Christian "education"..

Education seems to be a popular theme at the moment, here is another story bubbling around various Humanist sites it's about ACE (not of the spades variety) it stands for "Accelerated Christian Education" however various reports of its curriculum seem to suggest that the only thing that's "accelerated" about it is the rate at which students miss out on a proper education.

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted the popularity of this scheme with evangelical Christian "home schooling" fans in the USA and pointed out the blatant aggression the materials show toward the Biological sciences. Another interesting snippet was that the home schooling market is worth a billion dollars a year and the "special" text books that these so called Christian organisation are pushing are hideously expensive when compared to regular state supplied materials. This fact is surprising when reviews of these materials suggest that their contents are lacking in accuracy and integrity, for example here is a passage in one of the science books.

"Could a fish have developed into a dinosaur? As astonishing as it may seem, many evolutionists theorize that fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles. This gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis. No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all."

Clearly the author of this material is unaware of the plethora of intermediate fossils showing the transition from fish to amphibians and amphibians to reptiles, to name but a few, Tiktaalik, Ventastega, Pederpes, Proterogyrinus, Tseajaia, Paleothyris, Osteolepis et al.

Initially I thought this would be an isolated American issue, the proportion of religious wing-nuts over there seems to be much higher than in this country (UK), we'd never stand for this kind of indoctrination here... right?

Wrong, the New Life Academy in Hull which is a private Christian fundamentalist school oop North is actually using the ACE curriculum. I wonder if those parents in Hull paying for their kids to be educated in this way actually know about this, I wonder if they care more about their dogma than their children?