Yes. :/ It's one of the things that I think isn't discussed often as
an 'issue with skepticism'. :/ "Oh, let's all just buy lots of Oujia
boards!" "Let's bend spoons in front of Uri Gellar's daughter and see
how she feels about her peers saying she's the daughter of a fake!"
I've had a 'showdown' with a fellow staff member, who wanted no
discussion of skeptically-related topics beyond her classes on
religious education. Because she had a student at another school whose
mother was a Wiccan and he decided to do some of his mother's rituals
in the playground. Which was then countered by the school psych as to
why it wasn't a matter for the school psych first and foremost - who
in my particular case, I had kept fully informed about what I was
doing all along (as well as the Deputy Principal, the Science Dept,
the Maths Dept, my own Head of Dept, fellow teachers, parents at the
teacher's night before I started the topic, blah blah blah...)....
... well, they, (the staff member who wanted nothing to do with
skepticism) said that it had nothing to do with the school, or
psychologists, it was only for the spiritual leaders of the school to
deal with.
About then I asked if she had such a problem with such topics - then
why did she, two years previously, use Nostradamus as an example of
Jesus and his miracles? Including going through as many prophecies as
she could? Without a single hint of doubt about what he was doing?
About then she kind of got seriously grumpy and the school psych
stepped in - and we merely removed certain topics off the suggested
list. It was fine by me - we had already done so previously with
consultation with the Science teachers about cultural sensitivity /
outlining ethical guidelines to prevent things like members of the
boarding house designing experiments like 'a ghost in the dorms and
then tracking the hysteria over who believed it!'. Kids, after all,
can be silly at times.
They included:
faith healing
ouija
acupuncture.
As in the other post - I think that considering that 31% said in an
Ipsos Mori poll of UK (2007) said they believed in ghosts... it must
be something that occasionally crops up in institutions and I'm
interested in how it's dealt with...
k.