There’s no place like home
… where by “there’s no place like” we mean “OMG WTF is going on” and by “home” we mean “in Romania”.
Fun facts:
- The Ministry of Education and Research removed evolutionist theory from the biology curriculum, starting with the 2007-2008 academic year. Along with it, the philosophy curriculum stopped covering the religious views of heathens such as Voltaire and Nietzsche
- Romania is now the only EU country that doesn’t teach evolutionist theory in schools. This is in spite of EC resolution 1580 (2007) outlining the dangers of creationism in education
- Religion is currently taught in schools for the first 10 years. Attendance is mandatory unless the parents submit a written request otherwise
- The church is lobbying to make religion a mandatory class in high schools, too
- In a poll, 73% of the 7th to 12th graders interviewed believed that god created man
This situation isn’t just some power-grabbing attempt by the church (they’re state funded, anyway) – it has significant popular support. It’s not even a case of intelligent design versus pastafarians: there’s no effort to “scientify” the creationism taught in schools, and the feeble attempts at protesting are mostly covered by press in an ironic, “look at these wannabe disturbers of our holy tradition” tone (and viciously flamed down by the general public).
A picture is worth a thousand words: 
:-| I was looking for proof for this thing happening, I thought it was a misunderstanding. I see, however, that the school curriculum does include genetics & the like, so I can’t see why that would mean that they are aiming for removing the evolutionist theory from the curriculum.
It needs indeed more in depth analysis, since I cannot see how the religion taught in school could be perceived as science.
Yup – the genetics part is being used in defense of this decision: we apparently do teach evolution, we just do it “implicitly”.
Check out http://humanism.ro/articles.php?page=62&article=225 , it has the old curriculum with the removed sections highlighted – all explicit mentions to evolution are no longer there (along with whole chapters elaborating it).