Tag: Education

Article discusses the tax exemption status of religion in the USA and in European nations; detailing the wide variety of financial opportunities that the clerics enjoy and exploit. The financial loss in revenue to the nations is calculated, and the conclusion opines that the money would gained would be useful in alleviating hunger and improving education.

Sit down. Brace yourself:
The Texas Board of Education has just made a UNANIMOUS (8-0) decision to deny creationist-backed biology class supplemental material in favor of materials provided by mainstream publishers. The real victory is the fact that these publishers - you guessed it - explain the results of biological science without drowning those results in the pre-established dogmas of the region (i.e.,most of America). Evolution has just planted its feet firmly in the Lone Star State.

Does more education lead to less religion? According to a new working paper by Daniel M. Hungerman, an economist at Notre Dame who studies religion, the answer is yes.

Florida state senator pushes a law to force Florida science teachers to offer a “thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution” and to include “intelligent design” in the classroom.

Despite 80 years of court battles ousting creationism from public classrooms, most public high school biology teachers are not strong advocates for evolution.

A scientific study published today in the prestigious Royal Society journal Biology Letters was “conceived, carried out, summarized and written up by a class of 8 to 10 years olds” from Blackawton Primary School in Devon.

A 2005 court battle over intelligent design led scientists to seek better ways to improve students’ understanding of evolution.

A Christian teacher was sacked within hours of offering to pray for a sick pupil during a home mentoring visit. Olive Jones, 54, said yesterday that she has been made a victim of religious persecution for discussing her faith with the child and her mother, who complained about her behaviour. After she was sacked, she was told the family had strongly objected to her approach because they are non-believers, and that a formal complaint had been lodged about her.

It’s a great birthday present for Darwin in his 200th anniversary year. For the first time, evolution will be on the national curriculum for primary schools when the new version is published later this year. It was initially excluded from the draft curriculum when it was published for public consultation but sometimes, if not always, it seems government will listen to scientists and experts, many of whom were signatories to an open letter (pdf) to Ed Balls organised by the British Humanist Association in July which called for evolution to be included.

For as long as anyone can remember, McLennan County has been abstinence country. Nestled in the heart of Bible-Belt Texas, it’s the kind of place where the local newspaper prints “In God We Trust” on the front page of every edition. So when the McLennan County Collaborative Abstinence Program (MCCAP) came to her a little more than a decade ago, offering an abstinence-only sex education program, she says, “It was the answer to our prayers. It was exactly the way we wanted to go.” All that may change with a recent federal funding cut for abstinence only programs.

According to a Mori poll commissioned by the British Council, more than half the population believes it’s OK for children to be told about creationism and Intelligent Design in school science lessons along with evolution. The poll shows 54 per cent of Britons would not object to biology teachers discussing ‘alternative perspectives’ on the origin of life alongside explanations of evolution.

The long-standing theory has been that the higher educated someone is the less religious he will be. But new research in 60 countries proves otherwise. It is economic security that leaves churches empty.

After squashing Darwin deniers and God-botherers with bestselling tomes including The God Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins is set to tackle what might be his hardest audience yet: teenagers.

The well-known scientist and atheist has struck a book deal for his first title for young adults, which will look to explode myths and legends about the natural world with science. Due out in autumn 2011, What is a Rainbow, Really? will take on topics including who the first man and first woman were, why there are seasons, what the sun is, how old the world is and why there are so many animals, first answering the questions with myth and legend, and then with “lucid scientific explanations”.

When the UK Education Secretary Ed Balls expressed concern about the way independent religious schools were operating in this country he was given a severe drubbing by the religious establishment who said he had “launched an attack” on so-called “faith schools.”

“American Scientists Debunk Darwin”, exclaimed the headline in al-Masry al-Youm, Egypt’s leading independent daily. “Ardi Refutes Darwin’s Theory”, chimed the website of al-Jazeera, the region’s most-watched television channel. Scores of comments from readers celebrated this news as a blow to Western materialism and a triumph for Islam. Two or three lonely readers wrote in to complain that the report had inaccurately presented the findings of the research.

The response to Ardi’s unearthing was not surprising. According to surveys, barely a third of Egyptian adults have ever heard of Charles Darwin and just 8% think there is any evidence to back his famous theory. Teachers, who might be expected to know better, seem equally sceptical. In a survey of nine Egyptian state schools, where Darwin’s ideas do form part of the curriculum for 15-year-olds, not one of more than 30 science teachers interviewed believed them to be true. At a private university in the United Arab Emirates, only 15% of the faculty thought there was good evidence to support evolution.

A great deal of ink has been spilt over the nature of the relationship between the arts and sciences since C. P. Snow delivered his Two Cultures lecture in 1959. But that lecture has largely been taken out of context. Snow was frankly not interested in whether the plays of Shakespeare or the second law of thermodynamics was the more appropriate starting point for a full and rich understanding of contemporary Britain. Rather, the lecture was the culmination, rather than the beginning, of a postwar debate about the role of science in British society.

Less awareness of religious symbols, stories and lessons believed to be a sign of increased western secularism

Apparently there is no freedom of speech where Islam is concerned.  Yale University Press censored itself by decided not to include 12 Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a book by Jytte Klauson titled “The Cartoons That Shook the World.”

Tibetan monks and nuns spend their lives studying the inner world of the mind rather than the physical world of matter. Yet for one month this spring a group of 91 monastics devoted themselves to the corporeal realm of science.

At a Buddhist college campus in Dharamsala, the exile home of the Dalai Lama in northern India, red-robed monks and nuns experimented with pendulums, gathered plants in the foothills of the Himalayas that showed natural selection and bent their shaved heads over microscopes to view an unseen world.

To deny the importance of teaching evolution is to fail to grasp a basic truth about children