{"id":5561,"date":"2011-03-16T17:36:30","date_gmt":"2011-03-16T17:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=5561"},"modified":"2011-03-16T17:36:30","modified_gmt":"2011-03-16T17:36:30","slug":"old-time-irreligion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/old-time-irreligion\/","title":{"rendered":"Old-Time Irreligion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The British philosopher Colin McGinn gives us that old-time irreligion in this essay\u00a0&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/mcginn.philospot.com\/index.php?story=story100111-211826\">Why I Am an Atheist<\/a>&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p>I normally can&#8217;t take very much of this well-worn atheism-<em>vs<\/em>.-agnosticism stuff, but McGinn pulls it off very well &amp; I found myself reading to the end, in spite of those too-long paragraphs.<\/p>\n<p>He actually admits he can&#8217;t take much of it either:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I have also reached the point (I reached it long ago) that the issue of God&#8217;s existence no longer strikes me as an interesting issue. I mean, when it comes up I tend to glaze over, because all the moves are so familiar and the debate seems so antiquated. I find it hard to get fired up about it. It just seems dull. No intellectual sparks fly off it. The question has important political and cultural significance, to be sure, but as an intellectual issue in its own right it lacks vitality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m even more puzzled that I read the whole thing\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n<p>I am not competent to judge McGinn&#8217;s status as a philosopher. He writes well, and I always enjoy his articles. (I have never read any of his books.) He is a handy prop when discussing education, though. Thus:<\/p>\n<p>Like me, McGinn grew up in England under the &#8220;eleven plus&#8221; regime of school assignment. The way it worked was, everyone who passed through the state-school system (private schools were <em>hors de combat<\/em>) did six years in elementary school, then at the age of, of course, eleven plus took an IQ test. That&#8217;s what it was: a frank, straightforward IQ test.<\/p>\n<p>Based on your test score you were then assigned to one of the three categories of school:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Grammar school&#8221;:\u00a0 Very academic, lots of homework. Latin, Greek, modern languages, higher math, economics,\u00a0\u2026 the works.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Technical school&#8221;:\u00a0 Less academic, more vocational, but the cognitively demanding kind of vocational\u00a0\u2014 aiming to produce electronics engineers, not plumbers.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Secondary modern&#8221;:\u00a0 Prole school. You&#8217;re going to be a factory hand, but you&#8217;re too young to start yet. Hey, let&#8217;s have a game of football!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I forget the proportions, but they seem to have been very roughly 20-40-40. It wasn&#8217;t a bad system, though it might not work in a post-industrial economy.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, one of the objections raised to the system (which was swept away in 1970s reforms) was that once assigned to a technical or secondary modern school a child would accept his place in society and give up on anything cognitively demanding. The notion that anyone should accept his placein society was loathsome to the egalitarian New Class that was taking over the 1960s-70s British establishment. Hence those reforms.<\/p>\n<p>(Most of the New Class reformers were graduates of the Grammar Schools, by the way. The rest had been privately educated. And this line of thought was, as you may recognize, ancestral to the &#8220;stereotype threat&#8221; flim-flam currently popular with U.S. educationalists.)<\/p>\n<p>In fact the system was more flexible than that. Mis-assignments and late bloomers could transfer up to better schools. I was at university with a girl who&#8217;d been assigned to a secondary modern school.<\/p>\n<p>Well, McGinn is the star exhibit here, having been <a href=\"http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/nfmva95j\">assigned to a secondary modern school<\/a> in gritty,greasy Blackpool <em>circa<\/em> 1962.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The British philosopher Colin McGinn gives us that old-time irreligion in this essay\u00a0&#8220;Why I Am an Atheist&#8220;. I normally can&#8217;t take very much of this well-worn atheism-vs.-agnosticism stuff, but McGinn pulls it off very well &amp; I found myself reading &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/old-time-irreligion\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,14,711],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5561"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5561"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5563,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5561\/revisions\/5563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}