Lo, cometh a Used Car Salesman

The debate about Faith schools remains a relevant one. I remain perplexed as to why a Used Car dealer should be regarded as a paragon of virtuous faith.




No matter what the event may be, and whether you think it is good or bad, it never seems to matter to you if it is happening far away. Take Afghanistan for example; we are aware in some peripheral way that there is a spot of bother out there. If we hunt hard enough through the column inches of the newspapers we may even find that people are dying out there (despite President Tony’s best efforts). We may also have heard of Camp X-Ray, where prisoners from the conflict are being held. Perhaps we have heard in passing about human rights abuses, or that English prisoners are being held there. Yet none of it is really real, because it is happening over there. We can therefore safely forget about it and get on with the important business of our daily grind.

Sometimes however, we are given cause to regret paying so little attention to events over the sea and far away. Apathy gives way to anger, mockery turns to indignation, indifference to embarrassment. I’ve been given cause to feel like that recently. For many happy years I have sat in my chair and poured all manner of scorn on those evangelical Christians in the USA who believe firmly in Creationism. They have allowed years of scientific study to gently pass them by and remain cheerfully mired in the superstitions and fairy tales of times gone past, when the world was simpler and so were the people whom they wished to have influence over. When several counties in the south of the US began to pass laws stating that creationism was to be given equal weight in school’s to evolution, far from being utterly horrified at the world’s most powerful nation taking a giant leap backwards, I could scarce contain my laughter, to say nothing of the satisfying feeling that most Englishmen get when Americans do something laughable such as elect a chimpanzee as their president.

I would wade through reams of print to find the reasoning that led to these schools saying (with a straight face) that the world was created in 7 days. Naturally, their reasoning caused one to believe that if they were created in 7 days then it was definitely a rush job on the part of God. All sorts of pseudo scientific titbits (“carbon dating is only approximate”), circumstantial guesswork (“there is a lack of fossils from key periods in the evolutionary timescale”), and downright lies (“only God could have created the world, for he has provided us with the Bible to show us that he did this”) were trotted out to any reporter who could keep the mocking grin from his face whilst the interview was conducted. In short, I revelled in the opportunity to point and laugh and stare at a group of people whose wilful stupidity and willingness to be manipulated into believing such nonsense confirmed so many long held prejudices about the good folk of Southern USA.

Well, don’t I now feel like the idiot?

I live near Newcastle upon Tyne in the north east of England. In the eyes of some, the north of England can be equated to the South of the USA; we’re supposedly a bit rougher round the edges, our accents are funny, and in general we’re a little less sophisticated than those from the richer south. Like those people of Southern USA, there is also a general sense of pride in our region. I personally am deeply in love with the northeast. I love the nightlife in Newcastle, the fact that rolling hills and countryside is but a few miles away, that money goes further here, I love the honesty and friendliness that is so prevalent here. I even love the casual way in which two chaps may beat each other near senseless in a pub yet be seen drinking together the following day. Since going away to University, I have become a born again Geordie. Which makes my shock, shame, and anger at the events in Emmanuel College, Gateshead all the greater.

Emmanuel college is the first school in the UK to go the same route as those unevolved souls in America who wish to teach our children that dinosaurs did not exist, that the world is only 10,000 years old, and that fossils are simply rock formations placed there by God himself. It is their stated intention to churn out classrooms full of children whose spirit of inquiry will be blunted by the bland assertion that God created everything, and anything that contradicts that is either flawed as it comes from the mind of Man, or treacherous because it was put there by Satan to deceive us. How can it be that the place which I love more than any other is opening itself up to mockery by exactly the sort of smug git who would do things like laugh about the stupidity of those far away from himself?

The college is, in a way, a victim of it’s own success. It is partly private and partly state funded. It has been praised for the high number of exam passes that it is producing. A sister school is due to open in Middlesborough (which is just about far enough away for me to laugh at). However, the private finance comes from a gentleman who is passionately evangelical in his faith. And, as with most tiresome evangelists, he wants to spread the good word as far as possible. Hence the faith based science syllabus which he and many of the teachers at Emmanuel wish to smear all over their pupil’s minds.

Yet why should this be such a bad thing? After all, it’s not as if teaching of evolution is being abandoned altogether. It is merely being given equal weight to creationism as theories for how we all came to be standing here now. And isn’t it a good thing to give children the choice to make up their own minds? Well, to be blunt, no. Can you really imagine evangelical teachers giving unbiased information about evolution when their own beliefs conflict and when they have the opportunity to tell the Truth to a class full of blank slates? And what about homework or essays? If a pupil was to write that he or she had taken account of both theories and found that evolution was the more plausible, would he be given the same grades as someone who had seen the light and accepted that only God could have created such a perfect and holy world?

Neither do the teaching plans of Emmanuel College bode well for the governmental preference that is being shown to faith based schools at the moment. They don’t require as much state funding and so save money. These schools tend to do better in the yearly exam result league tables, and good luck to them for doing so. Consequently, more parents wish to send their children there. What if they decide that they too wish to teach the true word of God rather than Darwin’s distasteful and blasphemous theory? Does the idea of a generation who are taught to dismiss certain lines of enquiry with the blanket answer “God did it” scare anybody else as much as me? If you want an extreme example, let’s revisit the Afghanistan conflict. The Taliban and other assorted religious fanatics who are trying to show us how good God is by trying to kill as many people as possible originated from faith based schools in Pakistan. It was in these schools that they received their education, their absolute intolerance of anything that falls outside the scope of their religious beliefs, and their unshakeable knowledge that anyone who disagrees with them is the enemy. Why were these schools allowed to proliferate? Because they didn’t require state funding and so saved money.

Of course, I’m not saying that Emmanuel college will be the training ground for warriors of a Christian Jihad, but I am saying that it will encourage exactly the sort of narrow-mindedness that will be music to the ears of a failing and flagging church. This will also give the lapdog Church of England a little more courage to yap at the government and make some demands of its own. The Church and the State were separated for a very good reason. Please don’t let it take the introduction of parliamentary bills calling for the abolition of abortion or removal of sex education from schools to remind us why that separation continues to be a good idea.