Let them work it out for themselves
Here’s a bit of free advice: if you have any children in school, don’t send them to the one where Erfana Bora teaches.
I have taught secondary-level science to pupils in both state and faith schools. I am careful to teach my kids all the science they are required to know for their age group…
In my current teaching post at an Islamic faith school, pupils are concurrently taught in Islamic theology lessons that the universe and its contents originate from an omnipotent creator – and the mechanisms for this creative feat are described in some detail in the Qur’an…
Pupils with a faith background will learn the lesson content in a state school while holding their own viewpoints – and will then attempt to integrate two worldviews – inevitably reaching differing points of “belief equilibrium”, as it were. Pupils in faith schools do exactly the same.
All pupils will attempt to “integrate” what they have learned in science classes with the creation myths they have heard in school or church or mosque, inevitably doing it differently so that all pupils have some unknowable jumble of Stuff in their heads, thus demonstrating that Dawkins is quite wrong to think that “faith” does any harm to their cognitive faculties. And this arrangement is a good thing because
it is important that children are made aware of the limitations of scientific endeavour lest they be corralled into a realm wherein nothing is worth knowing unless it has been determined by empirical scientific discovery.
If they were encouraged towards that worldview alone, I believe they would be receiving an education devoid of further enrichment from a faith-based narrative…
As a teacher, I’d be doing my pupils a grave disservice if I insisted that the answers that science can give us should be the limit of our understanding of the world. Kids are bright and don’t need liberating from religion, especially if the alternative is limited to giving credence to atheistic secularism alone.
All kids “are bright” so it’s perfectly fine to teach them two incompatible sets of truth claims about the world and then leave them to figure out how to reconcile them. Let a thousand Venus flytraps bloom.
I can construct an endless list of human attributes that have stood the test of time – misogyny being but one – the defeat of which would serve us well. The religious impulse is another.
Science as an alternative worldview? How does this stuff even get published?
‘it is important that children are made aware of the limitations of scientific endeavour lest they be corralled into a realm wherein nothing is worth knowing unless it has been determined by empirical scientific discovery.’
Even if you accept that argument – and it’s not unreasonable – the ‘limits of scientific endeavour’ don’t terminate where religion begins.
Religion itself is explainable in terms of cognitive, social and evolutionary psychology.
Erfana Bora: “I am careful to teach my kids all the science they are required to know for their age group. They are then equipped with all the knowledge and information they need to both pass their exams and make their own minds up about the origins of the universe… Try telling a child in year seven that the question of where matter comes from is essentially unanswerable and therefore should not be asked. Often the response is “Why not? That’s stupid”.”
Problems:
1) The full modern answer to “where did matter come from” requires a great deal more physics than is taught in year seven. Does Erfana Bora really give them the depth of answer that Victor Stenger or Steven Weinberg would give to their grad students? Or does she artificially sell science short?
2) “Where did matter come from” – the theist must also answer this. “God did it” isn’t enough, I would demand to know _how_ God did it. Once a how is established, the easy next step is to ask: if we understand how, then why is God an essential part of the answer?
“That religions have stood the test of time is testament to the human need for something other than that which we can prove or disprove.”
Establishing the existence of a need is not the same as establishing the reliability of the fulfillment. Astrology has also withstood the “test of time.” And if “the test of time” is relavant, wouldn’t Hindu creation stories be better than Islamic ones, since they have withstood more time?
Hey, let’s get drug dealers into the classroom to explain their point of view, along with a cop, and let the kids sort it out.
Why don’t we do that?
Because they’re kids, dammit! They don’t know what to do!
Professor Dawkins’ documentary was disturbing, especially the part with the kids in the Islamic school. I felt badly for the parents who had to pretend to be religious to send their kids to a certain school in their area.
What stood out from this article for me was the following:
“Picking out attendance at a faith school per se as the reason a pupil professes to believing in an alternative narrative to the scientific explanation of these events is, I believe, somewhat disingenuous.”
While the children will probably ask similar questions, won’t the conclusions they reach be very different based on whether religious teaching is presented as equivalent to science or not? In other words, won’t their education actually affect them and their beliefs (and if not, are the really learning anything)?
“All kids “are bright” so it’s perfectly fine to teach them two incompatible sets of truth claims about the world and then leave them to figure out how to reconcile them. Let a thousand Venus flytraps bloom.”
So I gather you are being sarcastic. But why? What is wrong with presenting “two incompatible sets of truth claims”? For claims about the physical world they have, we hope, acquired from their science class the tools for making a decision. And for claims about the truth of aesthetic and ethical questions I could only wish that they *were* presented with more than one set of claims and allowed to choose freely between them. The biggest problem with faith based schools is not with the variety in points of view presented but with the *lack* thereeof.
Hopefully bright kids who are told God created matter will respond by asking ‘who created God?’
Alan (comment #8), you said:
What’s wrong with it? It’s not education. The problem with faith based schools is that children are presented with competing points of view, and are of course told (or it is at least impliced) that the faith point of view is the preferred one. Why else have a ‘faith-based’ school? But this confuses education with indoctrination, and while it is possible for kids to figure things out for themselves, many of them will not, and will be disadvantaged from the start, if education is the goal of education. Science and critical thinking are difficult. They don’t come naturally. That’s why it took so long for science to take hold of the human mind. That’s why it takes so long to immerse young minds in the skills required. Adding confusion to the mix is just asking for trouble, and we find it.
And let us further hope they are unimpressed with answers they are likely to be given, and ask why if god has always existed can we not just say the potential for creating matter has always existed, thus removing a stop from process.
Because one of those “truth” claims is stuff that other people made up. By all means present various creation myths in history, anthropology courses, but present them as the myths that they are and not as fact.
This seems to be a popular strawman response to Dawkins criticism of faith schools; if I (or someone else I know) was subjected to religious indoctrination as a child and it didn’t do me/them any harm (look ma, no scars) than how bad can it be ?
By all means let”s cripple our children to the maximum extent possible and see who comes through the ordeal unscathed.
Abolishing “faith schools” is a worthy goal, but I don’t see it happening any time soon. Meanwhile, in addition to insisting that no religion be smuggled into science class, it may be a good idea to push for adoption of Daniel Dennett’s proposal for a mandatory curriculum in all world religions — that should help combat religious extremism.
As a high school teacher myself, I’m deeply distressed by the divisiveness and indoctrination perpetuated by “faith schools.” I’ve written more about this topic here.
So they have to believe that a “faith-based narrative” is… what, exactly? True? That faith in something is somehow better than our best efforts to find out what really is true about the world?
It may be true that we cannot really apprehend the world as it really is. We know this. But we also know that attempting to understand the world truthfully is simply better than attempting to live in some world that one personally happens to prefer (and prefer regardless of the conflicts with the preferred world-view of so many others, and all the horrors that such conflicts can bring about). Maybe just the effort to try to see what really is the case, what really is going on, what really is true, is just the most important thing, the best thing, that an evolved species can ever, possibly, attempt. Because, just maybe, what is really the case is more honest and ultimately more meaningful than any of our pathetic, sordid, self-serving fantasies.
This foolish, possessive woman wants to justify her own beliefs, and to do that she has to get everyone else on her side, because how else can she “justify” her point of view? If the world doesn’t agree, she must be WRONG, and how bad is that? So she has to suborn the children, the innocent, the ones who really really want to know. Lying to children…? And she calls herself a teacher?
“We hope”. Can we be so sure about the effectiveness of science-teaching in such schools? My own experience of teaching children is that anyone under 11 can be safely assumed to be incapable of making inferences. Children just don’t do it. I always teach it, because I think that kids need to see that it is possible to work things out. But I am less convinced that the message goes home except, perhaps, in retrospect, much later. After all, why would they understand what the hell I’m going on about? For most children reason and inference are something akin to magic.
Young children are receptive to what adults teach them. They sort it out in their own minds, of course, but that process has nothing to do with reason. It’s much more to do with looking for things that match. Children simply don’t know what is true, and they depend on you and me to tell them. So a teacher just has to tell the truth. Kids will sort it out in their own way, but they should be given truth — or at least plain honesty — in the first instance, and also given the tools to deal with it. And those tools are learning tools about how to find things out, and do not include adult fantasies and preferences.
Alan, yes I’m being sarcastic, and one reason (to answer your “but why?”) is because it’s meaningless and absurd to announce that “kids are bright.” Not all of them are, obviously, and it’s not really education to tell them at nine o’clock that humans and other animals have evolved through natural selection and at ten o’clock that humans and other animals were created by a god, and let them “integrate” the two in whatever way they can. It’s a kind of bullying. Children don’t have the cognitive tools to judge the competing accounts; they’re not even in a position – cognitive, political, pedagogic, psychological, social, hierarchical, you name it – to grasp that they’re supposed to evaluate what their teachers tell them as opposed to simply learning it. They’re in school. The teachers tell them what’s what. How are they supposed to know that some of the teachers are just passing on myths without admitting that they are myths?
When I was at school we learnt to sing “All things bright and beautiful…/The Lord God made them all”. But my daughter was taught “Who put the colours in the rainbow?” Is it only my limited experience or has it actually got worse? Now, whoever wrote those words knew something about children. This is what is frightening. Maybe Dawkins has got it right about child abuse.
But aren’t they remarkably progressive in allowing a woman to teach?! Not at all like those ebol Talibans.
It’s the old “Science isn’t everything, so religion must be something” canard. The premise is true; the conclusion does not follow. Indeed, science isn’t everything — philosophy, humanities, history, physical endeavors, music, all of these things are also something of value. Religion is not.
Anyway, I’ve got an idea. Let’s teach fourth-graders two alternate sets of multiplication tables, one that is correct, and the other that is incorrect and in fact must be incorrect because it is not self-consistent. Kids are smart, they’ll surely figure out which is the right one eventually! After all, if we raise kids with only one multiplication tables, we will be failing to enrich them with a wrongness-based narrative.
Absolutely. Because it’s never too soon to get a handle on cognitive dissonance. Saves so much time when one encounters politics later on…
Because those two are obvious synonyms. (Tho if those “bright” kids find a path from the one to the other, I wouldn’t be standing in their way…)
Ophelia is right. Children expect their teachers to tell them what’s what, but some teachers seem to be afraid to actually teach.
I think is part of the wider pomo educational ideology that says actually teaching children the truth is somehow wrong because they should “find their own truths” instead. It is nonsense because children just aren’t equipped to do this.
When I was at school I always found this sort of attitude from teaachers confusing and frustrating.