Very cool teacher runs skeptics club for kids

[canetoad]

ADAM van Langenberg was horrified when he saw Australian sceptic Richard Saunders demonstrate how consumers were being scammed by Power Balance wristbands, which claimed to improve strength by working with wearers' ''natural energy field''.

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Mr van Langenberg thought about all the other areas where students could be conned and decided to start a lunchtime sceptical society devoted to ''ghost hunting, astrology debunking and homoeopathy ridiculing''.

He told students about the society at assembly, peppering his speech with jokes about aliens and offers to test whether anyone at McKinnon was psychic.

''I thought if I got 30 kids I would be happy. About 100 kids turned up, which blew me away.''

The club, which has about 30 regular members, discusses everything from the vaccine debate to actor Sylvester Stallone's mother Jackie, who practices ''rumpology'', similar to palm reading but done by examining photos of a person's buttocks.

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/sceptical-group-brave-enough-to-tackle-the-big-issues-like-the-stallone-rump-reading-20111226-1pafh.html

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He doesn't seem to have his own website right now, below is a long post he made about the group on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe forums:

"It’s pretty hard to quantify something like this, but I’d say the group was a success on all fronts. It’s membership has stayed constant at about 30 kids a session (a mix of regulars and newcomers) and they were excited to hear that it would be continuing next year. Quite a few of the members have some vague belief in the supernatural and I think coming along each week is giving them enough knowledge and confidence to start to really question things. We had a real win involving a girl talking her parents out of sending her to a homeopath which I am especially proud of."

http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=39392.0

[TZ]

1. Seems to me..

that Australians are much more inclined to skepticism than people in this country. All the Aussie's I've ever met here have been very scientific minded. Maybe thats why I like them so much.

[MarkCharles]

2. Compared to folks in the USA, lots of nations have ..

more skeptical and more analytically trained young adults.

Non-college/non-university young folks in countries as diverse as the UK, Germany, Romania, and South Africa, as well as Japan seem to "get it" about the nature of scientific disciplines and inquiry, and don't fall for pseudo-scientific cons as easily as folks in the USA seem to do.

Then again, we have fundamentalist religious colleges in the USA where the teaching of geology, astronomy and evolution are not offered as part of the science curriculum. Can we guess why?