Education
Don’t Think About The Children
It comes as no surprise that a Tory led moral panic about sex education has led to a report stuffed with recommendations that would only make things worse. As the article below suggests, we’d be better off listening to kids about this than paying attention to narrow minded fools.
Creationism in the UK
We should be better than this, and we should expect more from organisations like the National Recognition Information Centre, which has announced that a creationist course taught in religious schools should be considered equivalent to an A Level. This is an insult to everyone teaching real A Levels and all the youngsters taking them. This isn’t the USA or some other backward country. We need to demand that children are taught science, not fantasy, and anyone dressing up indoctrination as education should be punished, not accredited.
80% of teachers don’t want the cane back in schools
So why is all the reporting about the results of a Times Educational Supplement survey focussing on the minority who do want to hit children? I understand that discipline is a tricky thing, but I agree with the majority of teachers who think that violence is no sort of answer.
Politicians aren't very evolved
David Cameron has been typically ambiguous on the teaching of Creationism, effectively saying that faith schools could pretend it’s a real science if they wanted to. However, he’s not alone amongst politicians in abusing science.
Teach your children ignorance
The American home schooling trend is driven by parents who want to protect their children from the horrors of a secular education, such as sex education and evolution, and teach them a heavily biased and God based curriculum. Even though they’re doing it because they love their children, it strikes me as a form of child abuse and part of a slide toward the sort of fundamentalism they claim to be fighting in the Middle East.