Never have I said that they were.
Guess what? Not all religious people are even Christian! Shocking, I know…
I would expect the teachings in every class to be consistent with the beliefs of the church that sponsors the school. If your church believes in creationism, then yes, that is exactly what you should expect them to teach at their schools. Keeping kids safe from being exposed to pesky contradictory facts is a big reason people send their kids to such schools.
my guess would be some whackdar private religous quasi home school deal. we had an apostalic pentacostal church with about 16 students in their basement school taught by volunteer adults in the congregation. their “textbooks” were typed up by the minister/leader/whatever and then mimeographed and stapled into booklets, there only officially printed on a press book was the bible. This was in the 70’s, considering how acceptable whackdar is now, nothing surprises me.
I remember having a history book printed in 1948, I was using it in 1976. (my brother who is 20 years older than me recalled studying from the same book, but at least it had been semi relevant then!) I showed it to my dad because he was already pissed at book rental rates wow he nuked the school, school board, PTA, board of ed, the township, the state, and wound up getting most textbooks replaced (at least in our township)in the next three years (and quadrupling the already bloated book fees, I shudder to think what they are now)
And that appears to the very same Atlantan suburban county where I attended school. Imagine my relief when I found the quiz to be factual and not some religiously based mockery of reality. I do not wish to cast aspersions upon other’s beliefs, but there is a real world out there and the ideas promoted by young-earth creationists do not conform to it. At all.
Assuming this quiz presented by the OP does exist, where do the parents imagine their children will be able to secure a job after being misled about history and reality in general? They can’t all be accountants, after all. Or telephone disinfectors. Some of them might end of being <gasp> engineers, scientists, teachers, doctors or any of a long list of professions that require critical thinking. Doesn’t this kind of nonsense stunt the mental growth of these little girls and boys?
I ask because I don’t know, but my bet is that it does. You must teach a child to question and look for real answers. I usually don’t assert a statement directly, but there I did. We teach children by getting them to ask questions and then figure out the answers. How do fish swim? How do worms wriggle? How do birds fly?
Teaching notably incompetent thought processes and the ideas that are generated thereof cripples our next generation.
I believe it is our duty as rational people to stand against this.
But, how shall we?
Is this a worthy cause for anyone?
Is it OK for a good 30% of the US population to be genuinely and deeply ignorant about basic biology and geology and astronomy and physics? They believe that we never went to Luna; that the TWC towers fell because of internal demolitions; that airplanes contrails are actually poisoning us with as-yet-undetected chemicals; that mind control rays are broadcast from satellites to control the American people.
Do we just accept that that many people are mired in a belief system that doesn’t actually match up very well to what the rest of us casually call ‘consensual reality?’
It seems a foregone conclusion to most of my cadre that “there are just crazy people out there and we should leave them alone.” Is this a correct assumption?
Should I just climb down off of my donkey and stop tilting at windmills?
I would like to. This tin pot handle is really irritating my neck.
Apologies to accountants and telephone disinfectors.
The details have become a little fuzzy, as details are won’t to do with time, but I have a story for this thread that might bring credulity to the test, even if only tangentially.
My little sister came home from preschool one day and asked me why we don’t pray. I told her we had no reason to, and asked her why she thought we had to. She told me that she prayed everyday in daycare and it was an important Christian thing to do. She was four and my family were definitely not Christians.
This was a private preschool. When our mom signed her up, there was neither any mention of a religious curriculum, nor of any religious expectation on the part of the kids attending. They just went ahead and directed the kids on the finer aspects of prayer without informing or asking the parents (and most likely still do, as it’s family run). Quizzing her further, that’s apparently as far as it got, some vaguely day-to-day Judeo-Christian language used commonly by the staff aside (“Where else do you hear the word ‘God’”/“X” says God blesses me everyday").
We were in such a limited financial/living situation that we were stuck with this preschool. In fact, if my little sister didn’t get past the wait list, my mom literally didn’t know what else she could do. I personally didn’t have any power to change the situation at the time (being young myself) and my mom isn’t generally an empowered person, so there she stayed for a year and a half more until she went to kindergarten.
I think the similarities of my story and this story are obvious. In my life experience, the idea that a school can surprise you isn’t crazy.
I’ve never had a job that related at all to my belief or disbelief in any scientific or biblical theories. I don’t think anyone will have to resort to pursuing a career disinfecting telephones because they don’t believe in evolution. Most jobs don’t even involve critical thinking, let alone coming to a science-based conclusion, and most Americans are unable to locate various countries on a map or do simple arithmetic.
If a parent was surprised at what went on at a particular religious school, it could make sense, like if they discovered that their non-creationist church was teaching this crap, but the surprise isn’t coming from people familiar with a particular school. We all know churches exist that believe these things, and that some of those churches run schools, so obviously they would teach this in their schools and the existence of a school that teaches this should come as absolutely no surprise. Why even bother to doubt the authenticity of the test? If this particular test is not real, it’s surely not because no schools are teaching this.
I’m very, very tired right now, so I will fully concede I misunderstood something along the way. I was just trying to respond to people in the thread who doubted the possibility of something like this happening. The point of my story was, you can send a kid to a school and be full well informed of the going-ons and still have something crazy and line-crossing happen. However, it appears to be that the dad knew the affiliated church was a creationist one, so my story isn’t relevant.
My apologies.
There are religious schools and there are religious schools. I went to this school one summer to make up for failing English and didn’t get any religious teaching.
When I was in 6th grade (1980 in rural Alabama) my teacher was very religious. When it came time to teach earth science (or whatever it was called at the time) she had had a student read from Genesis about the creation of the earth, etc. On one of the tests dealing with creation of the earth the question was worded “How do scientists say the earth was created?”
I also remember a teacher having daily devotional readings in homeroom during Jr. High.
At my last job, the head of the engineering department was a young Earth creationist. Muslim variety, though, not Christian.
But would it have been so terribly shocking if you had?
I’m not saying that all religions believe in creationism.
I’m not saying that all Christians believe in creationism.
I’m not saying that all religious schools teach creationism.
I’m not saying that all religious schools teach religion.
I am saying that a school run by a church that believes in creationism is likely to teach that in school.
Locating a religious school that does not teach creationism, or religion, or even mention any god or gods to the students proves nothing. Religious schools often DO teach religion. If the church believes some wacky stuff, it should not come as EVEN REMOTELY SURPRISING that they would include this wacky stuff in the curriculum. Why wouldn’t they? They actually think it’s true.
**Jodie - Um, Chechnya became independent in 1991, and this map was printed before then. It’s completely outdated.
Mr. DeMartino - That’s right, Jodie. I guess they think since I teach history I don’t need any supplies created after V-E Day!**
Quote from Daria “Fizz Ed”
The Chechnya reference is coincidental.
Not shocking, no, but I was there for English, not religion. All I knew going in is that it’s a Christian school and that it was the nearest school offering summer classes.
Why does the kid’s handwriting appear to change from the first to the second page?
Great. A photo of my favorite fears. It better be fake.
Even in the context of Sunday School or the like, it’s silly, stupid and wrong. But thebiggest objection (assuming it’s real) is if this came from a school that’s an authorized alternative to public education. Religion is entitled to its own matters, spirituality, soul, morality even. But in the context of ostensibly providing a fully rounded education, it can not brush aside facts in areas outside its purview.
Meh, it doesn’t look all too different from the mimeographed pop quizzes I used to get at my crazy fundie/creationist elementary school. Our text books (from A Beka Book, a company popular with homeschoolers and private religious schools) usually just avoided the whole topic of dinosaurs, but our teachers would bring in extra stuff like filmstrips purporting to show fossilized human footprints alongside dinosaur prints, and from that point on we’d be expected to know dinosaurs and humans co-existed. Thanks to all of that, I (and AFAIK most of my fellow students) just kept “school knowledge” and "outside knowledge"separate in our heads, and learned that the point of school was to repeat back to the teachers what we thought they wanted to hear… though we did argue vehemently with the teacher the day he taught us that Jupiter was really a star, not a planet.
Student Driver, your school experience would make an interesting standalone thread. Consider starting one.