim women I have met feel oppressed. Indeed, islam was quite pioneering in it's time, with the education etc of Women. Personally I think yes, Islam does oppress women - Shari'a law does that by default, and the Hadith about testimony of a Woman and it's worth!. BUT so does this culture. And the constant focus on the effects of Islam on females- what about Hinduism when Sati was being practised as recently (on record) as twenty years ago?

Like any teacher to be I am going into the profession full of ideals I will never be able to fulfil. But i'd rather go in like this than just wanting the summer off .

Oh and a reluctance to offend- yes. Something I am very proud of. Not because of any PC crap but because I am well, a nice person.

can't agree with that DC. Understanding and knowledge do aid tolerance. They can aid the understanding that one group is not an alien or a stranger to the other, especially if one starts to see the similarites between each group rather than the differences. Of course it depends on one's motives. Northern Irelands struggles have little to do with religion, but the religions just mark each group's differences politically and culturally, and territorially. I would say this was true of all 'religious' wars.

I will teach the curriculum Domini, as I will have to.
I accept that and I apologise if have at all implied that the deficiencies of RE are in any way your personal fault.

so when someone with a Hijab or turban or whatever comes it causes real problems- people don't even know what religion goes with what.
What problems does it cause, if you know little you care little.
We had precisely one Asian at my school no one made an issue of that. Wasn't a nice school, im my year you were 8 times more likely to leave school for prison than university. Were racist, but the idea of perseucting someone for their beliefs was beyond their imagininigs.

I used to work very much in the community and when asylum seekers were destined for the area there were huge outcries- mostly on unfounded rubbish.
But a lot of the outcry was based upon the Guardian readers in control dumping on locals. Huge influx of non-English speakers to schools with no capacity for them for instance. When people have complained about capms they have instantly been labled as racists and ignored.

You may say the racial beliefs of Judaism, but you ahev to remember Reform Judaism.
Indeed, and that is a valid contrast to make. You're not going allowed to do that either are you ?

I have to say Sikh international policy has not been raised yet, but according to my Professor (an expert in Indian religions) their religion is very tolerant,
Ask your professor what Sikh men say the reason for wearing prominent headgear really is, and also about the kvives...
Not saying Sikhs are particulalry bad people but their faith does include some scary things, as do they all.

Oh yes. Lots of open debate please, because none of the Muslim women I have met feel oppressed.

Didn't you say you had studied statistics, prehpas you'd like to correct that statmement ?
Sampling error perhaps ? Pretty obvious one.

And the constant focus on the effects of Islam on females- what about Hinduism when Sati was being practised as recently (on record) as twenty years ago?
I thingk we both know Sati is more recent than that. But yes, pretty much all religions oppress women, look at how the Christians tried to stop anaesthetics being intriduced for childbirth, etc.

But you don't cover that either, it might offend someone.

Oh and a reluctance to offend- yes. Something I am very proud of. Not because of any PC crap but because I am well, a nice person.
Nothing wrong with being nice, but isn't it the job of a teacher to offend people ? You can't change people's world view without taking out the old wrong one.
I teach a highly specialised subject in the private sector, and if peple leave my lectures too happy I know I haven't earned my money.

Science belongs to the material world and religion belongs to the spiritual world so you cannot teach something that comes from the spiritual world as a science.

However, science education is not just about teaching scientific facts. It's about knowledge, skills and attitudes. One of the most important parts of science education is looking at evidence and different points of view on something, weighing it up, and coming up with your own conclusion about it (which funnily enough, is a large part of the RS curriculum as well). We also try to make science relevent across the whole curriculum and not keep it in a box.

I haven't taught about evolution, but have taught about the beginnings of the universe (Big Bang etc.), and I don't have a problem with matching this scientific theory up with the Genesis account. They are fairly compatible.

It's fairly easy to do this from an Anglican point of view because we don't tend to specify doctrine any tighter than it is specified in the Bible, and we also use reason and experience to make sense of scripture. Therefore, we can look at scientific evidence and conclude that a day of creation could well be thousands of years. It's a much different scenario from that faced by fundamentalist Christians who take literally what it is written in the bible.

Meant to add...

The reason I will sometimes match up the scientific theory with the Genesis account, is that some kids will come to class with firm views based on what they have learned in their Christians families or from church - and that it's OK to believe both.

I've never come across a child with a literal point of view, but would no doubt play the trump card of 'this is what you need to know for your exams'.

In defence of Sir Isaac, I think it's a bit harsh to say Newtonian physics is "simply not correct". It is imprecise as it does not account for relativistic and quantum effects (so fails at very small scales and very high speeds approaching the speed of light), but in objects on the scales we deal with generally, these effects are negligible. Most mechanics is still Newtonian in nature.

On the whole intelligent design debate, I remember a similar discussion over the post-modern view of science - that we all have our own reality and they are all equally "valid" on some level - nothing but the text, blah blah. Some guy offered 10 million dollars to anyone who could step out of his aparment window on the 35th floor and demonstrate that in their reality there was no gravity. I believe he hasn't had to pay up yet.

Early genesis is strikingly consistent with Genesis. Though it must be said the English Genesis is rather more consistent than the Hebrew one. The declaration of the void sounds remarkably like what would happen if you dropped a bronze age nomad into a modern physics lecture on the nature of spacetime.
However the biology goes downhill very quickly. Where exactly do the sons of Adam and Eve get wives Although that may actually be true in a sense.

We know that humans in general went through an bottleneck of a small population, and the idea of it being as small as one person has waxed and waned.
Australian aborigines had very low genetic diversity. So low that a widely held view is that they are all descended from a single pregnant woman and her son. Easy to see why the Bible didn't include that idea.
Humans are actually not that diverse considering the range that we can live in, even without much technology. We are a new species, and are evolving quite rapidly.

Yes, we both know Sati is more recent, I was referring to aprticularly well publicised case.

And I agree about Chrsitianity too, but also Buddhism (easrly, no females attaining enlightenment) etc and I can't just sit here and list them.

What problems did it cause? An idiot from the BNP going around peddling lies house to house when nobody ahd any information to refute them,a s they well knew. Nobody I worked with read the Guradian, or anything beyond The Sun (if they could read) for that matter.

And it's not a smpling error, it's a staement. Ahd I said ,my reaearch indicated'.. then OK, but I dind't, I just told the truth.

The last I read in this is that we are all decended from 7 different women. This done by looking at the mitochondial SNA which is only passed from mother to offspring, and does not take part in the random assortment and crossing over during meiosis. Mitochondial DNA thus being more 'stable' and allows you to llok at genetic drift by mutation rate alone.

However it has been some time since I looked into this, and I could be wrong.

What problems did it cause? An idiot from the BNP going around peddling lies house to house when nobody ahd any information to refute them,

Given the educational level of the BNP, I'm not sure that even if they met an expert in a given religion that would really help.
People from the Indian subcontinent are regularly called Pakis, heard it applied to some people from Africa.
This is pathetically easy to refute but it doesn't happen.
What if a BNP person pointed out quite accurately that under Sharia law a woman could be raped, then stoned for prostitution ? That her testimony in court is officially 1/2 that of the man, and thather brothers may kill people they suspect of sleeping with her consent but not theirs ?
This is true, and does happen.

Of course equivalent things occur in all religions, and even in systems of socialism where religion was heavily suppressed.

I agree with your comments on the BNP but it's the people they're preying on I'm concerned with: people have a right to be educated in stuff that will allow them to discriminate against such utter b-shit. For instance, one that came up a lot was:

BNP: They're all nicking you houses you know.
CLIENT: They're nickinga ll our houses you know.
US: Hmm, well actuallyt here's a separate business that provides housing for them and has abosutely nothing to do with the housing association lists.

Oh.

I understand your point about Shar'a Law and of course it's awful. For a woman to be stoned to death for adultry however she has to be (officially- not arguing that certain regimes make it upa s they go along)seen in the act: I think to try and quote Dt Norcliffe from memory, '4 people must see organ enter organ'. (Think 4 may be more)

I am not defending that, mind! Still awful! But not as wisdespread as people think; also Shari'a Law is I heard (I will question the student who was researching it tomorrow) being revised to an extent.

The thing is for me I guess, I'm not religious full stop- I can ee lots of flaws in it all. But I can also learn a lot from people who do have a faith. Which is education in it's real living sense.

I'm always worried about statements of the form that the bad guys are praying on the ignorance of those that they recruit.
Yes, there is a strong correlation between poor education and relgious belief, but sadly also when we look at places with bad racism they are frequently well educated.
I see personal racism in the West as a function of the failures of that individual. People who cannot compete well in the job market, or are unattractive to people they want to sleep with are reluctant to shoulder their part of the blame.
In many areas the housing system for economically failed people is set up so that newly arrived people are much more likely to be given housing.

We also not behaviour amongst religious groups being tolerated in a way that if carried out by others would be crushed by hard faced men with dogs and helicopters.

The "positive image" building also upsets these people. A friend of mine was the female Asian programmer employed by IBM. So frequent were the demands from marketing for her to appear on brochures that there was quite a nasty row when she refused to do it any more.
We thought it quite funny, because we were successful people, and IBM marketing was regarded as beneath us. But you can see how lower grade people could get wound up by that.

Given that most racists are frankly not very bright, the idea that people who can't master 5 French verbs can appreciate the subtlety of the poetry of the Koran is a bit optimistic. I'd guess 80% of Brits believe the King James Bible is a literal translation, bot a major upgrade.

One has to be careful defining "ignorance", people fill in such gaps with whatever suits their prejudice. Guardian readers will try to find merit in any belief no matter how silly, and equally silly racists will sneer at foreign shrines as "praying to a bit of stone".
Short version is that if group A wants to hate group B, they will find a reason.

'lower grade people'? Good heavens DC i find some of your comments rather contradictory if you don't mind me saying so!

A better person than me wouldn't feel better than others, we did.
Actually, as it happens IBM was a pretty rigid hierachy, "grades" were important things, and no, it didn't make it a more efficient firm.
On the official scale I was quite literally off the bottom. My wife to be who was a pre-university student was two bands above me. I even had a specially coloured badge to show I was a lower caste.

My point was an honest one of self image. We felt superior to them. My view is that the Guardian reader view of racists, as cunning dangerous people is simply wrong, or that education in the merits of other people will not help as much as we would like.

By telling a person who feels that they are "losing" that some other group defined by faith or race is really good, you don't make that person love them, you make them fear them, and that's one step from hate.

i agree with some of what you're saying DC. But there has to be some way of getting across understanding between cultures - that may not be what is happening at the moment, but understanding done the right way surely makes people realise our common humanity. I hope anyway.

Like you, my intuition is that education will generally make most problems less bad. If we are to go down that route, then the more traditional teaching of history might do mor for us.

A large % of history, is religious groups behaving badly. A lot of emphasis is put on the holocaust, but usually out of context. It's just one of many such events. Tudor times are fine examples of Group A murders and tortures Group B. Groups B then gets power and does the same back. Occasionally they gang on a small group C like Jews or heretics or gypsies or old women, or just people who look at you in a funny way.
Then it starts again.

Problem with the "all faiths are good" approach is that you don't show people the consequnces of putting superstitions above human suffering.

Also kids need to learn about relgious leaders who use faith as a way of getting power, usually for nefarious ends.

The trick of course is not to be equally nice to everyone, but equally critical of everything.

Like you, my intuition is that education will generally make most problems less bad. If we are to go down that route, then the more traditional teaching of history might do mor for us.

A large % of history, is religious groups behaving badly. A lot of emphasis is put on the holocaust, but usually out of context. It's just one of many such events. Tudor times are fine examples of Group A murders and tortures Group B. Groups B then gets power and does the same back. Occasionally they gang on a small group C like Jews or heretics or gypsies or old women, or just people who look at you in a funny way.
Then it starts again.

Problem with the "all faiths are good" approach is that you don't show people the consequnces of putting superstitions above human suffering.

Also kids need to learn about relgious leaders who use faith as a way of getting power, usually for nefarious ends.

The trick of course is not to be equally nice to everyone, but equally critical of everything.

well people who are putting superstition/religion above human suffering are abusing religion - that is not what it is for. If religion did not exist, these same people would do what they do in the name of something else. When i have met truly spiritual people [ i know this is not the kind of language you warm to DC] even if they are of different Faiths, I have been struck by the common ground and the common good between them. Something that is very hard to teach in RE, it probably has to be witnessed/experienced.

Yes, you see relgion as "for" something, which is not a universal view, though the world might well be a better place if it was.

Hard to tell what people would have done witouht relgion, certainly we observe socialist countries behaving at least as bad as religious ones.

I suspect it makes things worse by providing an excuse to do bad things, and a way for people to over ride their inbuilt reluctiance to hurt others for no good reason. There's a widespread view amongst anthropologists that this was how religious instincts evolved in the first place.
It does to to be common to most groups of humans, though may also be related to the strong human urge to model everything as if it were a conscious entity, which definitely was part of our evolution, and still not quite working properly.

But even if it is on average neutral or even good, it is a potent force. When dealing with dangerous chemicals, or sharp objects kids are taught not to do dumb things with them. Be nice if that happened in RE too.
I've seen spirituality in various cultures in my traveles, and went to a very reliogus school, so I'm not as cold to it as you may suggest.
I'm down on bad behaviour, that's all, and don't see superstition as justinfication for it, whether or not it's a genuinely held belief, or an excuse.

i am wondering though if the 'very religious school' you went to has had an effect on your opinions about religion. A lot of people i know who are vehemently against christianity, for example, have often been involved in fundamentalist christian organisations in the past, and been damaged by them, which puts them off christianity altogether. Again, i agree with much of what you say about religions. I cannot comment on the anthropological view point, though again i would have thought there is also a different view point on the matter. However, my argument is that so many abominable things have been done in the name of religion because people corrupt religion and use it to serve their own purposes. this is not the same thing as religion being inherently bad. I do believe that institutionalized religion seems to always become corrupt, and this should probably be taught as part of the RE curriculum, though it may belong more to sociology. But knowing some amazing christians personally, and knowing what their lives are about [as far from the idea of a repressive, judgemental, bigoted hypocritical unintellectual christianity as you can be] and knowing that there are people like that in other faiths too, informs my opinion that faith and spiritual teaching could play a vital role in helping human beings to progess, its just that greed always gets in the way and wins the day. That doesn't mean giving into it though.