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Comment by noir-york | Hacker News Reader

Now we just need the rest of the world to follow suit.

Is that really a thing in the rest of the world? I thought it was mostly the US, and even there mostly the homeschooling thing.

To be clear, despite the current story, it's not really a thing in Scotland or the UK either. I think this was prompted by some American faith groups getting involved in some schools in Scotland. The reason they weren't previously banned is because no-one thought it would come up.

This is interesting. I would have thought this was one of the factors dragging down math and science test scores in many western countries. The latest OECD rankings of 15 year olds in math and science put the UK at 20th and US at 28th. Seems pretty poor considering a country like Vietnam which was ravaged by war only a generation ago ranks 12th.

FYI Top 10 [1]: 1.Singapore 2.Hong Kong 3.South Korea 4.Japan (joint) 5.Taiwan (joint) 6.Finland 7.Estonia 8.Switzerland 9.Netherlands 10.Canada

[1]http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/singapore-tops...

I think the Western poor performance is a result of (a) terrible disorganisation in the education bureaucracy and (b) a lack of belief by people at the low end in the value of education for social mobility.

It's very easy for someone who didn't get educational opportunities to believe that making their kids do well will go better for them. In the West, there are a noticeable minority of people who did OK in the standard education, did badly in the search for work, and now have kids.

There are claims that sampling errors for the best known one hurt the US. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Stu... for more.) I have heard anecdotes that suggest some Asian countries (notably Singapore) pick unrealistically good students for their sample to make themselves look good. And also there is a question about mismatch between the test and the curriculum - certainly the US does better on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema... than on PISA.

None of this is to say that the US actually has a good education system. But it is not necessarily as bad as people think.

That's also my perspective. I grew up in Mexico, a very Catholic country and I went to a private Catholic school and we had religious classes and science classes. The content of both wasn't mixed, we had "brothers" giving the religious ones, and real scientists (Chemists, Biologists) giving the science ones. Even priests conceded that the Genesis story was a metaphor.

I had similar experiences in Hungary: I grew up in a very religious community (mostly Catholic) and went to a Catholic high school. Many of our teachers (including biology, geology and physics) were Catholic priests, yet I never heard anybody arguing against evolution.

I was 17 years old when I first met a young-earth creationist: he was an American missionary... I am still Christian and I know lots of people in various religious groups, but 14 years later I have only met one person who believes in Intelligent Design, and I know about 2 other people from mailing lists / blogs who are creationists.

The sad part is, young-earth creationists are such a vocal group that whenever somebody learns that I am a Christian, I am usually asked how I can believe in such nonsense as a 6000-year old Earth :)

The Catholic church's leadership has taught that there's no conflict between Evolution and Christianity for at least the past 60 years.

Creationism is a huge thing in the USA. At the state and local levels, where elementary and high school curriculum is mostly decided, there are fights over it all the time. Evolution is enough of a hot-button-issue that it's mostly glossed over in public schools, to the detriment of biology classes. People set up charter schools all the time in order to teach creationism outright.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_publi...

From a cursory look at this, it appears that it indeed is not a thing in most of the world.

Essentially many islamic countries that apply Sharia teaches creationism.

Not so much homeschooling specifically as Christian, mostly Protestant, political conservatives (often theologically fundamentalist, but not exclusively). Sometimes they also homesick as a reaction to content in public schools, but in many places in the US they've been fairly successful in dominating school authorities at the local and even state level and directing the curriculum.

But American religious/political activist groups often work to expiry their views overseas as well and implement similar policies -- there's been some attention to that on anti-gay policies, but pro-creationism features some of the same tactics.

In the SE US it's also common to find a lot of (non-Catholic [0]) Christian schools where this is prominent as well. I haven't, in recent years, spent enough time in any other US regions to know if they're similarly common elsewhere. It seems like a new one pops up every year or two in this county.

[0] I make this distinction because, IME, Catholic schools are generally better about separating science and religion courses. There are still more fundamentalist Catholics, but the Church (and thus most of the schools) has pulled away from that over the years.

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