Reading Time: 4 minutes [Previous: No one has the right to starve a child’s mind] Imagine you find yourself in a room, facing two doors. One door is rough, weathered wood. The other is made of boards polished smooth. There’s carved writing on both, but it’s in a language you don’t read, in characters you’ve never seen. There are […]
Education
Exploring the world of education from a secular, nonreligious perspective.
Posted inEducation
Landmark High Court win for UK humanism
Reading Time: 4 minutes A recent High Court judgment recently found in favor of a humanist, and Kent County Council will not appeal the decision. This has been seen as a landmark ruling. The event might ignite discussions of whether or not humanism should be designated a religion. When looking at the definition for humanism as per the Humanists […]
Posted inEducation
UK’s state-run CofE schools plan to ‘double number of children who are Christian disciples’
Reading Time: 3 minutes The UK education system is not secular, and the Church of England is looking to schools as a recruitment pool for new believers.
Posted inParenting & Family
Teach your kids about propaganda, or someone else will
Reading Time: 6 minutes Keeping kids isolated from viewpoints you disagree with is a parenting strategy that never works. A better one is to teach them how to recognize propaganda and toxic memes when they see them.
Posted inEducation
UN Committee on Rights of the Child calls out religious bias in UK schools
Reading Time: 4 minutes While the UK may seem more secular than the US, the public education system is a good example of how this assumption is wrong.
Posted inParenting & Family
When evolution is a bad word
Reading Time: 6 minutes (Part 1 | Part 3) Quick recap. My 9-year-old daughter won a national Evolution and Art contest. Her school’s assistant principal, Ms. Warner, said the principal would interview her about it on the school’s morning news program. But they wouldn’t be calling it an Evolution and Art contest, just an “Art” contest – because evolution […]
Posted inEducation
Want to protect secular democracy? Speak up at school board meetings
Reading Time: 3 minutes You don’t have to run for Congress to help protect our secular democracy. It’s at the level of your local school board that the Christian nationalist agenda is making its most influential stand. So it’s at public meetings of those school boards that our voices are most desperately needed.
Posted inFree Expression
UK pupils suspended for damaging Qu’ran
Reading Time: 4 minutes Four pupils have been suspended from a school in West Yorkshire, UK, for damaging a Muslim holy book. The incident took place last week at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield in the north of England, although the Headteacher has claimed that there was “no malicious intent” concerning the students involved. A non-Muslim Year 10 (14- […]
Posted inEducation
How Jesuits did and undid me
Reading Time: 12 minutes Like me, Voltaire was educated by men in the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. Like Voltaire, I’ll salute my Jesuit educators and do it using Voltaire’s own words in a letter to one Father Latour, 1746: I was educated for seven years by men who took unrewarded and indefatigable pains to form the minds and […]
Posted inEducation
Why we need public school: Pluralism is how progress happens
Reading Time: 4 minutes [Previous: What rights do parents have over their children’s education?] The battle over public schools is a clash of values. There’s no such thing as neutral or value-free education. Every choice about what to present or what to omit from the classroom carries ideological weight. That’s why red-state politicians want to present one version of […]