Did you watch More4 TV last week, when Richard Dawkins launched his attack on faith schools? Were you horrified by some of the things that were going on, such as those girls in a Muslim school, who thought the Qur’an’s version of our origins was true, and didn’t believe in evolution? Tom Sutcliffe wrote an excellent review for the Independent (and yes, I’m biased). If you’re a BHA member, you should have had an email from Richard Dawkins today, appealing for funds for the BHA’s campaign. If you didn’t, here’s what he wrote:

I am writing to you today to ask for your help in fighting the expansion of state-funded faith schools. This is not a campaign against religious education (teaching about religion) but against faith schools, which teach a particular religion as the one true faith (indoctrination in religion).
 
There are nearly 7,000 state-funded faith schools in England. These schools have many special privileges they can select pupils on the basis of parents religious observance, discriminate on religious grounds in the employment of teachers, and teach their own RE syllabus, free of Ofsted supervision and free of any National Curriculum. By the way, RE is the only subject (together with religiously sensitive subjects like Sex Education) for which there is no National Curriculum.

 
Some faith schools, as I discovered while making my recent television documentary, use their state-subsidized freedoms to undermine the teaching of science. It should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a state-funded school whose science teachers believe the world is less than 10,000 years old, yet that is what I found. And at a school