Andrea Peyser is but a simple tabloid sex columnist. But she knows one thing: well, she doesn't know what she "knows," because that would be an epistemological question (epistemology=bad). But she's against filling kids' minds with trash like "thoughts."

Andrea's outrage of the day: an eighth-grade teacher dared to try to teach philosophy.

"RELIGION," a sheet from English class, handed out to eighth-graders, is provocatively titled. The typewritten paper presents some 20 quotes that can be described as anti-God, coming from philosophers from Kierkegaard to Schopenhauer. Even a "Yiddish proverb."

Andrea Peyser doesn't know who these oddly-named foreigners are, but she's pretty sure their names aren't in the Bible, so where is the "RELIGION" here, really? She writes: "Angry parents want to know: What the devil does this have to do with middle-school English?" And then she writes: "the assignment [was] part of a philosophy unit within the English course." Which would seem to answer the previous question posed, but that would involve "logic," a branch of philosophy which Andrea Peyser and the parents of kids at MS 51 in Park Slope(!) agree has no place in a classroom setting, or a newspaper column, for that matter.

"Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake," wrote Pascal.

I'm not entirely sure of the meaning of that quote, contained on the handout. But at a time when kids need religion, family and strong schools more than ever, this kind of lesson is best left alone.

Andrea Peyser: Living the sexxxy unexamined life, and loving it!

[Pascal was a Catholic. Pic: Lauri Apple]