Reposted from:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article447509.ece

Providing millions of pounds to schools to teach creationism is dangerous, say atheist Richard Dawkins and Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford

The car dealer Sir Peter Vardy is a rich man, with a desire to use his money to promote education. He seems to have become embroiled with a clique of evangelical, American- inspired creationists who teach that the entire universe is less than 10,000 years old (which dates it some time after the middle Stone Age). Vardy has set up the Vardy Foundation, an educational charity with a strong Christian ethos. It is campaigning to take over “failing”schools in the north of England. While teaching the national curriculum, the schools will almost certainly be pushing a bizarrely anti-scientific version of cosmology and biology.

The schools, prior to takeover, were vulnerable because, being in poor areas with disadvantaged children, it was easy to criticise them as “failing”. And Vardy has discovered a golden goose in the shape of the government’s city academy scheme, which encourages private enterprise both to fund and take an interest in the education at state schools.

Some might argue (though we would not) that a sufficiently generous foundation has the right to have its chief benefactor’s views influence aspects of the curriculum, even if some of those ideas are more or less bonkers. But the city academy policy by which a rich man need contribute only £2m in order to buy a government contribution of £20m (plus running costs and salaries in perpetuity), is much harder to defend. It enables the benefactor to secure for his own nominees a majority on the school’s governing board, and even the power to select pupils.

The ability to influence young minds should not, however, be sold off like a catering franchise. In particular, to a bidder who only has to put up just under 10% of the costs, leaving the rest to the taxpayer.

This is what now threatens the unfortunate Northcliffe comprehensive school in Doncaster. Unless the teachers and parents can stop it, the Vardy Foundation, which already sponsors Emmanuel college in Gateshead, is on its way to adding Northcliffe to its growing empire of schools noted for their controversial teaching of creationism.

Of course, Northcliffe could benefit hugely from £22m. But, the teachers and parents argue, if the government has £20m to give, why not just give it without handing Vardy the right to influence teaching in the school? They’d gladly forgo Vardy’s £2m, if it rid them of the lunacy of a fundamentalist approach to creation.

Northcliffe comprehensive caters to some of the most disadvantaged children in all Doncaster. If you measure its achievement against other schools with similar disadvantages, it has succeeded brilliantly. And by what other standards should a school be judged? Any school can get respectable exam scores given good starting materials and lots of money.

Even judged by conventional standards, Northcliffe was improving creditably, under difficult conditions, in the years leading up to the Vardy approach. In 2001 and 2002, it was given a school achievement award, and in 2003 it produced the best GCSE scores in its history. This was a school on a rising curve.

But in spite of this and only three months after Northcliffe’s best-ever exam performance, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) put it on the blacklist for “special measures”. Then the local education authority indicated a willingness to entertain a role by the Vardy Foundation in its relaunch.

From an education authority’s point of view, to have a school in its locality with no capital or revenue expenses to pay is like winning the lottery. But most Northcliffe teachers are up in arms at what some see as a stab in the back.

Parents are unimpressed too and have set up the Conisbrough and Denaby Parents Action Group (www.cadpag.co.uk). Local people are planning a rally at the school this weekend, followed by a protest march against the takeover by Vardy’s fundamentalists.

The move on Northcliffe comprehensive is only the latest phase of the Vardy Foundation’s controversial bringing back of fundamentalist Christian teaching to certain schools. Emmanuel college became something of a cause célèbre in 2002. The headmaster, Nigel McQuoid, now director of schools of the Vardy Foundation, said that evolution and creation were both “faith positions”, implying that there is nothing scientifically to choose between them. This is deeply misguided.

Evolution is not a faith position. Like the “theory” the earth is round and not flat, evolution is supported by mountains of scientific evidence, accepted by informed scientists and church people from the Pope on.

Young earth creationism, of the kind advocated by the cabal of teachers that now have Vardy’s ear, is based on no scientific evidence at all. Its only support comes from a naively literalistic misreading of the beautiful myth of Genesis.

The situation at Emmanuel college worried the two of us sufficiently that in 2002 we convened a group of bishops and scientists to sign a letter to the prime minister. We had only two days to gather signatories, but they included seven senior bishops, and eight fellows of the Royal Society, among them the president and Sir David Attenborough.

We hoped to dent, however slightly, the prime minister’s overweening complacency. But his reply simply reiterated his earlier, breathtakingly inadequate answer to a parliamentary question from Jenny Tonge MP. He again adduced Emmanuel college’s GCSE results and its clean bill of health from Ofsted.

However, if Ofsted recommends a school whose then head and head of science apparently seriously thought the universe began less than 10,000 years ago, what does this say about Ofsted’s competence to judge schools? As for the exam success, anything less would have disgraced a school favoured with so much government money plus the privilege of hand-picking and rejecting some students.

In his letter Mr Blair (wisely) did not, as he had in response to Jenny Tonge, extol “diversity”. But we were still baffled at a stance that belied his vaunted — and surely sincere — support of science. Perhaps it is significant that, as was revealed last week, Blair and Vardy are old cronies. The prime minister opened another Vardy Foundation sponsored school, King’s academy in Middlesbrough. And Blair gave Vardy his knighthood, for services to business “and education”.

Not only is young earth creationism bad science, it is also lousy theology. As Frederick Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, put it in the 19th century when evolution was still a controversy, God does not just make the world, he does something much more wonderful, he makes the world make itself.

Literalistic young earth creationism is an insult to the idea of God. The evidence for evolution is so overwhelming that we can reconcile it with young earth creationism only by assuming that God deliberately planted false evidence, in the rocks and in the genetic molecules, to trick us. Could a cruder blasphemy be imagined?

Vardy himself may well be a decent man, with a sincere desire to help others. But he should look carefully at some of what he’s doing. Christianity has moved on since 1860 when the then Bishop of Oxford famously debated evolution with Thomas Henry Huxley.

Nowadays there is nothing to debate. Evolution is a fact and, from a Christian perspective, one of the greatest of God’s works.

At the time of writing, Richard Harries was Bishop of Oxford. He retired in 2006, but has retained his seat in the House of Lords as Baron Harries of Pentregarth.

Richard Dawkins is Oxford University’s Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science