BOOKS, EDUCATION AND BELIEF

I was listening today (16 November 2021) to a program written and presented by Jon Ronson (Welsh journalist and filmmaker) under the title Things Fall Apart – Dirty Books. It is a story originally covered and broadcast in the United States in 2009 by radio journalist Trey Kay on WVPB in west Virginia as The Great Textbook War. Mr Ronson does give credit to Mr Kay. 

It is the story of Alice Moore of Kanawha County, West Virginia, who started out campaigning against sex education and went on to campaign for the removal of over 300 textbooks from the school curriculum. Ms Moore got herself elected as a member of the Kanawha County School Board, the only member who did not have a college degree. It is a classic American story, not dissimilar to the Scopes Trial controversy of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. 

It is a story linked to religious fundamentalism. In the course of interview with Ms Moore, she makes comment that she is comforted by the fact that 24% of Americans still believe in the literal truth of the Bible. She views it as the only way to save America. It is also a terrifying story of emotions and frustrations about attitudes to education erupting into violence. It is the continuing onslaught on the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States under the guise of standing up for American values. It is a complete contradiction of what that document actually upholds. The following is a Gallup Poll chart compiled from May 3-7, 2017:

These figures are quite extraordinary, in my view. Based on the population of the United States in 2017, which was just over 325 million citizens, a little over 78 million people believed that the bible was the actual word of God and some 10 million plus, of them, were college graduates. Donald Trump received 74, 216,154 votes in the 2020 election. Can one postulate from these figures that those voters fall within the category of believers that the bible is the word of God, and consequently are more likely to believe in the word of Trump, whom they appear to worship in a similar fashion.

 

I do not know if such a poll was conducted in the United Kingdom, although a Gallup poll compendium of Religion in Great Britain, 1939-1999, indicated that in May 1993, 10% of the population believed that the Old Testament was of divine authority and its commands should be followed without question, and 13% felt the same about the New Testament. Whether these people were as fundamental as the American population is hard to say, but there may well have been a proportion who had the same adherence to creationism as the Americans. 

The survey seems to indicate that the numbers were fluctuating and diminishing as years progressed. That’s about 6 million people based on the population in 1993; however, that figure is probably misleading given that, currently, only 59% of the population today indicate that they identify as Christian. That would represent some 39 million, and assuming, in the last 18 years, the relevant percentage had dropped to around 5 %, it would still indicate some 2 million were adherents of the bible. Again, just how fundamentalist is a matter of conjecture.  

 

What is of more concern are the number of college graduates who hold this belief in the bible. Pedagogy, “the approach to teaching, the theory and practice of learning and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and psychological development of learners”, is a rather demanding, considered and perhaps technical discipline. The technique or system of teaching adopted by teachers reflects their practice and theory of learning. To teach pupils how to think and learn for themselves rather than what to think and learn is of importance. Imparting technical and scientific skills is one aspect, but inevitably social, cultural, philosophical and historical studies come into play. Knowledge of politics and political thought covers a wide spectrum of ideas. Similarly the science and study of anthropology is of considerable scope. It touches on every aspect of human behaviour including biology, culture, societies, linguistics and the myriad of religious beliefs. It is an academic discipline, and like any such exercise it involves a broad appreciation of adjacent and tangential areas of study. Any subject or branch of knowledge at a university touches on every other field of study. They are of necessity inter woven and for any student at a college to continue to believe in a literal interpretation of the bible, that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old, that God created Adam and Eve and expelled them from Eden for daring to seek knowledge by eating fruit from the tree, thereby exposing themselves to sin, is astonishing. As the Germans might say unglaublich!!.

 

But the creationist would have you believe in intelligent design. This is a concept or theory intended to show that science alone cannot explain the natural world, and that a divine creator is a required element for any explanation of nature. They claim that the study of Intelligent Design is itself an academic field of study and a fact of science rather than a religious belief, or just another aspect of a belief in God. There have been attempts to impose this particular belief system to be taught as fact in schools alongside the science of evolution. 

The federal courts first addressed intelligent design in Kitzmiller -v- Dover Area School District in 2005. A local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania voted to require teachers to read a statement about intelligent design prior to discussions of evolution in high school biology classes. The judge found that the practice violated the Establishment clause, concluding that intelligent design is not a science because it fails to seek a natural cause for observed phenomenon, among other reasons. The litigation on this will no doubt continue in other States. It would seem, like Trump, Americans love taking fantasy notions to the courts. 

Here is another view: