Posts Tagged ‘education’

Yesterday, the first session of Intimate Details took place at Leeds Atheist Society. Intimate Details is a course which looks at sex, relationships and surrounding issues from a secular perspective – and indeed given it covers a lot of the same material as UCCF’s Pure course, some have cheekily nicknamed it “Impure.”

Yesterday’s session looked at sexuality and the various sexual orientations that exist, taboos and fetishes and the attitude towards sex in society such as sex in the media and education system as well as pornography, prostitution and religion.

Next week’s session will be looking at dating, relationships and sex. You can join us for that at 7pm on Friday 10 December.

A big thank you to everyone who joined us in Leeds this weekend to make Sunrise Conference 2010 a huge success! Throughout the weekend we had an array of talks, seminars, workshops and discussions on a variety of topics – everything from leadership and organisation to marketing, the meaning of life and transhumanism! You can see photos from the event on our Facebook page and the conference website for full details.

The first weekend of September will play host to our new national event, Sunrise Conference. Hosted by LUU Debating Society in association with ourselves, Sunrise will bring together leaders of free thinking groups from across the UK to share ideas, knowledge and experience.

The conference will feature multiple streams aimed at local groups, student groups and also provide training for those wishing to volunteer as humanist chaplains. A full timetable along with a list of speakers already signed up to speak at the conference can be found on the website.

Labour MP Graham Stringer and sparked quite a debate by describing dyslexia as a “cruel fiction” invented by big wigs in the education system to cover up the fact that they can’t teach very well.

The charity Dyslexia Action hit back with a statement and claimed that six million people in the UK suffer from it. To be honest though I’m not really convinced such a figure really helps their case. For example the facts don’t really stack up if this figure is true and you take Mr Stringer’s point that…

“If dyslexia really existed then countries as diverse as Nicaragua and South Korea would not have been able to achieve literacy rates of nearly 100%.”

He also makes the interesting point that given there is so much finance support for the condition, it essentially creates an insentive to be bad at reading and writing. Personally I’m not convinced this actually much of an affect but it is certainly plausible that it does.

For further reading you may want to take a glance at the BBC’s coverage and Mr Stringer’s column itself.