Comments | cultureofdoubt: Worrying

cultureofdoubt

Worrying

Jul 04, 2008 11:53

40 or more schools teaching bullshit in science classes* via the New Humanist blog.

That's quite a bit more than I expected to be perfectly honest.

*I mean in a really bad way. They teach creationism to the exclusion of evolution. "Teaching the controversy" is bad enough outside a sociological context (in other words, teaching that there are ( Read more... )

Comments 14

typical July 4 2008, 12:09:35 UTC

I keep meaning to ask if you have a Teach the Controversy t-shirt from wearscience.com, actually...

cultureofdoubt July 4 2008, 12:11:05 UTC

Never even heard of wearscience.com... but I fear they may be about to get money off me.

typical July 4 2008, 12:49:38 UTC

Quite possibly. They'll get some off me too, very soon, I suspect.

hsenag July 4 2008, 13:11:08 UTC

I can't spot a list of the schools anywhere obvious - do you happen to know where to find one?

cultureofdoubt July 4 2008, 13:24:49 UTC

Nope, I got the impression from the More4 report that many responses were anonymous.

red_tree July 4 2008, 13:20:25 UTC

No, denying kids a basic education is not ensuring they are all literate and numerate, which is a real issue in many more schools.

I'm not saying that there isn't an issue with the teaching of creationism and I know you have strong feelings about what children are taught in science but there are far more fundamental issues with British education.

Believe it or not, many science teachers aren't particularly happy with what we're teaching either...

cultureofdoubt July 4 2008, 13:24:25 UTC

Depends on what you count as basic. I'd count literacy and numeracy as more important, but not the sole components of a basic education.

red_tree July 4 2008, 13:28:09 UTC

This is making me quite angry actually- I'm trying to educate kids in all these things you say are 'basic' but you're up there ranting, saying this and that is rubbish but not doing anything about it. Maybe I am taking this a bit personally as well.

I know it's important to teach about the idea of science and evidence (which is something that the new syllabus is actually quite good at by the way) but, if they can't read or perform basic arithmetical operations, we can't do that so it is more fundamental and basic.

cultureofdoubt July 4 2008, 13:36:24 UTC

It's not a complaint about teachers. It's a complaint about higher level decisions made by certain schools as a whole, not decisions being made by teachers. As far as I know the vast majority of schools are doing a good job on basic literacy, numeracy and scientific literacy. Mine certainly did. In the schools above there's no reason to think there's a decision by any individual teacher alone to deliberately fail to teach important stuff ( ... )

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