From: Richard Ridge (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Mon Mar 18 2002 - 05:21:10 MST
>From the excellent National Secular Society:
http://www.secularism.org.uk/newsline.htm
CREATIONISM CONTROVERSY EXPLODES
It emerged last week that the Government and the educational establishment have no power to stop Emmanuel College in Gateshead from teaching creationism alongside evolution - even if they had a mind to do it. It was also revealed that Sir Peter Vardy, the millionaire care dealer who has financed Emmanuel College has pledged £12 million to fund five more City Colleges on the same lines, and that fundamentalist schools from other religions are also teaching anti-Darwinian creation myths.
Emmanuel College - a City Technology College - is one of only two dozen schools in the country that are state-funded but not bound to teach the national curriculum. It is effectively an independent school and as long as it teaches the ten core curriculum subjects it can abandon the lesson plans laid down by the Government. This means Emmanuel College is much freer to pursue the creationist agenda being promoted by the clique of fundamentalist Christians who are presently in control.
Leading scientists, including geneticist Stephen Jones and NSS Honorary Associates Professors Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins, have called for the school inspectors to return to Emmanuel College and examine what is being taught. These demands have however been rejected. It now emerges that even if a re-inspection found Emmanuel College to be teaching creationism as being as valid as evolution, nothing could be done to stop it.
Over the entrance door to the Emmanuel College stands a stained glass window that reads: \"In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.\"
The school\'s prospectus states: \"Christian Truth must play a vital part in any genuine attempt to educate young people, not force belief on people but to ensure proper consideration is given to the Bible and its claims.\"
In a lecture to an adult audience given at the college last year, the college\'s vice-principal, Gary Wiecek, said: \"As Christian teachers it is essential that we are able to counter the anti-creationist position... it must be our duty... to counter these false doctrines with well-founded insights.\"
The head teacher is an evangelical Christian called Nigel McQuoid. He says he favours the introduction of creationism into the classroom, but at present it is still being evaluated and the earliest it could be introduced would be in September.
Mr McQuoid makes no secret of his sympathies. He is a close friend of John Burn, his predecessor, and one of the founders of the Newcastle-based Christian Institute, set up in 1991 to \"Promote Christian Values in a Secular World.\" The Institute now has 12 full-time employees and claims 10,000 supporters. Its accounts show it received half a million pounds in donations last year.
Giving a lecture at Emmanuel College in 2000, John Burn gave his vision for the school. In the lecture he says that children must not be coerced into belief, but at the same time he envisages an atmosphere in the school that will ensure that Christianity is inculcated into the pupils at all times. Read the speech here.
On the Christian Institute\'s website can be found a whole series of lectures describing how a Biblical perspective can be applied to the whole range of national curriculum studies - including mathematics here.
In 1997 Mr McQuoid and Mr Burn co-authored an article which argued: \"To teach children that they are nothing more than developed mutations who evolved from something akin to a monkey, and that death is the end of everything is hardly going to engender within them a sense of purpose, self-worth and self-respect.\"
Since then he has argued: \"There is no 100 per cent science and even scientists all over the world are now saying there are some gaps in Darwinism. I certainly think it is too simplistic to say that we should teach science in science classes and religion in religion classes.\"
Richard Dawkins is horrified at this kind of talk. \"These people are teaching that the earth is mere thousands of years old. This is not a matter of one scientific position against another. There is no scientific position which states that the Earth is a few thousand years old.\"
Meanwhile, NSS honorary associate Professor Peter Atkins told the Independent: \"These religions should be taught only as part of our cultural history, for their impact there is undeniable, but they should be presented only as quaint ways of disguising ignorance, propagating wishful thinking, and exercising power over the ignorant and weak.\"
As the NSS has been pointing out for some time, ambitious parents will put up with almost anything to get their children into successful schools - they will go to church, even if they are unbelievers, they will move house to fall within a particular catchment area and now, it seems, they will turn a blind eye to religious indoctrination.
One parent, stopped at the school gate last week by a reporter from the Independent said: \"We are not a religious family, we do not go to church. My daughter has come home at times and said that she has been concerned by the amount of emphasis on religion but that has been during assemblies and such like, not during lessons. The schools record on science speaks for itself; the results have been excellent for years.\"
What is not loudly trumpeted is the fact that pupils have to pass an exam to get into Emmanuel College in the first place. No wonder it does well in the league tables when the standard of entrants is so closely monitored.
Meanwhile, the Observer revealed that pupils at Emmanuel College are required to carry with them at all times two different versions of the Bible, and are subjected to frequent lectures on Biblical literalism. The paper suggests that this amounts to \"brainwashing.\" One 17 year old ex pupil said: \"Sometimes there are checks. You were punished if you didn\'t have your Bible. It was like some sort of cult.\"
The article also reveals that at least eight other schools in Britain are teaching biblical literalism as fact.
The Observer quotes Ibrahim Hewitt, of the Association of Muslim Schools, as saying that his members\' schools - including four state-funded ones - taught about Darwin because they were obliged to by the National Curriculum, but they also taught a different, Koranic, view.
The state-funded Seventh Day Adventist School, John Loughborough in north London, also teaches a biblical view of creation, as does the Hasmonean High School for Boys and Girls, which teaches 1,000 Orthodox Jews in north London. Rabbi Mordechai Fachler, director of Jewish Studies at the boys\' school, said: \"We have to do evolution in science, but as Orthodox Jews it is not what we believe. We would welcome Darwin and evolution being removed from the national curriculum.\"
Dr Jenny Tonge, the Liberal Democrat MP who stoked the controversy last week by asking the Prime Minister what he thought of creationism, said that she hoped Mr Blair\'s reticence to condemn Emmanuel College\'s agenda had nothing to do with the large investment in schools being promised by Sir Peter Vardy. Until he came along the City College concept was floundering. She told the Observer: \"Is this Government prepared to accept money from anybody, regardless of the doctrines or religious beliefs of the donor?\"
Mr Blair\'s refusal to condemn the activities of creationists may have worried the scientific establishment, but John Rentoul, the author of Tony Blair: Prime Minister is less concerned. He said: \"One of the common misconceptions about Tony Blair is that, because he is the first Labour prime minister to be a devout Christian, he must be an irrationalist. On the contrary, his theology is liberal, ecumenical and centred on the historical reality of the person of Jesus - rather than the literal truth of the Old Testament. He would not, therefore, be interested in the Creation story except as allegory. For him, the Bible seems to be more a way of approaching universal ethical questions than divine revelation.\"
Nevertheless, the Prime Minister\'s worrying enthusiasm for the promotion of \"faith schools\" - even in the face of wide spread opposition - is ringing alarm bells with those who foresee a troubled future. Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, said: \"If creationism is to be welcomed into science lessons in British schools, what can we expect next - lessons in Holocaust denial or exorcism? After all, some people believe that crop circles are the work of aliens from outer space - does that mean we should take them seriously and include study of their theories in our science lessons? Emmanuel College is setting a very worrying precedent.\"
---- This message was posted by Richard Ridge to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=16;action=display;threadid=11623>
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