If I end up working at CERN, I’m making this into a t-shirt:
Thanks to evil bastard frenchman for pointing out that truly horrible pun.
Current Mood: Amused
The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
If I end up working at CERN, I’m making this into a t-shirt:
Thanks to evil bastard frenchman for pointing out that truly horrible pun.
Current Mood: Amused
The debate between creationists and proponents of evolution isn’t ending any time soon, but now some creationists have a secret weapon, “Nessie!” Certain fundamentalist schools in Louisiana plan to teach children that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It sounds like a plot dreamed up by the creators of Southpark, but it’s all true: schoolchildren in Louisiana are to be taught that the Loch Ness monster is real in a bid by religious educators to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution. Thousands of children in the southern state will receive publicly-funded vouchers for the next school year to attend private schools where Scotland’s most famous mythological beast will be taught as a real living creature.
These private schools follow a fundamentalist curriculum including the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme to teach controversial religious beliefs aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism. One tenet has it that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man then Darwinism is fatally flawed.
The textbooks in the series are alleged to teach young earth creationism; are hostile towards other religions and other sectors of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism; and present a biased version of history that is often factually incorrect. One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: “Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”
Another claim taught is that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur. It’s unclear if the movie Godzilla was the inspiration for this lesson.
Private religious schools, including the Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, Louisiana, which follows the ACE curriculum, have already been cleared to receive the state voucher money transferred from public school funding, thanks to a bill pushed through by state Governor Bobby Jindal.
Boston-based researcher and writer Bruce Wilson, who specialises in the American political religious right, compares the curriculum to Islamic fundamentalist teaching. “They are being brought up to believe that they’re at war with secular society. The only valid government would be a Christian fundamentalist government. Obviously some comparisons could be made to Islamic Fundamentalists in schools. One of these texts from Bob Jones University Press claims that dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons. It has little to do with science as we currently understand. It’s more like medieval scholasticism.”
Of course, the Scottish tourist industry might well reap a dividend from the craziness of the American education system. Nessie expert Tony Drummond, who leads tours as part of Cruise Loch Ness, has a few words of advice to the US schools in question: come to the loch and try to find the monster.
Textbooks of some state-funded Christian schools praise the Ku Klux Klan. The violent, racist organisation, which still exists in the US, advocates white supremacy, white nationalism and anti-immigration. One excerpt from Bob Jones University Press American history textbook has been reported as saying: “the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross … In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”
It isn’t just America where the bizarre Christian Nessie myth is being taught as a reality. The UK has similar religious schools but they do not receive cash from the state. Nevertheless, the Evangelical Christian curriculum they follow has been approved by UK Government agency, the National Recognition Information Centre (Naric) which guides universities and employers on the validity of different qualifications. Naric judged the International Certificate of Christian Education (ICCE) as officially comparable to qualifications offered by the Cambridge International exam board. It is estimated around 2000 pupils study at more than 50 private Christian schools in Britain for the certificates as well as several home-educated students.
Huh… I didn’t know that last part. Just goes to show that crazy is a universal concept.
Source: The Scotland Herald
Current Mood: Cynical
From CNN (of all places)
Saws. The kind you buy at the hardware store to cut wood. That’s what the play-group teacher dumped on the ground for 3- and 4-year-old kids to play with. Knowing that doing this, in the U.S., would result in the teacher being, at minimum, fired and most likely charged with child endangerment, I had visions of emergency room trips and severed limbs dancing through my mind.
But this happened not in the U.S. but in Switzerland, where they believe children are capable of handling saws at age 3 and where kindergarten teachers counsel parents to let their 4- and 5-year-olds walk to school alone. “Children have pride when they can walk by themselves,” the head of the Münchenstein, Switzerland, Kindergartens said last week at a parents meeting, reminding those in attendance that after the first few weeks of school children should be walking with friends, not mom.
So looking down at the saws, I tried to hide my American-bred fear and casually asked the teacher about her procedures in case of emergencies. She rattled them off to me in perfect English (that’s another thing the Swiss believe — that anyone is capable of learning multiple languages), but added, “I’ve been a forest play-group teacher for 10 years, and I’ve never had to call a parent because of injury.”
What’s a “forest” teacher? (No, that ‘s not a typo or pre-school name.) That alludes to a tradition here that we signed our 3-year-old up for. Every Friday, whether rain, shine, snow, or heat, he goes into the forest for four hours with 10 other children. In addition to playing with saws and files, they roast their own hot dogs over an open fire. If a child drops a hot dog, the teacher picks it up, brushes the dirt off, and hands it back.
The school year ends next week, and so far the only injury has been one two millimeter long cut received from a pocket knife. The teacher slapped a cartoon band-aid on it and all was well. No injury form to fill out. No trip to the doctor for an extra tetanus booster. No panic. In fact, she didn’t even think it necessary to mention the incident to me. Which it wasn’t.
Does this mean that Swiss children are capable of handling saws and crossing roads at the same age that American parents are still cutting their children’s food and getting arrested for letting them go to the park?
Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids tracks the stories of how we’re failing to prepare our children for leadership. Many parents in U.S. seem to be convinced that children are incapable of making any of their own decisions or even functioning by themselves at the playground. While a high school principal recently threatened to suspend a group of seniors for the dangerous act of riding their bikes to school, and a group of parents protested that their misbehaving 17-18 year-olds were sent home alone on a train, I looked around me and saw 4-year-olds walking to school by themselves and teenagers also traveling alone across Europe, handling transactions with different currency and in different languages.
The leadership at many American companies were raised in a similar way to the Swiss children in my neighborhood. Boys had pocket knives. Everyone rode bikes to school. Kids started babysitting other children at 11- or 12-years-old. Now? We coddle and protect and argue with teachers when our little darlings receive anything worse than an A on a paper. The result? Well, the preliminary results from this method of parenting are hitting the workforce now. They are poor communicators who insist on using text-speak. Their mothers are calling employers. They believe they should be given rewards and promotions for the act of showing up to work on time.
If this trend in the U.S. continues, American children will become more crippled in their ability to make their own decisions (mom is always around), manage risk (at what age do you become magically able to use a saw?) or overcome a setback (you learn nothing when mom and dad sue the school district to get your grade changed). By contrast, my son learns about risk management every week. He’ll be in a school system that has no qualms about holding a child back if he doesn’t understand the material. And “helicopter” parenting? Not tolerated by the schools or the other mothers at the playground.
So, while he’s 4 and generally covered in dirt, I suspect he’ll be more prepared for leadership when we move back to the U.S. than will children who have no freedom and responsibility and face no consequences.
That is, if he doesn’t cut off his own hand with the saw.
Current Mood: Pensive