Have you read the posts on Brain Gym? It was recommended to me by another school librarian and it's either really funny or really worrying depending on how your point of view.

I just had a look, because I had forgotten about it and had a vague notion that it had something to do with the spiffy Nintendo DS.

I remember a bit more about it now, assisted by a bit of badscience scanning.

I think it's funnier than it is worrying, for the following 2 reasons:
1) If I have children (which is unlikely), I'm the sort of parent who wants to name them something really embarrassing just to give them a more excruciating childhood than mine. I also want to abuse that complete trust they place in me by telling blatant untruths that will survive into their adult lives. Apparently Maz's mum was in her 20s before she found out that tortoises couldn't leave their shells, contrary to what her brother had told her.

2) My current plans never to spawn mean that I do not have to worry personally about whatever gibberish they're being taught.

However, in principle I do object to this sort of thing, since if anyone's going to fuck with my prospective kid's head it should be me, not some gullible teacher who's just bought the equivalent of three magic beans and is now trying to get the class to climb the beanstalk with her. Besides, what if I hit 30 and suddenly decide I have got a paternalistic bone somewhere in my body after all, and by then all the primary school classes are encouraging children to worship purple crystals and take homeopathic smartpills or something?

Nevertheless, at the moment my response is more "aah, bless, ickle-wickle teachers don't understand sciencey-whyiency stuff", than Angry of Tunbridge Wells.

I'm sure you often have the truism repeated to you that I do to me - headteachers are no longer teachers but managers. This means the following:
1) they do not need to have any knowledge about teaching whatsoever
2) being managers they do not have to have any contact with planet Earth, because management only means that yuo administer within a given system, regardls of whether that system actually, you know, exists.

Therefore it wouldn't surprise me if you are correct, to a large extent (although I'm not willing to rule out the notion of thick teachers entirely - you should see some of the people I work with - dear god) - and to anecdotally back this up I recall another Bad Science classic, whatserface from Co Durham's LEA who seems to have such a major fetish for Omega 3 Snake Oil Pills that it conjures up very disturbing images of her private life...

I also think that the Barnsley lie is a brilliant one. I'll have to think of something similar for my spawn.

Thing is, hailing from Derbyshire, I probably can't come up with fiction that's stranger than reality:

'Where I grew up, son, every year the whole village would get together, soak some wooden boards in the river for a month, then walk around in some clay, paste it over the boards and then construct an image of Noah's ark by sticking petals and coffee beans on them. Then we'd put them on display over bank holiday weekend and people would come, in their free time, and look at them, and then say "Oh, isn't it lovely"...'