Lies from Sir or Miss:

How teachers in faith schools lie to children.

Following on from my post "You cannot get there from here", I am reminded of an incident a few years ago with a class of 15-year-olds. In a physics lesson, I made the mistake of asking the ambiguous question "Why does it rain". I got a detailed answer from a group of girls along the lines that "Plants need water to grow and we eat plants. Therefore it rains so that we have something to eat and don't die." After some probing they did seem to recollect something about evaporation and condensation but, to them, this was a mere detail. Their whole worldview had been distorted by their teachers in a Church of England faith school. It seems that, throughout three years of secondary science, they had accepted all of it from the point of view that the universe is designed for our benefit. Their minds had been taken to la-la land at an early age, preventing them from ever understanding the world as it really is. I had no doubt that the born-again idiots in the Humanities department were continuing to reinforce these silly notions.