"The problem—I mean the problem for children's education—is not just that so many adults positively believe in things that flatly contradict the modern scientific world view, but that so many do not believe in things that are absolutely central to the scientific view. A survey published last year showed that half the American people do not know, for example, that the earth goes round the sun once a year. Fewer than one in ten know what a molecule is. More than half do not accept that human beings have evolved from animal ancestors; and less than one in ten believe that evolution—if it has occurred—can have taken place without some kind of external intervention. Not only do people not know the results of science, they do not even know what science is. When asked what they think distinguishes the scientific method, only 2% realised it involves putting theories to the test, 34% vaguely knew it has something to do with experiments and measurement, but 66% didn't have a clue.
Nor do these figures, worrying as they are, give the full picture of what children are up against. They tell us about the beliefs of typical people, and so about the belief environment of the average child. But there are small but significant communities just down the road from us—I mean literally just down the road, in New York, or London or Oxford—where the situation is arguably very much worse: communities where not only are superstition and ignorance even more firmly entrenched, but where this goes hand in hand with the imposition of repressive regimes of social and inter-personal conduct—in relation to hygiene, diet, dress, sex, gender roles, marriage arrangements, and so on. I think, for example of the Amish Christians, Hasidic Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Muslims . . . or, for that matter, the radical New Agers . . . all no doubt very different from each other, all with their own peculiar hang-ups and neuroses, but alike in providing an intellectual and cultural dungeon for those who live among them.
In theory, maybe, the children need not suffer. Adults might perhaps keep their beliefs to themselves and not make any active attempt to pass them on. But we know, I'm sure, better than to expect that. This kind of self-restraint is simply not in the nature of a parent-child relationship. If a mother, for example, sincerely believes that eating pork is a sin, or that the best cure for depression is holding a crystal to her head, or that after she dies she will be reincarnated as a mongoose, or that Capricorns and Aries are bound to quarrel, she is hardly likely to withhold such serious matters from her own offspring.
The question was, does childhood indoctrination matter: and the answer, I regret to say, is that it matters more than you might guess. The Jesuit did know what he was saying. Though human beings are remarkably resilient, the truth is that the effects of well-designed indoctrination may still prove irreversible, because one of the effects of such indoctrination will be precisely to remove the means and the motivation to reverse it. Several of these belief systems simply could not survive in a free and open market of comparison and criticism: but they have cunningly seen to it that they don't have to, by enlisting believers as their own gaolers. So, the bright young lad, full of hope and joy and inquisitiveness, becomes in time the nodding elder buried in the Torah; the little maid, fresh to the morning of the world, becomes the washed up New Age earth mother lost in mists of superstition."
- Read rest of Nicholas Humphrey's fascinating 1997 Oxford Lecture @ Edge
Nor do these figures, worrying as they are, give the full picture of what children are up against. They tell us about the beliefs of typical people, and so about the belief environment of the average child. But there are small but significant communities just down the road from us—I mean literally just down the road, in New York, or London or Oxford—where the situation is arguably very much worse: communities where not only are superstition and ignorance even more firmly entrenched, but where this goes hand in hand with the imposition of repressive regimes of social and inter-personal conduct—in relation to hygiene, diet, dress, sex, gender roles, marriage arrangements, and so on. I think, for example of the Amish Christians, Hasidic Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Muslims . . . or, for that matter, the radical New Agers . . . all no doubt very different from each other, all with their own peculiar hang-ups and neuroses, but alike in providing an intellectual and cultural dungeon for those who live among them.
In theory, maybe, the children need not suffer. Adults might perhaps keep their beliefs to themselves and not make any active attempt to pass them on. But we know, I'm sure, better than to expect that. This kind of self-restraint is simply not in the nature of a parent-child relationship. If a mother, for example, sincerely believes that eating pork is a sin, or that the best cure for depression is holding a crystal to her head, or that after she dies she will be reincarnated as a mongoose, or that Capricorns and Aries are bound to quarrel, she is hardly likely to withhold such serious matters from her own offspring.
The question was, does childhood indoctrination matter: and the answer, I regret to say, is that it matters more than you might guess. The Jesuit did know what he was saying. Though human beings are remarkably resilient, the truth is that the effects of well-designed indoctrination may still prove irreversible, because one of the effects of such indoctrination will be precisely to remove the means and the motivation to reverse it. Several of these belief systems simply could not survive in a free and open market of comparison and criticism: but they have cunningly seen to it that they don't have to, by enlisting believers as their own gaolers. So, the bright young lad, full of hope and joy and inquisitiveness, becomes in time the nodding elder buried in the Torah; the little maid, fresh to the morning of the world, becomes the washed up New Age earth mother lost in mists of superstition."
- Read rest of Nicholas Humphrey's fascinating 1997 Oxford Lecture @ Edge
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