Religion and schooling does not mix
14Oct. 09
This is an excerpt from A.C. Grayling’s book, The Reason of Things:
” … All religions are anxious to proselytise the young. Society seems not to see either the absurdity or the danger in the fact that pupils in one school are taught, as truths of history, that the Normans conquered England in 1066 and that Jesus is the son of God, in another that the Normans conquered England in 1066 and Jesus is not the son of God but that Mohammed received the definitive divine revelation, in a third that neither Jesus nor Mohammed is of any significance besides Guru Dev — and in a fourth that the Normans conquered England in 1066 and all three of Jesus, Mohammed, and Guru Dev are false distractions, attention to whom is likely to provoke God’s jealous wrath.
Yet in schools all over the country these antipathetic ‘truths’ are being force-fed to different groups of pupils, none of whom is in a position to assess their credulity or worth. This is a serious form of child abuse. It sows the seeds of apartheids capable of resulting, in their logical conclusion, in murder and war, as history sickeningly and ceaselessly proves.
There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity. Human credulity and superstition, and the need for comforting fables, will never be extirpated, so religion will always exist, at least among the uneducated. The only way to manage the dangers it presents is to confine it entirely to the private sphere, and for the public domain to be blind to it in all but one respect: that by law no one’s private beliefs should be allowed to cause a nuisance or an injury to anyone else. For whenever and wherever religion manifests itself in the public arena as an organised phenomenon, it is the most Satanic of all things.”
Grayling is making a noble and perhaps audacious point. Children are biologically conditioned to accept everything they are told by their ‘superiors’. This means that mature human beings have a responsibility to teach young children reasonable ideas. Religion is most certainly not a reasonable idea and hence children often hang onto these unreasonable thoughts causing various side effects such as intolerance, slowed scientific development, and deluded morals. Perhaps society should be more cautious in simply accepting religious educations.
Tags: child abuse, Education, Religion
October 19th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
It is indoctrination. I was told many times, “raise up achild in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”. It took me almost 45 years to understand that the world view I was raised with was cult like. I am so glad to be free from religion.