Hello Sailor!

I take your last point but as children are impressionable, and there is a need for authority to be respected when you are a child, (as training to question it appropriately as an adult, but I digress...) Is't it incumbent on the school board not to put it forward in the first place rather than prompt children to take a view on the sanity of the elected school board?

There are times when the wishes of a school board have to be be implemented rather than examined, so surely the best route is to ensure they act responsibly in the first place.

We have faith schools in The UK, and whilst the statistics add up to better achievement than those run by the local authorities, I suspect that is due to better discipline rather than teaching fairy stories as fact. Science is on the curriculum and whilst there may still be a few renegade teachers out there, we put religious education in a religious education class and Darwin in a science class.

That said, one of my teachers didn't believe in dinosaurs and claimed there was more evidence for the existence of Jesus than Hitler. I respected him as an adult figure, (but we called him Larry Gooseneck behind his back,) but I recall even as a child, dismissing his silly fundamentalist viewpoints.

(Now there's something. I recall being told that he moved to The USA where he became a preacher. But there again, many preachers come from the villages around here; The Wesleys, William Brewster, Peverill to name a few. Obviously if it is something in the water, I didn't drink enough...