"Education has become one of the most fiercely debated political battlegrounds." "Billions of pounds of our money are poured into schools every year." "But there's an aspect of education that is rarely questioned, a slow, creeping change in the make-up of our schools - one third are now faith schools." "I did, I converted to Catholicism." "For the sake of your child." "For the sake of my child." "If you come to our school, we're very much open minds." "What we are trying to indoctrinate is a view that faith matters." "Some say parents must be able to educate their child in their faith." "Do you believe that parents have the human right to choose the education for their children or not?" "Others fear this is limiting and divisive." "To separate yourself off from the rest of humanity, is deeply, deeply tragic." "Isn't it time for our society to re-think what is best for children?" "I want to explore the balance of rights between a parent's right to educate a child in their own faith and the children's rights to determine their own beliefs and approach the world with an genuinely open mind." "FAITH SCHOOL MENACE?" "One in three state schools in our country is now a faith school, a school with formal links to a religion." "These schools have extraordinary privileges." "Because, 60 years ago, churches provided half the money for their schools, many were allowed to discriminate on religious grounds in selecting pupils based on parents' faith and in recruiting staff." "They could also have the freedom to teach their own syllabus of religious education, RE." "Today, we taxpayers fund the running of these schools and also pay up to 90% of the cost of building them." "But the problem is the churches held on to their special powers in their schools." "And then the Government under Tony Blair made a decision that changed Britain forever." "It oversaw the foundation of over 100 new faith schools, including Muslim, Hindu and Sikh schools, along with 42 academies sponsored by Christian organisations." "A big man for a big job" " Charles Clarke's waited a long time for this." "This man was Education Secretary under Blair." "Why did he open the floodgates?" "You can say, we're only going to keep it that you have Christian and a tiny proportion of other faith schools." "I think that leads you into serious risk of discrimination, saying it's OK to have a Christian faith school but, for the sake of argument, not a Muslim faith school, which is not acceptable, and you've got to have the same rule for all." "I understand Charles Clarke's desire not to discriminate against minority religions." "I agree we need one rule for all." "But I think the Government turned the wrong way." "It should have abolished the faith component altogether, not rolled out more faith schools." "You can make a logical argument" " I completely understand it, in fact, I first was a co-author of a pamphlet about this in 1978 - which says abolish all faith schools, but I think you've then got to look at how that relates" "to what the population as a whole feel about faith schools." "You wouldn't have to abolish them, just stop supporting them with Government money." "Well, that's the same as abolishing them." "I mean the net effect of this would be to close thousands of schools." "Let the schools remain but abolish the separation between Catholic, Protestant..." "You're saying take the money away from the school which has that..." "Yes." "But the school could stay." "It's got the same buildings, teachers..." "But you're taking away 90% of their revenue funding." "Closing these schools, which is I think the effect of what you say, is something that wouldn't be accepted." "But it's their decision to close it." "They have the option." "I'm Secretary of State for Education, and 4,000 schools are closed - by their decision, not my decision - but as a result of what I have said hypothetically, waving your big stick which you've offered me." "I don't think that society would accept that." "Having been a key player in this huge gamble with our country's education system, you'd hope there'd be more enthusiasm and conviction in Charles Clarke's backing for faith schools." "In fact, we find he used to be against faith schools and his main defence of them now seems to be that voters wouldn't agree to abolishing them." "And I'm not at all convinced" "Charles Clarke is right about public feeling." "In fact, we commissioned an ICM opinion poll that showed a clear majority, 59%, still believed that schools should be for everyone, regardless of religion and the Government should not be funding faith schools of any kind." "I believe the Government must act and take the faith out of faith schools." "The first and most outwardly dramatic change being brought about by these schools has been a bizarre distortion of parents' behaviour, particularly in the push for primary school places." "About 7% of the British population worship in church." "But around 36% of primary schools are run by the churches, and they can select pupils on the basis of parents' faith." "Parental choice?" "OK, let's talk about parental choice." "Suppose I'm a parent living with my children exactly here in Oxford, where we are standing now." "If we want a faith-based primary school, we've got all these red dots to choose from within easy walking distance." "St Phillip and St James, there's St Aloysius, a Catholic school, and there's St Barnabas, another Anglican school." "But if we want a non-faith-based school, we've got to go miles here, here or here, or here." "Parents who wish to exercise their choice of a non-faith-based education for their children are, effectively, discriminated against." "They're excluded from one third of British state-funded primary schools." "How do parents feel about this?" "I've come to Mumsnet." "Justine?" "Richard!" "How nice to meet you." "Hello, Justine, thank you very much for having me." "Welcome to Mumsnet Towers." "Mumsnet is a web forum where parents get together online using pseudonyms to chat freely about issues involving their children." "I'm here to ask about their experience of faith schools." "Slug is saying it's not that we were forced into a choice, it's that we were excluded from state-funded schools because of our lack of faith." "It would be unacceptable, of course, to exclude people on the basis of their race, but somehow it's OK if it's their parents' religion." "Joe Bauwens's son is excluded from all three of the local primary schools, two Anglican and one Catholic, on the grounds that his parents are not churchgoers." "Oh, God, there's so much going on, I can't keep up." "Hang on." "If parents don't want their children to be excluded, the other option, of course, is to fake a faith." ""Our neighbours trot along to church every Sunday," ""rolling their eyes as they go," ""all so their children can go to the local school."" "We seem to be hearing that again and again." "I went to meet one couple who wanted to send their daughter to what they thought was the best school in their area, a Catholic primary." "But the problem was they weren't practising Catholics." "The SATs was 100%." "So, first child, you just want the best for your child." "Yeah, we spent four years going to church, you know, doing the right thing." "You went in order to get the child into the school?" "Yeah, we went to church every Sunday." "Yeah, that's part of the criteria, attendance." "The parish priest has to sort of sign you off." "He stood at the door and ticked your name off as you went in?" "Not quite, but almost." "After church, everyone was crowding the priest to say, "Hi, look, I'm here, I'm here."" "Helen converted to Catholicism." "Didn't you?" "Converted to Catholicism?" "From what?" "From Protestant." "You were brought up..." "Plymouth Brethren." "Plymouth Brethren in Scotland." "Yeah, so that was my commitment to my daughter." "Did you have to do anything else?" "Any other hoops to jump through?" "Be nice to the priest." "Be nice to the priest in what sort of way?" "Well, if he had a cough, you would get him some cough mixture or just generally feed his ego." "That's not too serious bribery, was there anything more serious than that?" "I..." "It got to the stage where it was sort of hinted at that things like, you know, the church roof needed fixing and, you know, the fee of 5,000 was sort of bandied about." "5,000?" "That if you sort of contributed that amount, your child was guaranteed a place in school." "If you gave 5,000 to the church, you would get your child into school?" "Yeah, yeah." "Oh, absolutely." "It's not money to him, but if his church looks like its getting bums on seats on Sunday, erm, if the coffers are full, he's doing a good job, isn't he?" "He actually said that to me." "It's about bums on seats." "We contacted the priest in question." "He denied these claims and stated he had nothing to do with admissions, which were dealt with by an independent body." "Of other faiths, the Church of England told us that not every admission to their schools is based on parents' religion and it hopes no parent feels compelled to worship to secure their child a place." "The Board of Deputies of British Jews makes no apology that parents must demonstrate a commitment to the values and ethos of Judaism." "But why are parents who hold no faith sending their children to faith schools?" "It seems to be about results." "League tables show that, of primaries last year with perfect SATs scores, two thirds were church-run." "So what's going on?" "Are faith schools better?" "Surely God isn't helping pupils in exams?" "Through a massive analysis of half a million primary school pupils, this man has now has the authoritative answer." "We can compare children who live in the same postcode, so you're comparing houses next to each other, and if you do this, and compare children in these very similar circumstances, one going to a faith school, one not," "you find actually the rate at which these children progress is very, very similar." "There's not much of a performance advantage measured on these terms." "The upshot is that all the performance advantage we observe for faith schools is to do with the motivation of the parents, it's to do with the background, you know, their wealth." "So the evidence suggests that the idea that improved results in faith schools are due to faith is a myth." "It's about the social level of pupils and the pushiness of parents prepared to jump through hoops to get their children selected." "Do we conclude from this that parents are wasting their time struggling to get their children into a faith school?" "Looking at the data we've got, that's the conclusion you would come to." "It might seem there's nothing deeply wrong with parents making a pact with beliefs they don't hold in order to get their children into faith schools - a little harmless hypocrisy, perhaps." "But I worry that these parents may be unwittingly saddling their children with ways of thinking that are hard to shake off." "One in three schools in Britain is now a faith school, and their number is increasing throughout our green and pleasant land." "As a non-believer," "I have concerns about this, but not for the reasons you might imagine." ""Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth." ""While the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say," ""I have no pleasure in them."" "Perhaps surprisingly, I'm in favour of religious literacy." "As we glide over the English countryside," "I really feel that in order to understand England, the village cricket matches," "Evensong, harvest festivals, the weddings and christenings, you need to have an appreciation of the cultural heritage of England, and that includes Christianity." "Equally, if you're to understand our wider world, the Muslim Koran and Hindu Bhagavad-Gita deserve study." ""Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love."" "It's not all that surprising that I enjoy the reading the Bible so much, because, at least in the 17th-century King James version, it is most beautiful English." ""Go to the ant, thou sluggard." "Consider her ways and be wise."" ""Spare the rod and spoil the child."" ""Of making many books there is no end."" "These phrases and hundreds like them suffuse our literature and our language." "You can't appreciate Shakespeare unless you are steeped in the Bible." "While I think it's important all schools teach about the culture of religion," "I'm worried that faith schools are allowed to do far more." "Even the mild old Church of England has openly set out its aim, through the Archbishops' Council, for its some 5,000 schools to "nourish those of the faith," ""encourage those of other faiths, challenge those who have no faith."" "What does that mean for those on the sharp end, our children?" "I suppose what we are trying to indoctrinate into is... a view that faith matters." "What you would expect here is to find that collective worship means something." "But the main aim is not just to learn about the major faiths, but to have something of an experience of faith." "One of the things that's very difficult to do when you're older is to make a decision on something about which you know nothing and have experienced nothing." "So it would be very easy for someone to say," ""Oh, religion's all a load of rot,"" "without actually ever having encountered what it's like lived." "And so the Christian Foundation enables some of that to be part of these children's experience, not in a way that expects them to sign on the dotted line, but to say, "This is what it is like," ""it's part of your learning and your education to see how it works."" "Janina Ainsworth and I disagree here." "She feels it's important to experience faith in school, but for me, this is indoctrinating children too young to defend themselves." "I worry that religions like getting to children young precisely because that's when they are at their most impressionable." "I'm going to show you what it's going to make next." "It's going to be a box." "Are you ready for the box?" "Yes!" "OK." "There." "There's a box." "Do you see its lids there?" "I can make a hat out of it." "What, like that?" "LAUGHTER" "No!" "Put it on me!" "Thank you." "'Some sixty years on from my childhood, I can still remember 'how to fold a piece of paper into a Chinese-style boat." "'It was a craze at my school.'" "This is going to be..." "This is the difficult bit now." "Pulling that out, pulling that out, and pulling up the sails, and it's a boat!" "Windmill Primary School in Oxford is no faith school, but I've come here to demonstrate children's natural propensity to absorb new information." "A sailor went to sea, sea, sea..." "'I've reminded one pupil of a well-known clapping game.'" "Within minutes, others pick up the game, pass it on to friends, make connections and adapt it with variations." "Children love to imitate, they love to join in." "There's something compelling about ideas and the way they spread through minds that are a bit like sponges." "What children absorb at a young age can last a lifetime." "Should it really be the dogma and daily rituals of religion?" "And faith schools do much more, of course, than hymns and prayers." "The hard edge of the indoctrination goes on in RE, religious education, for which many faith schools teach their own syllabus, and often parents contribute money for the lessons." "We weren't granted access to film any RE or faith studies at a Jewish or Catholic school." "So I turned to someone who has systematically collected information for years on what actually goes on." "The problem is that it is totally deregulated." "The governing bodies of state-funded faith schools have control over their religious education curriculum." "Ofsted inspects the religious education in other state-funded schools, but state-funded religious schools have their own religious inspectorates to inspect lessons." "And that really compounds problems in other subjects." "So a lot of faith schools, particularly Catholic schools, will teach their sex and relations education in their RE." "Lots of faith schools do the same with citizenship education." "So those subjects become seen through a religious filter." "How much time do they actually spend on faith as opposed to ordinary education?" "Well, we have an example here of a state-funded Jewish faith school, where in Year Seven, that's the first form in secondary school, pupils have eight hours of religious instruction every fortnight, which compares with six hours per fortnight for science" "and far outweighs any subject in the secular curriculum." "One faith was brave enough to open its doors to filming." "Right, come on, girls." "Right, now, we know what we're going to do this lesson." "We're going to do some drama." "I'm just thinking to myself, how universal is this story?" "Back then, everything was according to the family." "You've got to obey them..." "This is Madani High School, an all-Muslim secondary school in Leicester and one of 11 Muslim faithschools now in the state system." "I've come to see first hand how faith and education mix." "This school gets good results, and many of the girls here hope to become the next generation of lawyers, doctors and teachers." "Faith schools are sometimes accused of closing children's minds down by teaching them this is the one true faith and you get your truth from Holy Scripture rather than from opening your mind to the world." "That's slightly a misunderstanding from those who think that." "If you come to our school and look at our lessons, we're very much open minds, thinking critically, understanding the world in a very critical fashion." "Like all state schools, they teach national curriculum science here." "But, like many faith schools, they supplement this with religious lessons that they control and which are not subject to Ofsted inspection." "In our school, when our teachers tell us stuff, like, teach us stuff, it's up to us whether we believe it or not." "The teachers do not disrespect our decision." "Everybody has a right to their own decision, at the end of the day." "Suppose we take a fact like, are we and chimpanzees cousins?" "Do you believe that we're cousins of chimpanzees?" "Or monkeys?" "I wouldn't think so." "Perhaps we have a science teacher here." "What do you teach about that?" "We learn in the curriculum, because that's what we follow, we teach them the theory of evolution, but then I do tell them we in Islam, our opinion about it, and the girls will also have their own opinion" "and ask questions, "So, Miss, do we really come from chimpanzees?"" "But they all have their own opinions for that, and they'll come to their own decision, which every single one of them realise that actually we didn't, because we believe differently." "Every single one of them comes to the conclusion that we did not evolve?" "Yes." "Everybody in your science class, everybody in the school comes to that conclusion?" "Well, in my class, yes, they did." "How many is that?" "Well, I teach 60 Year Ten students, so 60 of them." "And all 60 of them end up rejecting evolution?" "Yes, because, obviously, they have their beliefs, which is Islam." "Yeah, about evolution." "Evolution is that human evolved from apes and stuff, but if there are still apes here, then how did humans evolve from apes?" "This is the commonest question I get." "What's the answer of your science teacher to that?" "I wanted to know your opinion." "I'm going to give you the answer, but we've been told that your science teacher teaches the theory of evolution." "I'm interested to know..." "That's exactly what we teach them, that humans evolved from apes and through natural selection we became humans." "But her question is why are there still apes?" "Mm." "Erm..." "I'll tell you why there are still apes." "Firstly, we are not just evolved from apes, weareapes." "And when animals evolve from other animals, it's not that they supersede them." "It's not that we've evolved from chimpanzees." "Chimpanzees and we have evolved from a shared ancestor who lived about six million years ago and who was neither a human nor a chimpanzee." "'There's a bigger point at stake here than evolution, of course." "'What's worrying is that a school that says it wants its pupils to be open-minded is, 'through its religious training, also guiding them to reject factual evidence 'at the very core of science and rational thought." "'Where does that lead?" "'" "The school's job is to provide all the information, but it's up to individuals to see what they believe and what they don't believe, so I'd like to leave the choices to these young people." "So you think that matters of scientific fact are a matter of personal choice, based on traditional faith?" "Well, none of the reports that I've read says that evolution is a scientific fact." "It just says there's a scientific theory which says evolution is there." "There's another perspective, from a faith perspective, that says" "God created all human beings." "But I hope you'll see that from our young people evolution is only one small thing in their lives and probably an insignificant thing in their lives." "It's not a small thing in the life of a science teacher." "She will teach children things which are... contrary to the entire scientific community." "Now, that's not a small thing, that's actually quite a large thing." "If science says one thing and the Koran says the other, who do you go with?" "Well, I'd like to believe that because science, scientific knowledge and the Koran are essentially from the same creator, there won't be a conflict." "The conflict will probably arise in our understanding of those facts." "That sounds reasonable to me." "My advice..." "If you'll pardon me for offering advice..." "Please do." "You're never going to win the fight against evolution." "It is a fact." "What you should do is look at the Koran and reconcile it with evolution, which is what Christians have done." "In RE, we learn about science and the Koran." "By the end of the day, we all came to one conclusion, that the Koran is evidence of science, that what science has proved to be just recently is already proved in the Koran 1,400 years ago, when it was written." "But that doesn't include evolution, apparently." "No." "So what does it include?" "It includes stuff like the shape of the earth, about the mountains, how they secure the earth." "And how in the sea the two waters, they don't mix, the salty water and the drinking water." "So it's pure for us to drink." "They don't mix, but they pass through each other." "Salty water and fresh water don't mix in the sea?" "No." "It's like..." "It's a natural barrier." "I was shocked that RE elbows out science like this." "So you think the Koran is a good source of scientific information?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "Right, yeah." "Right." "And you're the one who wants to be a doctor, is that right?" "Yes." "I can't be sure indoctrination triumphs over real learning like this in other faith schools, but I do worry there's nothing to stop it happening." "I think RE must be taught critically so that the factual evidence of history and science are properly respected." "In my view, RE should be part of a national curriculum and subject to Ofsted inspection, like other subjects." "The Church of England told us it wouldn't oppose a national curriculum for RE, and I welcome that." "The Board of Deputies of British Jews claims critical thinking is intrinsic to Jewish faith education, and their inspectors inspect their schools' RE in a way that matches Ofsted requirements." "But then, why not let Ofsted inspect their RE in the first place?" "I think there's something deeper going on here." "Supporters of faith schools claim they're in some way necessary to allow groups to hand their religious culture down the generations." "I understand the argument." "But what is the impact of this across our society?" "One former Muslim feels concerned that faith schools are resurrecting barriers where there need be none." "When I first arrived in the UK back in the early 1970s, myself, my friends, my family, we encountered a lot of racism and we often felt excluded." "And things have improved, and it shocks me, it saddens me that people like me are now choosing to self-segregate, when others have worked so hard to allow us to mix and to join in and to be part of a wider community." "For me, what's exciting about the world is the range of ideas we can encounter, and to separate yourself off from that, from the rest of humanity, frankly, is deeply, deeply tragic." "Some faiths claim they actually promote community cohesion through their schools, and that this is recognised by Ofsted." "But, as we've seen, Ofsted doesn't inspect what's taught in faith schools' RE lessons, nor does it consider the schools' admission policies, which can discriminate along religious lines." "I'm worried that faith schools in fact encourage separation from mainstream society." "Now I want to ask how important it is for parents to have the right to preserve their culture through their children's school or whether this creates a dangerous and divisive "them and us" mentality." "FAITH SCHOOL MENACE?" "Faith schools are on the march in this country." "One of the key claims of their supporters is that they create a confident sense of identity amongst pupils." "But that very sense of identity sets them apart from others schooled to believe in a different God or a different theology." "In not mixing at school, surely there's a danger that these children will grow up as strangers." "We have a warning from our own recent history about how destructive faith education can be when it helps forge tribal identities." "The human psyche has two great sicknesses." "One is the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the other is the tendency to fasten group labels onto people instead of seeing them as individuals." "One of the great scars is Northern Ireland, where you can see the badges of Protestant-Catholic divide on walls, in flags, on bunting, wherever you look." "Nowadays some of this may be put on for the benefit of gawping tourists." "Thankfully, Northern Ireland seems on the verge of a new era." "Politicians, police and professions, both Protestant and Catholic, are working together." "But one area the Good Friday Agreement couldn't touch, tragically, was education, which threatens to re-open the sectarian divide." "For children, the tribal divisions start in the nursery." "In July 2010, it was reported to be children as young as nine who led the riots, throwing stones and shouting abuse at the other side." "Around 95% of pupils in Northern Ireland go to either a Catholic or a Protestant faith school." "Most of them never have the opportunity for a proper conversation with a member of the other faith." "They usually marry into the same faith and, if they meet in the workplace, it's only because of strict employment laws to promote equality." "Surely, here of all places, they can't see segregated faith schools as a good thing?" "Surely they should welcome mixing up" "Protestant and Catholic school populations?" "At present, the overwhelming majority of Catholics go to so called Catholic maintained schools," "Protestants to Controlled state schools." "I want to meet both sides." "I think it just boils down to choice, and I believe, for me, the Controlled sector have the schools with the history, with the record of academic achievement." "That's where I'd want my children to go." "But increasingly, parents look at what are the best schools." "The hard reality is surely that there's very little crossover, is there?" "One might say that humans are innately driven to be divisive and to form tribes and to separate out, and there are plenty of ways in which that can happen - skin colour, language - but religion is a pretty good one to do it with," "and isn't it a gratuitous one that we could do without?" "Oh, certainly not." "Religion has been here for thousands of years and will continue to be until the Lord comes back again." "But does it have to be so divisive?" "I personally don't see it as divisive." "You don't?" "You live in Ulster and you don't see it as divisive?" "No, I don't see it as..." "I see it as us having differences and hopefully we can work through those differences." "The differences relate to our theology, the way we worship." "I believe all our churches are in need of a Reformation and I'd love to see another Reformation come." "Perhaps at the deepest level of my concern about faith schools is the assumption I'm encountering that children are somehow the property of their parents, and their parents' religion." "It's all about parents' choice, and I found that strongly echoed on the Catholic side." "MAN:" "Our Catholic schools, our Catholic ethos adds value, gives a sense of belonging, a sense of community." "That's what parents want for their children." "A child, to a parent, is a very blessed thing, and the vast majority, almost all parents, will do what they think is right for their child." "Is that not a legitimate human right?" "Oh, it's certainly legitimate." "Oh, it's certainly legitimate." "But you don't agree with that?" "Well, I have all sorts of issues with faith schools..." "But you clearly don't agree with that." "Let you state that." "OK, I worry about segregation of children in any way, not just in Northern Ireland, on the basis of their parents' religious opinions, because it seems to me that religious opinion is a pretty odd way in which to separate children out." "Richard, I think we need to nail this one - do you believe that parents have the human right to choose the education for their children or not?" "Well, I think they do..." "That's the core of what you're asking me." "Do you afford parents the human right, and it is a human right..." "I also... ..to choose the system of education that they wish for their children that's most consistent with their beliefs and understanding of life?" "Now, you're seeking to impose your view on other people, and I think that's wrong." "I think you should respect everybody from..." "Are you a parent yourself?" "Yes." "Well, what do you have for your children?" "What do I..?" "What do you have for your children, what do you want them to do?" "I want them to be open-minded." "I want them to be sceptical." "I want them to ask critical questions." "I want them to seek knowledge for its own sake." "I do not want to impose my own views on them." "Good." "I respect that." "What you said is a perfectly legitimate view, but you should afford other people the same respect." "Once you begin to engineer or begin to thwart parents in terms of parental choice, you really enter dictatorship, Richard, maybe that's where you want to be." "No, I don't want to get into that..." "No, I don't want to get into that..." "But that's what you're essentially saying." "You come at this from a premise that here's what you think is right." "I'm coming from the premise that parents should be allowed to make choices." "I do believe in taking the faith out of faith schools and, yes, that would impinge on both Reverend Gibson and Mr Flanagan's rights as parents to choose their children's education." "But look at the result of parents' rights as exercised in Northern Ireland." "Are parents' rights so important that we allow them to risk dividing the two communities forever?" "The trouble with rights is there are conflicts between opposing rights." "What about the right of free expression versus the right not to be offended?" "In the case of education, children have rights as well as parents." "Children have the right not to be indoctrinated, not to have their parents' beliefs forced down their throat, but to make up their own mind after a proper, balanced education." "FAITH SCHOOL MENACE?" "There goes a right-wing Tory child." "I see there's a socialist child over there, a group of Lib Dem children over there." "What we have got here?" "A group of logical positivist children." "An existentialist child there." "It's absurd, isn't it?" "We wouldn't dream of labelling children like that." "And yet, when it comes to religion, our whole society is happy to talk about a Catholic child, a Protestant child, a Muslim child." "Why the double standard?" "I've already set out why I think presumptions like this, rooted in the very idea of faith schools, are a growing menace." "But I don't want to just attack." "I passionately believe there is an alternative, and I want to persuade you that education is better without faith." "I feel strongly about this because, when I was a boy, I thought very traditionally and believed in God." "But it was education that allowed me to change my mind and unleashed my curiosity." "Any teacher or parent may influence children in many ways." "We all have baggage." "So how do we best respect a child's right to learn with a truly open mind?" "Young children are uniquely vulnerable to simply believing what adults tell them, so my starting point would be to give them tools to sort fact from fiction." "When my daughter was ten, I decided to write a letter to her asking her to think for herself about how we know the things that we know." ""How do we know, for instance, that the stars," ""which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky," ""are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away?"" "I mentioned one good reason to believe anything's true, which is evidence, and I mentioned three bad reasons." "There's tradition, "Believe it because our people" ""have always believed it, it's been handed down over generations"." ""The trouble with tradition is that no matter how long ago" ""a story was made up," ""it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was."" "There's authority," ""Believe it because your parents do, believe it because a priest does," ""believe it because a teacher does or because a holy book does"." "That's another bad reason to believe anything." "And finally "revelation", believe something because it just feels right. "And next time somebody" ""tells you that something is true, why not say to them," ""'What kind of evidence is there for that?" "'" "And if they can't give you a good answer," ""I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say." ""Your loving Daddy."" "I'm fascinated by the way children start piecing together how the world works." "I've come back to Windmill Primary School to look at a new scientific study of how children are naturally biased to believe certain kinds of ultimately religious explanations." "We've used a variety of different methods, just asking children to spontaneously tell you what they think about the origins of things, and also then sort of presenting them with answers." "So we are going to play a game." "We're going to look at some pictures..." "Dr Deborah Kelemen is a leading child psychologist at Boston University." "You have to pick the answer that makes most sense to you." "In this experiment, she poses the children questions like," ""Why are rocks pointy?"" "One person says they were pointy because little bits of stuff piled up on top of one another over a long time, and another person said they were pointy so animals could scratch on them when they got itchy." "What answer makes more sense to you?" "The animal one with the... scratch, to make itchy." "OK, then." "All right." "And here's another one." "What you find is that kids have a tendency clearly from about four years of age to endorse a purpose-based explanation or to give you a purpose-based explanation for the origins of things." "Another question she asks the children is, "Why are lakes still?"" "One person thought they were still and didn't have waves so animals could cool off in them without being washed away, and another person thought they were still and didn't have waves because no moving water ever ran into them." "Which answer make more sense to you?" "Animals can be cool without being washed away." "So that animals could be cool without being washed away?" "Animals could wash in them and don't get washed away." "OK, brilliant." "Because no moving water." "OK, excellent." "'I suppose a child is surrounded in the home by artefacts, telephones 'and televisions, all things which actuallyare designed for a purpose.'" "What we're finding right now is that children really start to do this at the point where they start to understand that artefacts are objects that have been made by someone for a purpose, and that might be orienting them towards" "an understanding that things are intentionally caused, intentionally designed and then, once they understand that, yes, they're surrounded by these objects that are intentionally designed, then going, "Well, that's quite a good way to understand everything."" "Do you think children can be described as natural creationists?" "In some sense yes, insofar as they are attracted to and spontaneously invoke notions that things exist for purposes and that's associated with their notions that these things have been intentionally caused for a purpose." "In many respects, it mimics what's seen in religion as creationism." "Are you up for that?" "I think so." "You think so." "Brilliant!" "So children naturally tend to assume meaning and purpose in things even where there is none." "This, of course, gives religions, with their own presumptuous, but unfounded, sense of purpose and meaning, a peculiar advantage." "That's why it's all the more important that religion is put in its proper place, as it is in normal schools like Windmill, and not allowed to get in the way of children's questioning minds." "Rather than indoctrinating children in faiths that can only preach a limited view on the deep questions of existence, how much better instead to fire children's curiosity about all the extraordinary questions we have yet to answer." "'At Windmill School, I'm going to take an alternative assembly." "'I'm hoping I can share with these children something of 'what I wrote to my own daughter 'and get them to ask me questions.'" "When I was your age, I pretty much thought that anything that a grown-up said must be true." "But that can't be right, can it?" "Because grown-ups say different things, and they don't always agree." "How do we know what's true?" "You've probably all heard about a great big, meat-eating dinosaur called..." "Do you know what that's called?" "T. Rex." "T. Rex." "That's right." "Yeah." "Tyrannosaurus Rex Now, if I tell you that T. Rex was about as long as a double-decker bus and was taller than an elephant, it'd be very sensible of you to ask me: "how I know these amazing things?"" "So evidence is a good reason for believing..." "'Our greatest responsibility in education 'is to unleash children's curiosity and never limit their questions.'" ""You and I are really very lucky." ""We're lucky because we live in a country with a long history" ""of thinking for ourselves and asking questions." ""We're lucky because we live in" ""the most extraordinary world, the real world, of real evidence." ""And I hope you'll enjoy finding out much more about its wonders."" "(INDISTINCT QUESTION)" "Yes, well, horseshoe crabs haven't changed very much." "Lots of other things have changed a lot since that time." "How did the sun come?" "How did the sun come?" "Well, the sun came from a huge, great cloud of gas which came from an earlier star that exploded." "How did the dinosaurs die?" "Well, probably what happened was there were lots of fires." "And there was huge lot of steam and smoke and dust, and a great big cloud formed all around the earth and so the sun couldn't get through." "That's what people think, but nobody really knows, and you have to ask, "what the evidence for that is?""