Dawkins On Faith Schools

[poliphilo]

Professor Dawkins was on the TV last night talking against faith schools. He's a nice man and I largely agree with him but he's out of his depth. He was in Northern Ireland talking to a couple of dumb bigots  representatives of the catholic and protestant churches and they had him on the floor- not because they were right and he was wrong but because there was so much passion behind their arguments. You don't talk people out of their inherited tribal identities by being all nice and reasonable and English with them

And is it really such a terrible thing that kids come out of school questioning evolution? I'm inclined to take the Sherlock Holmes line- that information that doesn't have a direct bearing on my life is irrelevant and can be dispensed with. The earth goes round the sun? So what? How does that help me catch criminals? Same with evolution. Unless I'm intending to become a naturalist or a palaeontologist does it really matter what my opinions are?

In the final sequence he was taking an assembly in a primary school and telling the children how they shouldn't believe things simply on the word of grown-ups, but should demand evidence. You could see their attention wandering. "Ooh look a bird" "I wonder what's for lunch."

The most intriguing thing in the programme was a little experiment  where kids were asked to choose between explanations for natural phenomena- one scientific, the other teleological. For example: Why are rocks pointy? Is it because of sedimentation, or is it so that animals can scratch their backs on them? Most kids went for the Just-So answer- which seems to suggest they're hardwired to find purpose in the world. "Does this mean they're born creationists?" asked Dawkins. "Yes," said the experimenter. This might have caused him to go away and rethink his assumptions- to dig a little deeper- but it didn't.

Dawkins objects to religious education as indoctrination, but all education is indoctrination.  Every curriculum has a philosophy behind it- and at least with a religious school you know what that philosophy is.  Dawkins wishes to replace religion with secular humanism- only he doesn't have enough distance on it to call it that but presents it rather as "scientific truth".   So much for scepticism. He is attempting- as Eliot said of Matthew Arnold- " something which must be austerely impersonal... in which reasoning power matters, and it fails him."

Comments

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

Isn't it indoctrination to teach kids to disbelieve what they are told by parents and clergy and to believe what they "learn" in school? We had the conversation about evoloution being taught in grammar school a while ago, and both agreed that our own education did not deal with evolution when we were in lower grades. In fact, we barely touched on it in high school biology. By the time I got to college in the 1980's a sociology professor, of all things, was demanding that everyone in her class accept evolution as a first premise, while the biology professor simply taught us about life on earth and said nothing about evolution per se, allowing us to see for ourselves and draw our own conclusions. I stated before and will state again, I have no problem with either faith or science and do not find them incompatible unless one is so terribly biased as to possess a completely closed mind. However, I do have problems with school systems that would brainwash children into trashing the values system their parents - and yes, clergy - are teaching them. Some of the stuff that is going on in kids' classrooms over here, at least, makes my head spin!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've never seen there was any conflict between Evolution and Theistic belief. Most of the more intelligent Victorian Christians who had to cope with Darwin when his ideas first came out took a deep breath, adjusted their beliefs a little- and carried on as before.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

The always sensible old Brits! No wonder I have a soft spot for the Victorians!