Anti-Meat Propaganda in School ExamsTHE HAGUE, 18/05/13 - The Dutch language exam for secondary education at HAVO level was a propaganda text for vegetarianism, in the opinion of the Christian democrats (CDA). Thousands of pupils had to answer questions about a text by the controversial anti-meat activist Roos Vonk.
CDA MP Geurts says he has received many complaints from parents. The text is said to be a one-sided argument against eating meat. It was written by Vonk, a professor who has been reprimanded by the Radboud University after a fabricated publication in which she claimed that eating meat makes people aggressive. The exam text states that people who eat meat are “antisocial and immoral,” though it is also possible that they are “simply ignorant or stupid.” The text was used for a text analysis exam for the subject of Dutch at HAVO, the middle level of secondary education. According to Geurts, pupils could take the contents as true, because they immerse themselves in such a text for a long time. He considers that the reprimand that Vonk received should at least have been mentioned beside the text, and has asked Education State Secretary Sander Dekker for a response. Vonk was reprimanded in 2011 for a study she carried out with Tilburg University professor Diederik Stapel on meat-eaters. Later, it emerged that Stapel based virtually all the publications he had written in his career on non-existent research. |