Education Resources

The long-awaited Humanist website for teachers is now online. It should prove very useful for teachers who include Humanism in their RE lessons, as they do in Suffolk.

Andrew Copson, the BHA’s Education Officer, writes,

The site will be a growing resource, and so do let me know of any themes that may be covered in your syllabuses that you think it would be good to cover in our resources.

On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen.

Every society that's ever existed has felt it necessary to have creation myths. Why should I believe one? People write to me and say: "You show us birds and orchids and wonderful, beautiful things - why don't you feel you should give credit to He who created those things?" My reply is: what about a parasitic worm that's boring through the eye of a four-year-old child on the bank of an African river? It confuses me that I should believe in a god who cares individually for each and every one of us and could allow that to happen.

Conservapedia has over 3,800 educational, clean and concise entries on historical, scientific, legal, and economic topics, as well as more than 350 lectures and term lists. There have been over 2,500,000 page views and over 19,000 page edits. Already Conservapedia has become one of the largest user-controlled free encyclopedias on the internet. This site is growing rapidly.

Oh dear! Should you laugh or cry? Conservapedia is being touted as a reliable alternative to Wikipedia, “the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. Instead,

Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America. Conservapedia has easy-to-use indexes to facilitate review of topics. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of "political correctness".

There's been a Suffolk Humanist on Suffolk County Council's SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education) for years - John Aldam, who was a member of the BHA's Education Committee before we founded our group, was a SACRE member. When he wanted to quit, Margaret Nelson was co-opted in his place. She contributed to the development of the new Suffolk Religious Education syllabus that was introduced in September 2007. It includes Humanism and other secular life stances. Some may anticipate problems with teaching children about Humanism, for the following reasons:

• Many who teach RE are non-specialists, of whom some may be unfamiliar with Humanism.
• Unlike most religions, Humanists don't have rituals and festivals to base lessons on.
• Humanism may be falsely considered 'too difficult' for younger children.

We hope you'll find that it isn't difficult to teach children about Humanism, mainly because of its relevance to their lives and experience.

The British Humanist Association provides resources for teachers on its new schools website.

For KS 3-5, Team Video provides an excellent CD-Rom/DVD resource pack called 'Why Atheism?'.

If you need any help, or would like to suggest the sort of help you'd like to find here, please get in touch.

Of course, we're completely opposed to the teaching of Creationism or "Intelligent Design" as science (or even as religion) in UK schools. For a comprehensive explanation of Darwinian evolution versus Creationism and ID, see "We're all monkeys".

If you are involved with RE teaching in Suffolk you’ll know about the new RE syllabus that was launched at Endeavour House yesterday.

Now that Humanism is officially included in the syllabus, we must provide teachers with the resources to teach it. RE is often taught by non-specialists and teams that change from term to term. Teachers who are new to Humanism will find it especially difficult to work out how to approach the subject. One teacher has already told me that he has difficulty with including Humanism in the syllabus because “you don’t have festivals and rituals, like the religions do.”