Taxpayers funding Christian anti-science private schools

dlgoff

Oh. I was thinking it might be something like:

A volume of 1 seah = 7.33 liters or 7.33dm³

and areas are determined by how many seah of barley seed is needed to sow that area.

Bipolarity

When I heard Bible-based math book, this came to my mind:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/hell.htm

Let alone for the fact the "Bible-based science" teaching is probably incorrect, what they are doing there in Louisiana is also a violation of the 1st amendment, since it uses public funds for religious education.

In 1968, a Supreme Court case in Flast vs. Cohen outlawed the allocation of public funds to religious non-secular teaching. I wonder what has happened since then?

BiP

edward

Bible based math.

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52381.html

They should encounter a problem with 0 since it didn't exist in the bible.

LadyStardust

This is awful...yet not surprising. We're headed in the Idiocracy direction.

Ryan_m_b

This is just my personal opinion but even though it is private that's no excuse for teaching rubbish to children. Parents and guardians have a duty of care to children that should include providing them with a certain level of education. Private schools should still have their curriculum regulated to ensure a minimum standard. I'm not sure about the US but we do have legislation for this in the UK though I've heard of many stories in recent years of private faith schools using loopholes like teaching the bare minimum of biology and then maxing out on their "religious studies" so that creationism is presented to children as the dominant theory regarding the origin of life and biological diversity. Dawkins did a documentary about it to highlight how either the rules weren't being enforced or needed to be stricter, there was a clip of him going into a science class in a private muslim school and finding that the teacher didn't (and in some cases couldn't) answer the children's criticisms of evolution.

leroyjenkens

Actually, it shouldn't even be allowed regardless if the parents pay for it. Children are required by law to be educated. That's a good law. Well, children who go to these schools are not being educated.

John Creighto

Given the poor results of public schools I can’t help but wonder if the issue is a red-herring. If the schools don’t produce good results then I can’t see why parents would be lining up to send their kids to these schools. In Canada we have an alternative Catholic school system in some provinces and many non-Catholics try to get their kids into these schools. I also think that the phrase, “tax payer funded” is a bit “incendiary” as parents who send their kids to private schools still are taxed for kids that go to public schools. Do these voucher’s provide enough to compensate for these cost? I suspect for someone in a high tax bracket they wouldn’t.

Number Nine

Parents who enrol their children in religious schools (particularly schools with a more protestant and evangelical bent) tend to do so for ideological reasons; their objections to public schools centre largely around "secularism" and the lack of a Godly education. Catholic schools, by and large, are very good, with many of them being better than their public counterparts, but they also tend not to teach the nonsense described in this thread.

Honestly, I'm really not all that concerned that people who make lots of money are paying taxes so that other people's children can go to school.

Evo

People that have no children also have to pay these taxes. The taxes are to ensure that every child has access to an education. The problems with the quality of the education is being discussed in another thread.

The main issue in this thead, IMO, is WHAT is being taught and what isn't. If a public tax voucher is used for a school, then there should be educational requirements that the school should meet. Unfortunately in the US we allow children to not be taught even the basics. We seem to have no guidelines for what suffices as education.

Jack21222

I'm a fairly "militant" atheist, but even I have to defend the bible on this one. I don't think the bible gave numbers to many significant figures. To one sig fig, pi DOES equal 3. In some of my astronomy classes, when dealing with 4/3*pi (as in the volume of a sphere), we canceled the pi and the 3 to get just 4.

The bible does not say that pi equals 3.000. I'd say that it is no more wrong to claim that pi = 3 than it is to say pi = 3.1 or pi = 3.14, or... you get the picture. All of the above are saying the same thing.

I'm not even certain decimal points existed at the time of writing of the bible.

tiny-tim

1 Kings 7:23 …

And he made the molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and the height thereof was five cubits; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

so if the height is the radius, then π = 30/5*2 = 3

(but the "sea" is described only as round, not hemi-spherical, so is the height the same as the radius?)

turbo

Yep! My wife and I have no children and Maine's property taxes are quite high. 50% of the property tax goes straight to public education in one's local school district.

skeptic2

Evo, I wonder to what extent these private schools are allowed to discriminate. Can they accept only the students with the top grades? If so, they would be able to compare the performance of their students to those of the public schools and declare how much better they are. Public schools could be left with a majority of under performers.

Are they, as a private religious school, allowed to refuse admittance to students not of the same denomination as the school? Are they allowed to expel students who don't uphold the school's religious values, e.g. homosexual students or who hold conflicting religious beliefs, e.g. Jehovah's Witnesses who don't salute the flag?

Evo

That's the problem, there is no education standard for private schools. Each state handles things differently. As far as to what they can get away with, I don't know if there is any tracking.

As far as educational standards, here's an article on New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/26/ny...ted=all&src=pm