Daily Mail, March 15 2002

Emmanuel College in Gateshead is one of the most successful state schools in the country. Its examination results are excellent. Its orderliness is exemplary. Parents are desperate to send their children there, with three applicants for every place.

Yet now this beacon school is at the centre of a storm. It is being accused of teaching that Darwin’s theory of evolution is only a theory, and that it can and should be challenged by the Biblical story of creation.

Parents of the children at Emmanuel are not concerned that their children are being taught a theological view of the world. Why should they be? Emmanuel is a Christian school. Parents send their children there for a Christian education.

But secularists, including the militant atheist and evangelist for Darwin Professor Richard Dawkins, are enraged. They say that the school’s fundamentalist Christian teachers are undermining the scientific teaching of biology.

Dawkins and other distinguished scientists have now complained to Ofsted, which gave the school a glowing report only last year, and demanded that it re-inspect the school’s science teaching.

This row should cause intense concern to anyone who cares about liberal values and freedom of thought in our schools. For this is a direct attempt by secularists to force schools to teach only what they deem to be an approved set of beliefs.

Emmanuel is a non-denominational Christian school run by evangelical Christians. This causes a frisson of alarm in those who --especially since September 11 -- think that faith schools are recruiting grounds for bigotry.

This has created a climate of hysteria which has engulfed the government’s plans to increase the number of faith schools, which it wants to encourage on the not unreasonable grounds that they are generally very successful and popular with parents.

The attack on Emmanuel reveals an alarming intolerance. For what exactly has the school done to attract such opprobrium? It merely teaches creationism, the Biblical story that the world was created in six days – which some evangelicals interpret metaphorically -- in its religious education classes.

In science, teachers and pupils discuss the gaps that Darwin himself acknowledged in his theory of evolution. There are proposals from some science teachers that creationism might be included for discussion in science classes, but no decision has yet been taken.

What is wrong with any of that? It is all well within the requirements of the National Curriculum. It is being said that taxpayers’ money should not be spent on teaching creationism because this runs contrary to scientific fact.

But evolution is not a fact. It is a theory with holes in it. What Emmanuel questions in its religion classes, and may question in its science classes, is scientism, the doctrine that says the only questions worth asking are the ones that science can answer.

This is an extremely dubious doctrine which many scientists themselves think is anti-science. Scientists such as the physicist Stephen Hawking still haven’t managed to produce their grand theory of everything that can explain the mysteries of creation.

And evolution certainly does not have all the answers. It does not explain human self-consciousness; it does not explain altruism; it does not explain how existence began.

Scientists like Dawkins say such questions are unanswerable and therefore should not be asked. But this attitude is not only the height of arrogance – when it translates into telling faith schools what they cannot teach and what pupils are not allowed to think, it becomes totalitarian.

Emmanuel’s head teacher Nigel McQuoid and the former head John Burns have said that the school should teach both evolution and creation theory, and that both are ‘faith positions’. What is wrong with a Christian school encouraging its pupils to debate and question such great matters from different perspectives?

McQuoid and Burns wrote in 1997: ‘To teach children that they are nothing more than developed mutations who evolved from something akin to a monkey and that death is the end of everything is hardly going to engender within them a sense of purpose, self-worth and self-respect.’

To which many parents would say, amen. That’s why they fight to get their children into this school. If they don’t agree with this perspective on life, they are free to send their children to a school which takes a secular view. But our illiberal secularist missionaries cannot tolerate such a choice. They think no children should be taught any alternative to scientism.

If we did go down this road, we would have to say that Christian schools shouldn’t teach that God created the world, the resurrection of Christ, or anything that does not conform to the laws of empirical scientific discovery.

This would be tantamount to saying that the state should not be funding religious schools at all. It would also mean that the state would be declaring that religion was bunk. This would be an intolerable intrusion for a liberal society.

It also ignores the fact that secularism has infested our National Curriculum with a number of highly dubious educational messages. This curriculum has become a Trojan horse for destructive ideologies – so much so that even the former Chief Inspector of Schools Chris Woodhead, who for years thought it was an essential tool to raise educational standards, now believes that it does more harm than good.

It promotes, for example, unproven environmental propaganda as fact, a subversive idea of citizenship, a sexual free-for-all and above all, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth.

This mono-view helps explain why so many of our young people are unable to think for themselves. It helps explain why our universities are centres of conformity. It helps explain why, when anyone dares challenge this scientism-based consensus, they are ridiculed, abused and all but run out of town.

The state’s sole interest in education should be to produce good citizens. That means it has a duty to ensure that they are all literate and numerate and understand the history of their country – none of which it is actually managing to achieve.

What the state should not be doing is telling pupils what they should or should not believe. Parents are entitled to choose schools with a set of beliefs they support. Pupils won’t get very far in life if they don’t know any science, and any schools which didn’t teach science would soon find themselves short of pupils.

Faith schools are used as a kind of backdoor to selection because their standards are high. The Prime Minister himself sends his children to Catholic schools for precisely this reason.

But their faith is an essential ingredient in their success. It creates the schools’ ethos of commitment, discipline and support. That’s why parents value the religious element.

But religion has become the great unmentionable in our society. In intellectual, political or media circles, a religious handle is enough to label one as a bigot or fruitcake.

Instead, secularism now arrogantly presents itself as if it were a religion. It is this overweening and ugly illiberalism that is now putting an excellent school on the rack.

Posted by admin at March 15, 2002