Islam and Education
Stumbling and mumbling has some data on education. It turns out the the less kids are exposed to Islamic culture the better that they do educationally:
in Bradford, students of Pakistani origin do best in white-dominated schools, and worst in Pakistani-dominated schools. Whites also do better in white-dominated schools.This could just be a statistical anomaly, but it also fits in with the global trend that Islamic culture is currently pretty well the least inventive out there. It produces an order of magnitude less inventions than Judaism even though it has three orders of magnitude more people, and the only Jewish state is under constant terrorist attack from Islamists.
| Religion | Total Patents 2000 - 2004 | Population |
| Buddhist | 198881 | 1654057653 |
| Shinto | 170243 | 127417244 |
| Christian* | 164857 | 1654057653 |
| unaffiliated/unspecified | 19165 | 145577513 |
| Jewish | 5014 | 6,276,883 |
| atheist | 1325 | 14497341544 |
| Hindu | 1263 | 1109609681 |
| indigenous beliefs | 1244 | 94314589 |
| Muslim | 611 | 1429768766 |
| Zionist | 0 | 1173900 |
Population data from CIA World Factbook
Patent data from US Patent Office
posted by chris at 3/29/2006 09:30:00 pm
2 Comments:
I could quibble a little with your use of stats (there aren't 14 billion atheists in the world, you can't really infer someone's religeon from their nationality, and do Christians really produce over 100 times as many patents as atheists?) but I think your point is essentially correct.
Interestingly enough, it wasn't always like this. I understand that Education is actually a really important part of Islam, and this is one of the reasons why the arab, islamic world was so advanced by 1300AD. "Algebra", for example, is an arabic word because that's where it was invented.
But it seems that at some point after that it all went wrong. I'd love to find out why. I'm sure muslims would argue that education is still really important in Islam, but that their focus is on religeous education rather than the kind of education for its own sake (not just science, but maths, art, music, philosophy) which was probably what lead to the flourishing of islamic culture in its heyday.
The patent numbers where by country as well, not by individual. But I was interested in the effects of culture. This will be closely related to their predominate religion, as religion forms such an important part of believers lives.
So it is not that individual Christians produce 100 times more than individual Atheists. It is that predominately Christian countries (mainly the Western ones) produce more than atheist ones (which are also all Communist). So Christian/Western culture is better at fostering inventiveness than Atheist/Communist culture.
Where the predominate religion is Indigenous Beliefs for example that is what it got classified as, even if there where also Christians and Muslims living there, since it would be these Indigenous Beliefs that form the bedrock of the countries culture. Where there was an even split between two or more religous cultures so that none predominated I included them in all of religions involved as all the religions would be contributing equally to their culture.
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Something has clearly gone wrong with Islamic culture. Algebra as you say was an invention of Islamic culture, and so little understood at the time in Europe that it is also the root of the word jibberish. During that period they where also more advanced in anatomy, astromomy, alchemy (which later evolved into chemistry), even the first parachute was an Islamic invention.
Then for some reason everything went pear shaped and Islamic culture stopped producing.
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