So What Shall We Tell the Children? Balls?

Angels are past caring about the adults.  Here is Nick Humphrey on the damage that is being done to the children.

'The problem—I mean the problem for children's education—is not just that so many adults positively believe in things that flatly contradict the modern scientific world view, but that so many do not believe in things that are absolutely central to the scientific view.

A survey published last year showed that half the American people do not know, for example, that the earth goes round the sun once a year. Fewer than one in ten know what a molecule is. More than half do not accept that human beings have evolved from animal ancestors; and less than one in ten believe that evolution—if it has occurred—can have taken place without some kind of external intervention.

Not only do people not know the results of science, they do not even know what science is. When asked what they think distinguishes the scientific method, only 2% realised it involves putting theories to the test, 34% vaguely knew it has something to do with experiments and measurement, but 66% didn't have a clue.

Nor do these figures, worrying as they are, give the full picture of what children are up against. They tell us about the beliefs of typical people, and so about the belief environment of the average child. But there are small but significant communities just down the road from us—I mean literally just down the road, in New York, or London or Oxford—where the situation is arguably very much worse: communities where not only are superstition and ignorance even more firmly entrenched, but where this goes hand in hand with the imposition of repressive regimes of social and inter-personal conduct—in relation to hygiene, diet, dress, sex, gender roles, marriage arrangements, and so on... alike in providing an intellectual and cultural dungeon for those who live among them.'