[scordova]

One of our members MaxAug mentioned he was a biology teacher in Brazil. I would like to hear more about the cultural situation in Brazil.

Is the schooling in Brazil mostly public or private?

Is it illegal to teach ID and/or creation science there?


regards,
Salvador

[MaxAug]

I’ll try to present a nano summary:

Brazil is a poor country, so the majority of students are in the public system. Most people here are religious, I’d say most people here claim to be a member of the roman church, but they mix roman dogmas with a lot of other things. But still, speaking somewhat of God in a public school classroom is not yet too risky. First, because the schools have the option to offer religious studies, which is basically a roman church based program with the “respect the others” component. Second, since most people are indeed religious, they don’t see much of a problem speaking of God, specially because speaking of God and Jesus makes some of the kids a little less problematic, and this is big deal.

I believe, though I think this is not explicitly stated in the law, you can’t teach ID or creationism in a public class. Most people here don’t know anything on the controversy by the way. But I can say for myself: If I wanted, I could criticize evolution and teach ID/creationism without too much risk. I work in a public school with a different system, a military school, and basically, there is a lot of Biblical Christians there, plus the roman catholics. My fellow teachers, as far as I can tell are all sympathetic to ID, man I wish you could see the face of a friend, who has a masters degree in genetics talking about a book I lend her (I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist), she got amazed, because she never heard those basic level arguments.

To finish, I would say, overall, it is not too risky to teach ID in a public classroom, the main source of problems though, not only with respect to this subject, are the kids parents. If one dad out of 500 decides to harass the school principal, then the standard thing is to presume the kid is always innocent and blame the teacher. So, in this case, if I say for instance: Haeckels embryos are a fraud, and some dad decides to bother me, I may get some punishment. Not gonna get fired, but will get reprehended somehow.

That’s is in a nutshell.

[YEC]

MaxAug,

Thanks so much for that summary!

Since Brazil is poor do you think that if schools were given free biology text books that were creation oriented, or at least creation sympothetic, that the government would allow them to be used?

[MaxAug]

Good question, actually very good.

Overall, the authorities are more concerned with hindering anti-socialist ideas. Being so, a textbook offering a favorable view on creation would be immediately associated with political conservatives (And by the way, there are no conservative politicians here), and probably not accepted.

What we really need is to start from the bottom: Spread the good news. But for that, we need more books. We do have a few translated books here on Christian apologetics but we need more. And we also need, as i said, people with doctorates arguing around.

Let me give you an example: Criticisms of Behe's Darwin's Black Box abound, and counter criticisms, well, i dont even remember reading any.

[jb]

I wonder if there is a Portuguese language version of this:

http://www.exploreevolution.com/index.php

[MaxAug]

Definitely not.

You know something i would really like to see? A prominent ID speaker giving lectures here. Interestingly, Werner Gitt has done it.

[YEC]

Well Sal knows all the big guns ... and maybe even qualify as "prominent" himself (at least in some circles) ... what about it Sal?