Sitting on a train on the way home, I've been reading the TES on-line where one of the headline stories is about the Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm (which somewhat coincidently is located near Bristol which is where I've been for a JISC meeting,) controversially receiving the Government-backed Council for Learning Outside the Classroom's “quality badge”, a kitemark developed last year to accredit outdoor activity centres, museums and stately homes as suitable for children's education.
Hopefully the institution's name ought to be a clue for any educators wanting to broaden the mind of their charges, but the presence of an official badge might sway the unwary into inadvertently exposing enquiring minds to religious propaganda presented as fact.
Now leaving aside problems which are presumably issues of faith, such as where did all the water come from and where did it go, or why did Noah leave all the marsupials in Australasia, the likelihood of the story having any actual, and therefore significant, educational basis can be illustrated with simple mathematics.
Ignoring what we actually know to be the highest peaks on earth (Everest, K2, etc) and instead using Mount Ararat as reference point since that's where the biblical story says the ark ended up, we're left with water covering land at an elevation above sea level of to close to 17000 feet (to be precise the elevation of said mountain is 16945 feet). Since the story says it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, that means in each twenty four hour period the water rose an average of 425 feet (17000/40), or to put it in another way, 17' 9" each and every hour all around the world for nearly 6 weeks, not just local to wherever Noah's menagerie was floating around.
That's an awful lot of water in anybody's (good?) book, and if the family who run the zoo want to believe that it really happened and put on a show about it then that's up to them, but handing out an official educational endorsement is surely not something that's going to help anybody involved in the planning of school trips now that we know there's no apparent care taken in deciding which organisations can be trusted to deliver objective supplements to the national curriculum.
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According to a NHA blog post about the same place it's unethical treatment of the animals is another reason why schools should avoid it.
ReplyDelete"Undercover members of the Captive Animals Protection Society found evidence that the zoo had a breeding arrangement with the Great British Circus, the last remaining UK circus to use tigers, and that the remains of a tiger that died at the zoo had been buried on site, rather than disposed of in accordance with the law.
The allegations led to the expulsion of Noah's Ark Zoo Farm from the professional body for zoos, the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquaria (BIAZA), which you might have thought would have put paid to the zoo's prospects as a desirable destination for "educational" school visits."
As a concerned local teacher I'd like to mention Sink the Ark (http://www.ark.isambard.com/index.php) which has been set up to urge local authorities to discourage educational visits and to make it stop claiming to be supporting the national curriculum.
ReplyDeleteIve been and they even have posters up showing how we are all descended from Noahs 3 sons LOL
ReplyDeleteThankfully she's not in government anymore, but see today's Daily Express where Ann Widdecombe describes the zoo as having "an imaginative and educational display" and "workshops which cover the national science curriculum".
ReplyDeleteDon't think she's been, do you?
Thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteLooks like Anne's interpreted criticism of the zoo's CLOC Award as an attack on religion (and in particular Christianity).
If she'd actually bothered to read the BHA response (or mine!) she'd realise that there's not an objection to kids learning about religion, just that it ought to be in Religious Education lessons, not in Science ones. Or in this case that the institution and it's workshops are described as religious and drop the pretence to having any scientific basis.
And no, having looked at some frankly disturbing images taken on site (thanks Steve), I don't think she could possibly have been!