[extropy-chat] I keep asking myself...

[Acy Stapp]

My daughter is almost five and she has started believing in fairies
and angels, heaven, and all that magical stuff. I tell her it's all
pretend and then let her know that some angels have four or six faces,
two or four or even more wings, some of them have lots and lots of
eyes or mouths, some are always on fire (but it doesn't hurt them),
etc. It's easy for her to imagine that there could be a real creature
with wings and a person's body but she really has to think about it to
get her head around a really biblical angel.  I also like to mix it up
and throw an angel or fairy into a story about a talking rabbit or
other clearly impossible scenario. Basically I try to mythologize the
whole christian pantheon and it seems to work fairly well to convince
her of the unreality of it all.

On 4/6/06, kevinfreels.com <kevin at kevinfreels.com> wrote:
>
> I wouldn;t be so sure about that. The main reason there was a lot of shift
> to private education had to do with silly things they were starting to do in
> school - especially the propensity for teachers to automatically assign an
> unfocused child the label of ADHD and send them to a doctor to get them on
> ritalin. There was also the "whole word" method of reading being taught
> (which my daughter was subject to and is just now pulling out of).
>
> My daughters still attend a public school and recently my daughter joined
> the school choir. Shortly after joining she came home to tell me that she
> felt uncomfortable because they were making them sing all these religious
> songs. I spoke with the music teacher and the principal and found that of 12
> songs, 10 were clearly christian and two were "prouod to be American" type
> songs. I was told that if she didn;t like it, she didn't have to be in the
> choir because choir was an optional activity.
>
> I think something else is at work here besides private education. Something
> far bigger, yet more subtle. My thought is that over the last 20 years,
> christians who were feeling isolated and alarmed by the pace of scientific
> discovery decided to move into the public education system so that they
> could directly affect the education of children in that direction. Sometimes
> I feel I missed my calling and I should be there on the front lines as well
> because that is where the battle is. Changing the curriculum will have less
> of an effect than increasing the number of secular leaning teachers.
>
>
Robert appeared to write:
>
>
> With respect to the discussion involving "public" education, Dennett's
> perspective was interesting.  He thought a public education about
> "religions" in the broadest sense -- i.e. one has to learn about *all*
> religions (sufficiently well to pass 'standardized' test about them) was the
> solution to current paradigm of religious brain washing.  I know that for
> myself it was an education in science that forced a direct confrontation
> between evidence-based reasoning (science) and Catholic indoctrination
> around the time I was 13-14 years old.  An education in a variety of
> religions at an earlier age would quite likely have facilitated the
> realization that one set of beliefs that I had been taught had some major
> problems.  I would suspect that I would have stopped believing in a "savior"
> around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus.
>
> It seems that the removal of ones children from public education is perhaps
> playing a major role in the revival of Christan fundamentalism (in the
> U.S.).  It is the ability to brainwash children and limit their exposure to
> other "realities" which allows the manufacture of irrational mind-clones.
> It is easy to say that one (as a list member) would educate ones children
> "properly" (in rational thinking, etc.) -- but what is to guarantee that
> everyone else will do that?
>
> Robert
>
--
Acy Stapp

"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think
only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the
solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." -- R. Buckminster
Fuller (1895 - 1983)