Oh, and this worried me slightly:

More than a quarter of science teachers in state schools believe that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science lessons, according to a national poll of primary and secondary teachers.

The Ipsos/Mori poll of 923 primary and secondary teachers found that 29% of science specialists agreed with the statement: “Alongside the theory of evolution and the Big Bang theory, creationism should be TAUGHT in science lessons”

I’ve little problem with the discussion of creationism. But the teaching of the doctrine is another matter. We shouldn’t teach creationism as a scientific point of view; it’s not, and doesn’t claim to be. The theory states that a divine being literally created life, the universe, and everything. As such, it’s explicitly based in faith, both in a god, and an idea of what that god might do. It isn’t an empicically tested hypothesis, as inclusion in a science lesson would suggest.

And yet that’s how it’ll be taken; because children expect what they’re taught in a Science to be demonstrably true. Far from challenging creationism, encouraging Science teachers to teach on it will simply lend it the perception of fact. We should teach pupils about creationism, and the debate that surrounds it - but in RS, along with every other belief system based in faith above empiricism.

A Catholic school in Bury has banned pupils from receiving the Cervical Cancer vaccination. It claims it isn’t in the position to do so; governors worry that side-effects can include dizziness. Some pupils must worry that the side-effects of cervical cancer can include death.

The decision just doesn’t make sense. It isn’t on the overt fundamentalist grounds other groups tried to stop the vaccinations; the Vatican came out for the vaccine. Their complaint seems centred solely on the grounds that pupils might faint; despite reassurances from doctors and the unavoidable fact that the vaccine can prevent a deadly disease. Do they have no sense of proportionality?

Someone please explain the following logic:

An exam board is removing a poem about a knife-carrying violent loner from its anthology for GCSE English because of fears over teenage knife crime.

The AQA exam board has decided to withdraw the poem Education for Leisure written by Carol Ann Duffy.

The exam board is writing to schools to advise them to destroy the copies of the anthology - and says it will send replacements not containing this poem.

Why? I’ve read the poem; it hardly glorifies knives. Far from it, the protagonist seems the model of mental instability: he kills because he’s bored, and it makes him feel as though he counts. At most, it provides a decent model of some of the reasons behind gang-membership without glorifying death:

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

Emphasis mine. Today’s youth find themselves locked out of the political system by a generation of greedy boomers; hence are “ignored.” Some (many?) go to school and find much irrelevant - Shakespeare is, “another language,” and life-skills are firmly off the curriculum. Without those skills, and on the verge of a recession sparked by 29 years of economic vandalism, employment for some very much becomes a choice between shovelling shit for a wage barely worth itself, or leaving an empty “autograph,” at the JobCentre. And that leaves nothing to do; so the streets become, “grey with boredom.” In those circumstances, are we really surprised that that some turn to gangs and crime? The system, economic and social, abandoned them - so they’ve little incentive to work within it.

Youth crime is a complex issue, and needs a complex approach. Simply removing poems which address it from the curriculum won’t help at all; a problem won’t go away because you resolutely ignore it. Teenagers, after all, probably know far more about their own world than adults - so changing the school curriculum to avoid that world won’t help them avoid it. If you want to educate someone out of a habit, then you need to educate them in the first place. And does this really look like that?

…this time in Northern Ireland. There, the “Family Education Trust” wants the state to withold a vaccine against STDs and cervical cancer from teenage girls on the grounds that it’ll encourage early sex, and that parents should emphasise abstainence.

The base idiocy of this position is well established. Abstinence only sex-education doesn’t work, and simply encourages the spread of disease through ignorance. The desire for sex is a perfectly natural instinct, and one that won’t be quashed because a collection of pompous prigs stand in front of a class and say that it’s naughty. Teenage experimentation will happen; I speak as a teenager who has experimented, and would’ve done so in most conceivable circumstances.* But, because these teenagers have only been told to abstain, they might not know to wear a condom, or about how syphilis/chlamydia/AIDs/etc are spread; so they don’t take precautions. And then teenage pregnancy and STD infection rates go up.

The case for the vaccine is still more simple. The state exists to preserve and extend the freedom of its citizens; one such freedom is from infectious disease, and from dangerous ignorance. A lack of knowledge of how infectious diseases such as this cervical cancer because you’ve only ever been told to avoid sex counts as dangerous ignorace. Therefore, the state must offer full and detailed sexual education, for the sake of the individual and public health. And if a vaccine exists which can prevent the spread of potentially deadly diseases, that needs to be available too; if they vaccinate against meninghitis in schools, why not cervical cancer?

Ah, but doesn’t all this infringe a parent’s right to raise their child as they wish, you ask? Not so. A child does not exist as an extension of their parent’s will; it exists as an entity in its own right. If a parent plans to put that child at risk of infectious disease for the sake of the parent’s beliefs, then someone else must look to the child’s rights and future. It’s in the teenager’s every interest, both in the present and the future, to be safe from disease and ignorance. If they themselves objected on strong grounds, religious or otherwise (and I note this is an offer of a vaccine), then there’d be grounds to withold its provision. But not otherwise. A child is an individual in its own right, and one that exists in a community as well as a family. If it serves that individual’s interests more, then that community must also play a part in raising them.

So, frankly, the “Family Education Trust” can fuck off (preferably wearing condoms, of course.) There are no legitimate grounds to withold a vaccine against a potentially deadly disease from teenagers; especially when it’s an offer rather than a compulsion. Individual and public health must comes before parental sensitivity - and this is no exception.

*Could there be a more unfortunate sentence?

Time for some “militant secularism”; another shredding of faith schools, I feel. Observe the latest obscurantist wail from their defenders:

Selective, divisive, a law unto themselves: faith schools have been depicted by Ed Balls, secretary of state for schools, families and children, as a danger to Britain’s 9.8 million school-age children. Balls made his allegations last March, and has commissioned Sir Philip Hunter, the chief schools adjudicator, to investigate the 7000 faith schools in England and Wales. Hunter’s report is scheduled to reach ministers in September – and will, once again, stir up the row over faith schools.

Ball’s charges against faith schools can be dismissed one by one.

Really? They seem justified to me. Faith schools ground pupils in a seperate religious community, and so are divisive; they virtually require pupils to hold that faith, and so are selective; and raise hell (hah…) whenever the state which funds them imposes the same controls as it does on other schools it funds. Selective, divisive and a law unto themselves? Just a bit.

But, let’s hear what Ms. Odone has to say:

The schools do not select middle-class pupils or reject troubled ones. The intake of Christian schools reflects a broader ethnic range than comprehensive schools in the same area.

Class and race are synonymous? Look, we all enjoy a decent non-sequitur now and then, but to cite one phenomena and cite evidence (strangely without validated statistics) from another defeats itself. Balls’ point isn’t even addressed, save with unsupported assertion - so it isn’t addressed.

Moving on:

The schools are not divisive. Fully 76 of the 77 British citizens convicted under the Terrorism Act of 2000 attended a secular state school; the exception was home-schooled.

And this is meant to be serious journalism? When an author manages two complete non-sequiturs in 6 sentences, they need to be denied the oxygen of publicity. It doesn’t matter how many citizens arrested under the Terrorism Act attended secular schools; that’s simply not the point.

Faith schools are inherently divisive. They encourage pupils to conform to the tenets of a certain religion and inculcate a sense of community with others of that religion; they thus perpetuate faith communities. These faith communities are seperate and frequently opposed to each other. In a word, they’re divided - and faith schools perpetuate this. So, actually, it’s got nothing to do with arrests under the Terrorism Act of 2000 and more to do with the socio-cultural implications of telling a child they’re different to other children because of what’s written in an ancient tome.

But there’s more:

Faith schools do not charge parents for places. Although some schools did ask for voluntary contributions from parents even before admission, these pay for extra teaching for religious studies and, in the case of Jewish schools, for protection.

So, what you’re saying is that they do charge parents money and so exclude low-income families? A “voluntary contribution” before admissions sounds suspiciously like one on which admission could hang. Nothing would need said; the very fact that the charge comes before admission would simply worry parents, who then pay out just in case something goes wrong with the application goes through.

Not that those charges would be necessary in a secular school anyway; surely, “protection” money is required because of the school’s very insularity? The group seperates itself off from the community; that community is left in ignorance of that group’s traditions and finds it harder to challenge prejudices; the prejudiced, meanwhile, have an easy target in the isolated group. They’re not asking for it - but they’re hardly making the problem better.

Ed Balls’s attack fed, and amplified, the strident secularist stereotyping of faith schools as ghettoes that teach a backward mentality.

Let’s check a popular definition of the term, “Ghetto”: “a part of a city, especially a slum area, occupied by a minority group.” Substitute, “education system,” for, “city, especially a slum area,” and, actually, that’s about right. A faith school sets itself up as a seperate entity within the state education system justifying its existence by its religious status - an educational ghetto.

In fact, Labour’s own Commission on Integration and Cohesion found that faith schools support local communities in terms of sharing their resources, and generating social capital.

Note the strange jargon to confuse the uninitiated; “social capital,” is an evasive non-phrase straight out of a sociology textbook. The author again misses the point; the schools might support their own, local communities, but their perpetuation of an insular, religious mentality seperates them from the national community (such as it is) and so is divisive.

Moreover, faith schools are crucial in the emancipation of Muslim girls: those who attend Muslim schools are more than twice as likely to go on to higher education than those who attend secular state or independent schools.

Perhaps more importantly, they’re more than twice as likely to have the doctrines of a religion elements of which treat women as second-class citizens forced on them. As they would do with a Christian or Jewish school; the patriarchal elements of Abrahamic faiths are inescapable.

Very emancipating.

As for the urban myth that faith schools teach creationism in science classes, this is precisely indeed a myth.

Now this just needs editting; “precisely indeed”? Ugh…

Faith schools have an excellent academic record, serve their local communities, and ground their students in a religious as well as national identity. Why squander this force for good?

Because they ground their students in a religious identity, and because that grounding is tax-funded. Parents have the right to educate their children as they wish, so long as that doesn’t harm the child; but they don’t have the right to do so on other taxpayers. All parents fund the education system. That system should thus be open to the children of any parent at any point, regardless of faith. That requires universally secular state schools; that requires an end to state funding for faith schools. Simple, really.

Oh - and since when was a religious and national identity a force for good? Division is the word she’s looking for.

For Ed Balls – and Gordon Brown – the answer is obvious: to woo the “old Labour” rump of the party, equally committed to secularism and comprehensive education.

Or maybe it’s because they believe in an open and fair education for all children?

With an eye to the No 10 succession, Balls is setting himself up as the old Labour candidate by bashing faith schools.

This is just laughable. Balls is setting himself up as Old Labour - by bashing faith schools? Odone could at least do the scaremongering properly and realise that the Labour left aren’t very well disposed to Balls because of City Academies and more. They care about socialism as well as secularism.

He deserves to fail.

Oh, look, another unsubstantiated point. Typical, no?

Ed Balls has managed to get something right for once. Well, sort of, anyway.

This is an excellent suggestion. Being able to cook is an essential life skill. What are you supposed to eat if you can’t cook a basic meal? Expensive, unhealthy, foul ready-meals are really the only option beyond beans on toast - neither of which are the foundation for a healthy diet. Or, indeed, a healthy wallet.

Now, I think the emphasis is wrong. Balls wants to introduce compulsory lessons in 8 healthy dishes to combat obesity. This strikes me as a poor way to approach the matter. What use is teaching children to cook certain, specific dishes if they don’t understand the fundamental mechanics of cookery? The preparation of food is generally based in a number of universal, essential techniques. Surely it would be better to teach teenagers these techniques rather than specific meals? That would allow them to cook any number of meals, and give them a degree of choice in what they ate.

So, the measure is very much half-arsed. But it’s a step in the right direction. Cooking is as essential a skill as basic mathematics, and should be taught as much as it.

In the same Op-Ed The Times continued in its degeneration into a neo-liberal tool by making the bizarre claim that Faith Schools “Create competition which, by and large, is a healthy.” A perpetual, prevalant, interminable error of the free-marketeers is their assumption that, since the market works brilliantly for the economy, it must work equally well when applied to just about anything else.

This has lead to the aforesaid absurdities in response to “Targets” and although Ofsted has been a good deal less irrational this suggestion is downright odd. Schools are effectively dependent upon the quality of their “Resources” {that’s young human beings, to you or me} to get the “Product” {an education} to levels which are observable by those who measure {league tables, that is, not the remarkably efficient Ofsted inspectors} and although that could, plausibly, be considered similar to the standard capitalist model how exactly does this comparison work out who the “Consumer” is. Would it be the parent, who chooses? The child, who is the one which actually receives the benefit? Or is the child’s mind truly seen merely as a resource and the parent’s contentment what the school must provide.

This is a suitably dismal view of education for a philosophy reliant upon economists to provide, as well as perhaps the only one that they ever possibly could. It is also entirely untrue: the faith school approach to “Competition” is simply to siphon away the most academically talented students, using an advantage which the secular state schools do not have at their disposal. To present this as a contest is rather like saying that a sprint where one conducts the race freely and the other with his legs bound is entirely fair and open.

Besides, a school is a poor one if it places the desires of its student body, or worse still the parents of this body, above their intellectual lives and as such is entirely an anathema to the ideal of “Customer satisfaction” that neo-libs rely upon. It must pursue their greater and long-term pleasures and interests as well as more short concerns, rather than being a solely a means of satisfying the immediate will. If it honoured the doctrine of “Supply and demand” that is neo-liberal dogma then it would flounder and sink, as it is only an occasional child that desires more homework but the inverse proportion, if not greater, that benefit from it.

In short what is suitable for economic revival and pleasing the customer is not appropriate at all for the education system. Competition may well have its place, perhaps even a prominent one, in such a system but it is firstly unwise to apply political theory based around economics to the education of children and secondly doubly unwise to imagine that a school with a selection process will ever be able to “Compete” with one without and win by any other means than a positive catchment area.

To summarise further: given that this preposterous piece sat alongside a piece where a journalist sharing Hillary Clinton’s genital format claimed that her vagina should be considered before her political acumen, her character and the wisdom of her policy {or at least disregarded all three latter to focus upon the former} is there truly any worth left in The Times at all?

On the front page of The Times today there is an article stating that the Labour MPs have taken a break from worrying about their leader to instead focus upon the faith schooling system. About time too, I say.

Apparently Balls announced recently that the Brown administration was not ideologically tied to the daft idea of using taxpayer’s money to indoctrinate children, which is rather a relief, really. Unfortunately mixed signals seem to be being emitted as he also suggested later om that they were planning to dramatically expand their number.

So why exactly is this? If there is no “Idealogical” {whatever their understanding that is} affiliation in the Brownite Cabinet what is causing them to promote the idea of the state effectively funding a Church outfit focusing solely upon children? Simple: figures.

Like all the rest of the New Labour project the Browns are blind without statistics and numbers, which is not necessarily a poor state to be in but proves unquestionably hazardous if you have no idea what you are looking at.

Which is the case here: you could look at the stats showing that state schools without faith do worse than those with it and say “Aha, it is the religion that makes the schools do better!” And be wrong. The most likely explanation is not the one nebulously connected to religion {which is a curious argument at best, are we to understand that God’s blessings upon these institutions has a tangible effect? That someone the closeness to organised religion creates organised children?} but rather something which has been demonstrated thoroughly: selection.

If you allow a school to choose the pupils it receives the outcome is remarkably predictable. They will choose the best and will thrive. It would be remarkable if they did anything else. Wonderful for that school, isn’t it? Not so wonderful for the school which has had all the talent siphoned away and is left with children who range from severely deprived to mediocre.

This is an old argument that only the Tories are bothering to continue, the Comprehensive system is supposed to dominate now. But faith schools are allowed to continue this grand cherry-pick.

This is the point where advocates complain that this is a grotesque misrepresentation: that the schools are indeed permitted selection {to maintain identity} but that this is strictly limited to the faith of the children.

The most obvious response to this is the Dawkinsian one: to automatically assign children the faith of their parents is absurd. They are not extensions of parental belief but instead autonomous, if immature, beings. To attempt to classify their religion by whether they have had water splashed on their forehead, had their foreskin sliced and ripped off or been dragged off regularly to the church/mosque/synagogue is simply preposterous. This shows nothing but how the parents have treated them.

But, pragmatically speaking, the statistics remain, do they not? There is an objectively distinguishable difference, one with copious exceptions but still a fair rule. Faith schools do better. But then, so did Grammar Schools.

Of course, the situation is more nuanced than then: the selection process of grammatics allowed them to choose their girls and boys on purely academic acumen, while faith schools, as we have found, have to make choices on parenting styles.

Although it pains me to have to say this, seeing as how positive my view of humanity generally is and how I do my best to ward off the corrosive cynicism that gnaws into most pursuers of matters political, the problem with this argument is this: parents lie.

The phenomenon of the “Year Five Epiphany” is a phenomenon that only the most naive could try to explain away. The fact that the Church ignored it altogether in their response to the article is telling. Effectively parents leave out the baptism when it is performed usually and suddenly experience a miraculous change of faith just in time for the baby to be deemed eligible for admittance into the high-powered academic institution of their choice.

Or at least that is the kindest explanation. The one which is more likely is a good deal more harsh and revolves around the phrase “Rampant opportunism”, so I shall refrain from making it explicit.

Various institutions have cottoned on to this method and have introduced more draconian methods: some have forced parents to make the ceremony occur within the first year of life, while in the London Oratory {guess which former Prime Minister and recent convert sent his child there? Despite living on entirely the other side of London…?} the Catholic “Ethos” is so strictly enforced that an interview is required for both the child and the parents to ensure that they are theologically suitable. both demands the baptism have occurred within six weeks of birth {in adherence with the same “Magisterium” that declares every drop of semen spilt outside of a vagina belonging to somebody both married to you and wishing to procreate with you sinfully spilt} , but also formerly had a long-standing policy that required an interview of both child and parent. This absurd measure {harsher even than that of highly selective private schools} was reverted only last year when outlawed by the government. Other schools have been less rigidly draconian but all have made efforts to deny access to those children that have parents of inappropriate beliefs.

This, however, is not enough to stem the tide. What is an hour or so on a Sunday in exchange for avoiding a hefty bill for sending your children private? What is lying through your teeth to a polite headmaster for a few minutes if your child is spared the strife of secular state schooling? What is outright deception, dishonesty and dishonour if you need not buy a £2.3m house on sale in an affluent catchment area?

Not nearly enough to reconsider.

Parents want the very best for their children, this is something that is inevitable and that the government could never hope and should never desire to change. But as long as that remains unaltered the system will be filled by the offspring of agnostic, atheist and long-timed lapsed parents who are in the know about such matters. And these, conveniently, are the ones which sociologists identify as those most likely to pass on the cultural capital required for scholastic success.

Which makes this the academic equivalent of the nurses who redefined a trolley as a bed to transform patients waiting in hospital corridors into patients placed where they belong simply by taking of the wheels. Middle-class parents infiltrate these institutions, send there children who will achieve and inflate their Ofsted ratings. What else would you expect?

Now that the alleged faith-based superiority of these institutions has been refuted there are two matters left: the alternative and the harm that they cause.

The latter is clear: the claim made by today’s Times leader that faith schools encourage “Diversity” is nothing other than a mockery of reality. They instead serve to isolate “Communities” and segregate our youth.

This matters less for Christians, especially due to the aforesaid infiltrators, but for smaller groups the results can be disastrous: a child of Muslim parents can be insulated from the decadent kuffar by those “Of his own kind” and overseen by an Imam, while a Jew of religious parentage driven to the school gates need never so much as encounter a goy for his entire childhood.

What hope is there for true, total integration when this is the state that people are raised in? When you have rarely, if ever, encountered children of other backgrounds and certainly not enjoyed them as your peers then what will the consequences be to your connection with mainstream society? What hope have we of quelling bigotry when a substantial proportion of minority of the young are forced to capitulate to some grotesque extension of the “Birds of a feather” maxim?

These questions have not been asked, let alone answered, by the high-rankers yet. That the lower-league players are kicking up a fuss and showing a desire to shout them to the rafters is promising and I certainly hope that the “Debate” suggested manages to materialise, unlike the plethora of other occasions such an event has been suggested and then never occured.

As there is an alternative, one which would be seen as radical by some but truly supports the entirely moderate proposition of secularism: the state should give its money to institutions devoid of religious background and them only. Those that wish to continue existence and previously relied upon the taxpayer may switch to Private and become like the school which I attend {at which, hilariously, there are around five-seven actual genuine Catholics with a basic understanding of Church teaching which they mostly accept in my year. At most.} or else will cease to exist.

This is no tragedy as any arrangement which required the money of the public to subsidy a religious institution is inherently illegitimate, especially so if its intention was to preserve itself through influencing the developing minds of children.

If this was to occur it is likely that the state schools would improve immensely: the intelligent children which they have been deprived of would be returned to them and their standards would rise accordingly.

Alternatively parents would continue to attempt exploitation of the catchment area instead and house prices would sky-rocket and our economy at very least stablise, or quite possibly expand.

Either way the move would be entirely beneficial and prove immensely helpful to our nation’s children, by bringing them together rather than enclosing them apart. This is, largely, what already happens in Scandinavian nations and the results have been superb. The alternative is keeping them apart and thus segregating on the grounds of parental religious practice, as was practiced extensively and thoroughly in Northern Ireland.

The preferable course should be instantaneously obvious.