Our interest is in fostering critical and creative thinkers. We feel that the probable result of this will be secular kids. Still, if the end of that path is theism for some, then it is a theism that doesn’t hide from reason. A real unfairness “of religion-izing” young kids is that it’s especially hard, when they come to the Age of Reason, to “reason out of something” they didn’t “reason into” in the first place.
Christian apologist Randal Rauser recently shared on his blog that in 1997, secularist Nicholas Humphrey delivered the Oxford Amnesty Lecture which he titled “What shall we tell the children?” (Published in Social Research, 65 (1998), 777-805.) In the lecture, Humphrey warns against allowing parents to teach their children religious ideology:
“I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed – even expected – to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas – no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith. In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.” (here: https://randalrauser.com/2022/02/the-danger-of-the-secular-ideologue/ )
I feel children should be taught at school a wide variety of religious belief systems, and also secularism, because what matters is that truth should win out fair and square.
REFLECTION QUESTION:
Think about what has been presented above in this post and consider whether perhaps BRAINWASHING is a hidden issue here? As a follow up question, historically, why has shaping young minds to be copies of themselves been so important to some adults (eg fanatic cults, the Hitler Youth, etc)?