Yes/no poll on religion in state schools.

[seeker]

Do you think state schools should be secular, but with RE lessons giving information about all the main world religions as part of the curriculum?

[BetsyBoop]

for CofE schools they make up about a quarter of primary schools (25% if memory serves me right, can't find the stats I had before)

About half of those are "voluntary controlled" i.e basically run by the LEA in the buildings belonging to the church, using the standard LEA admissions criteria (not faith based criteria at all)

SO that leaves about one in eight schools Cof E "vouluntary aided", the out-and-out faith schools

There are of course RC schools in the mix too, I think they are about 10% if my memory is working & (where I live at least) if you are not baptised catholic in mass every Sunday, forget about getting in. (At our local one even if you are a child in care unless you are baptised catholic yourself then you come after all the baptised catholic kids, which is crap IMHO) There are also a tiny number of jewish & muslim schools in England

So at the top level it seems a reasonable split if we make all the community schools secular.

10% for RC
12% CofE VA (for the regular church goers)
13% CofE VC (for the "cultural christians")
65% community secular schools, for the god-less

Obviously there will be areas where there are too many of one type & not enough of another to meet local demand, but it's a start?

If we are steering clear of god-less/god-free can we also stop using "imaginary friend" and the like as that is equally judgy IMHO.

[noideawhereIamgoing]

You got to love Eric Idle - I wonder if this version will go down well in assembly.

All together now.....

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.

Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.

Amen.

[BetsyBoop]

aah found the stats now, my memory is not too bad

Schools by religious character 2007
No religious character Church of England Roman Catholic Other Christian Other Faiths Total
Secondary
Number of schools 2,796 205 343 41 14 3,399
Percentage of schools 82.3% 6.0% 10.1% 1.2% 0.4% 100%
Number of pupils 2,782,443 175,313 318,591 37,114 8,073 3,321,534
Percentage of pupils 83.8% 5.3% 9.6% 1.1% 0.2% 100%
Primary
Number of schools 11,106 4,441 1,696 84 34 17,361
Percentage of schools 64.0% 25.6% 9.8% 0.4% 0.2% 100%
Number of pupils 2,909,512 767,323 404,354 16,023 10,464 4,107,676
Percentage of pupils 70.8% 18.7% 9.8% 0.4% 0.2% 100%

[BetsyBoop]

well that's totally unreadable

here's the link

[GrimmaTheNome]

NoIdea - oh good, you found it. I came across it in one of Anne Fines' anthologies, 'Too Good To Miss' vol 1 I think, nicely juxtaposed with the original. DD sang it gleefully. I did wonder whether to suggest it for her next elocution piece

I can't see it making assembly but really if they are going to sing all those other Creator God type hymns they really ought to have this for fair balance.

[Tinfoil]

It depends whether you believe the entire Bible in a literal sense I suppose. Lots of Christians also believe in evolution.

By OldLadyKnowsNothing
Could God have created evolution?
Not if you believe the Bible, no.

[MillyR]

Have left it a bit late to come back to this, but anyway...

My irritation is not caused by the suggestion of creationism. I am annoyed that it has been brought into a science discussion. There are various things, within the realms of science, that may have been happening before the Big Bang. By suddenly talking about a someone having been there before, the teacher is totally changing the topic of conversation away from science and an understanding of why or how the Big Bang happened.

That is the problem of religion in education. It enters into other areas of the curriculum in ways that are not to the benefit of an understanding of Science, Geography and so on.

As to the idea that it is valid because some children believe in a Supernatural creator, so what? My DD believes that pumpkin seeds around window sills repel bald people from entering our house. I hardly think the teacher will make a point of that in discussing what we do with seeds in the context of a science lesson.

[AvengingGerbil]

Milly, that's fab: what is it about bald people that has to be repelled? And would sunflower seeds do instead?

[MillyR]

We don't have any sunflower seeds in the house, so I don't know. I don't why she has such an issue with baldness. She has a very broad definition of bald. All children in her class with very pale blonde hair are also considered 'bald', as are people with cropped hair.

She has been warned in the strongest terms not to make any comments to the allegedly bald people.

[UnquietDad]

Sudden image of Patrick Stewart, Montel, Sinead O'Connor and Duncan Goodhew advancing in menacing "spaghetti western" fashion on the MillyR household... and recoiling in horror... "No! No! the sunflower seeds!! aaaagh!!"

[seeker]

Milly - that's fab. My dd used to say you could tell the difference between girls and boys because boys had "flat heads".!

[OldLadyKnowsNothing]

Tinfoil, that's one of the problems I have with Christianity - the tendency of "Christians" to pick and choose which bits they believe, then make up bits in between. If you believe the Bible, God created Earth in six days. If you don't or can't believe that, why choose to believe other bits?

[GrimmaTheNome]

Even fundamentalists have to make up bits.

Quite a funny one: OK, so there were Adam and Eve, who begat Cain and Abel... Cain slew Abel but then they had Seth... er, so who did Cain and Seth do their beggetting with? One fundy I came across on the net said that Adam and Eve must have had daughters which the Bible omitted to mention and that incest must have been OK then

Sorry this is a bit of a flip aside - I've never come across anything quite as bizarre as that IRL!

[UnquietDad]

I'd come across that too, but I tend not to worry about it as I can cope with most of Genesis being basically allegorical. So can a lot of the more intelligent Christians. I don't know why they then have to go off and claim that so much of the rest of it should be taken literally, though!!

[OldLadyKnowsNothing]

But incest is ok in the Bible: Lot shagged his daughters, did he not?

[UnquietDad]

He did. The dirty bugger. And got turned into a pillar of salt for his pains. I bet the CEOP wish that sort of thing could still happen...

[OldLadyKnowsNothing]

Nah, that was his wife, the salt thing. Tsk tsk, UQD!

[UnquietDad]

Oh, yes, well, whatever...

[GrimmaTheNome]

I think I used to interpret it as approximately: OT mix of myth/allegory/possibly-though-not-definitely historical stuff. Apocrypha: apocryphal. NT: Gospels: Gospel truth (with some discomfort over inconsistencies). The letters etc: what we were meant to do about it. Revelations: well theres some interesting imagery in it .

[daftpunk]

lemonmuffin

hey...just seen your post..

i'm posting less and less these days..you know how it is...(never really fitted in..)

maybe we'll meet up on a thread one day....be interesting.

[Tinfoil]

OldLadyKnowsNothing, it depends what you mean by "believe the Bible".

Jesus told many parables using metaphors, so it's not surprising that the rest of the Bible contains these. If I said "it's raining cats and dogs", you would know what I meant, and you'd also know I wasn't purposely misleading you, but trying to tell the story in a memorable way.

IMHO, the Creation story is very similar to evolution, in the order of events, but with a metaphorical timescale of "days". Science eventually gave us more details of how this happened.

As for Lot and his daughters... just because something is in the Bible, doesn't mean it's recommended. Isn't it just as likely that God wants us to learn from people's mistakes? And if we were supposed to copy the behaviour of those in the Old Testament, why would Jesus need to have come along and shown us a more loving way of life?

Some Christians think it's fine to take tiny little bits of the Bible out of context as the literal word of God, without looking at the message of the whole. Others prefer to see the Bible as a collection of books which together give an overview of humanity and our relationship with God, from the start of the world to its end. These were written by human beings doing their best to describe the God they had come to know, and the laws and behaviour of various people at the time.

I'm not a fundamentalist, so it doesn't worry me too much if not every Christian belives exactly the same as me. Hopefully what we have in common outweighs this. Christians are human beings so we're bound to disagree among ourselves sometimes. (Scientists disagree too, don't they?)

[oneopinionatedmother]

somewhere ags ago i this thread, someone mentioned schols that don't mention God..I went to one. It has since closed to become a tech colleg....what they did was get round the need for 'spiritual' education by...

having assemblies where music was played (sometimes religious in nature..)
having humanities as a mixed subject (so no specific RS subject, and RS wasn't an option for Gcse)

It was a good school, run by an ex labour-candidate who found his true talent lay in education.

FWIW i think parents like good schools, and even though I'm an out and out atheist, I'd prefer a god Cof E school to crap secular one. Becuase the C of E schools tend to be well established (and also have more control over their intake dueto being allowed to select on religious grounds - particularly as Christians are welathier than avergae) they do tend to be better schools.

[oneopinionatedmother]

@dp.. i admit i am uncomfortable wth 2 gay men adopting - though not at all with two lesbians.

my mum was adopted by two women (sisters, it was 1960). it was alright - much better than 'care'. She did miss having a Daddy.

i really don't have a reason not to support gay men adopting - it is just based in a feeling that kids need mums. i don't think i'd deny a kid a chance at a stable home based on that feeling though.

[Dominique07]

Yes - secular. They teach RE about all the main religions anyway.