Romania Drops Evolution from Education, Substitutes Religion

Romania has decided to duck behind an Iron Age curtain. The nation's schools have stopped teaching evolutionary biology and instead requires students to attend compulsory religious instruction classes. Previously, students were taught about evolution at age 18 or 19, in itself an entirely inadequate requirement if they are expected to understand biology.

Romania removes theory of evolution from school curriculum

Romania's withdrawal of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum could be evidence of a growing conservative tendency in teaching. Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts children's understanding of how the world came into being.

Meanwhile, religious studies classes continue to tell Romanian children that God made the world in seven days.

The theory of the Origin of Species and the evolution of humans is no longer present in the compulsory curriculum, through a nationwide decision made under the previous Government in 2006. Before the change, Darwin's theory was taught to pupils aged 18 or 19 years old...

Meanwhile, in religious classes, pupils are taught that the world was created in seven days and God made plants on the third day and the sun on the fourth. Textbooks claim the first man was Adam, who was 'made of ground', and that Eve, the first woman, was made from one of her husband's ribs.

"The Romanian state, whether it intends or not, offers pupils a unique perspective on the world, the religious one, without any critical scientific or philosophical offset," argues [Remus Cernea, president of Solidarity for Freedom of Conscience]...

Biology has been cut from two hours to one of teaching per week for the final two years in many high schools...

"Kids find out what really happened from the Discovery channel," she adds. "They don't really believe the world was made in six days. Well, I hope they don't..."

At present, children are taught religious classes from ages seven to 18. This is mostly an Orthodox curriculum. They are also taught that to sleep in on Sunday mornings is bad because children should be going to church.

"It's not being taught about religion and what it means," said one headmistress. If a parent wants their child not to attend the classes, because they are, for example, Jewish, Muslim or agnostic, he or she has to draft a letter to the school. The child then sits in a library or the head teacher's office working on, say, maths or languages.

But there are new proposals to make all religious classes compulsory for the education system, regardless of the parents' wishes. All children who do not want to attend Religion classes would attend a Moral and Religious Education class...

At last, the world has its Creationist, anti-science, anti-intellectual paradise. The "academic freedom" crowd should be most pleased; unfettered by church-state separation, the educational systems of places like Florida, Texas and Kentucky would look quite like that of Romania.

Perhaps the decision by Romania's government to turn that nation into a citadel of the Disenlightenment should be encouraged. American disenlightenment proponents ought to be encouraged to relocate to Romania. Their children could live out their lives there in exactly the sort of place they want the United States to become, an explicitly religious state where no challenges to church-sanctioned theology is allowed, where education is indoctrination, and where knowledge is made subservient to mythology with full governmental support. Don McElroy would surely feel right at home.

Psalm 100:1-3 is very relevant to this discussion:

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all you lands
Serve the Lord with gladness,
Come before his presence was singing,
Know ye that the LORD he is God:
It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves;
We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

(Notice, that this Psalm is address to "all you lands", i.e. all the nations, i.e. all people. This Psalm is not addressed solely to Israel. I don't believe there's a more emphatic, concise statement in the Scriptures than this that refutes the idea of evolution—"and not we ourselves"; and it is written to all people. And what is their response to be? It is to "Know ye that the LORD he is God".)

Also, in Job 38-41 we have an entire speech by God himself, where he articulates the Truth that Naturalism is false and he created all things.

— Source: Intelligent Design 2^nd Session, Don McElroy, February 6, 2005

Wouldn't Romania be the perfect place for someone like McElroy? His "intelligent design," a couple of fancy words swapped for Creationism, is perfectly in keeping with the theology that has now fully eclipsed education in that country, and it would certainly be better for America to put that particular Texan in Romania than it would be for Texas to wind up looking just like Romania.

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