A C Grayling presents a rather startling statistic:
An Opinionpanel Research survey conducted in July this year found that more than 30% of UK university students believe in creationism or intelligent design.
He blames the education system:
From the day that the government of John Major allowed polytechnics to redescribe themselves as universities, and his and successive governments set a target of getting 50% of school leavers into higher education, but without the huge investment of resources at all levels that would make this viable, it was inevitable that standards required for entrance to degree level courses would fall. And so it has dramatically proved. At the same time standards in public examinations at the high school level have also fallen, by some measures a long way.
He says there will be tears before bedtime here.
The combined result is that a significant proportion of university entrants today are noticeably different creatures from their average forerunners of a generation ago: quite measurably less literate, less numerate, less broadly knowledgeable, and less reflective. At the same time education has been infected by post-modern relativism and the less desirable effects of “political correctness”, whose combined effect is to encourage teachers to accept, and even promote as valid alternatives, the various superstitions and antique belief-systems constituting the multiplicity of different and generally competing religions represented in our multicultural society. This has gone so far that our tax dollars are now arrogated to supporting “faith based schooling”, which means the ghettoisation of intellectually defenceless children into a variety of competing superstitions, despite the stark evidence, all the way from Northern Ireland to the madrassahs of Pakistan, of what this does for the welfare of mankind.
The only cheer I can gather from this article is that apparently our taxes are now being collected in Dollars.
