My 13 year old niece is running rings around her Religious Studies teacher at school at the moment. Her dad's a committed atheist and has brought her up to question things. Her teacher is a bit flaky...she teaches about all different religions but she herself seems to have adopted a confused partial-christianity. She makes it clear that she thinks there is a God and has a tendency to expect that the children will tackle the subject from the direction of belief (of whichever faith) which is disturbing from the perspective of a high school teacher.
Especially as Religious education is compulsory.
There y'go rk, now that is something you and I will both agree is appalling; however, this is not due to some recent upsurge in religious sentiment, but rather a survival of an earlier age, which due to resistance from some of the religious sections of society, has proved devilish difficult to dislodge.
An interesting take on this from Guardian Unlimited's Comment is Free section:
Quote:
I am a big fan of the "intelligent design" teaching packs that the god-botherers are sending out to our schools. I hope the government makes them compulsory. They will be incredibly useful in teaching kids the single most important lesson that anyone learns in school.
That lesson is, obviously, that adults in positions of power and responsibility often talk the most extraordinary bullshit. Either because they are kidding themselves, or because they think it is OK to mislead you in order to persuade you to behave in some desirable way, they will look you in the eye and lie to your face.
The widespread knowledge of this fact is surely the cornerstone of any democratic society, far more so than anything about evolution. So I say let the creationists make asses of themselves if they want to. The smart kids will see straight through them and the thick ones were never going to believe in evolution anyway, so who cares?
In general, for every belief that I don't want to take hold in society at large, I am in favour of it being taught in state schools. Consider the question of religion generally. America has a strict blanket prohibition on religion in the public education system, and it is one of the most devoutly Christian countries on earth. We have a compulsory act of worship every day and compulsory religious education up to 15, and we are largely Godless. This isn't a coincidence.
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http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/...s_learned.html
Quote:
In fact, this principle could usefully be extended. In regions of the country where we are worried about the development of Islamic extremism, we ought to force the teachers to draw up a rota and take turns every day unwillingly dragging the kids through a tired, desultory, unenthusiastic version of the basics of Islam.
Just to suck the life out of it even further, we could draw up a set of incomprehensible "targets" and capriciously cut the school's funding now and then if they didn't meet them. Wouldn't five years of grinding through the dullest bits of the Koran substantially reduce the appeal of radical Islam to disaffected Asian youths? The glory of jihad would be inextricably linked in their minds with miserable Thursday afternoons sitting through another bloody hour of RE. It's just an idea.
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[my bold] Now, see that's how I remember RE teachers being. In the main, even if they did believe in God, they tended to be fairly unenthused by their subject. My RE teacher in the 3rd year (age 13/14) just sent us off on loads of 'research missions' in the school library, digging out books of the Hindu gods and drawing pictures of Shiva or other mundane, make work shit that left her to get on with her paperwork :P