Downing Street Says » Creationism in Schools

» Friday, September 12, 2008

Creationism in Schools

Asked whether the Government still stood by its longstanding policy of insisting that in the curriculum, creationism should be restricted to Religious Studies, the PMS said that it was for the department to comment in detail on the curriculum. As he understood it, the comments made this morning were not in conflict with what the department were recommending, which was that creationism could be raised as a point of view in a biology lesson because a biology lesson would also discuss the theory of evolution and students could touch on creationism as an alternative point of view. A detailed discussion of creationism was probably best left to an RE class. The PMS added that the idea that the Government and the Royal Society were at loggerheads over this was simply wrong.

Put that there was a problem if you allowed a discussion in biology, because you appeared to be giving equal weight to something that the majority of scientists said was not science, the PMS said he would leave it to DCSF to comment in detail, but in the context of a discussion about the theory of evolution, it was reasonable to see how a reference to creationism could arise. On the detail of how teachers should run their classes, the PMS said he would leave that to the department to comment on.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.