Simple Living Isn’t Always

The New York Times reports on the failure of technology to save education. Continue Reading »

I mentioned Douglas Wilson’s reply to Christopher Hitchens the other day. A friend pointed out this reply from another Hitchens, Peter. His retort, while not evangelical, is nonetheless convincing. Further, he points out his brother’s worst chapter:

There is one chapter in this book whose implications are sinister. It is Chapter 16, which attempts to suggest that religion is child abuse.

On the basis of such arguments, matched by similar urgings from Professor Richard Dawkins, I can see a movement growing to outlaw the teaching of faith to children.

Some may dismiss this idea as preposterous, but why should it be? Already the courts intrude regularly into family life and decisions. Already homeschooling, for instance, has come under incredible scrutiny. It’s only natural that a family’s religious teaching could be determined to be negative. It only remains to be tried.

Imagine, for instance, that an atheist father resents his ex-wife’s conversion to Christianity. In an effort to ensure equal treatment under the law, he sues to restrain her from teaching the child Christian tenets. No Sunday school, no vacation Bible school, no church. What would a court say to such a father? What scientists (other than Dawkins, et. al.) would emerge with extensive studies of the harm that religious teaching does to children?

It’s not so far-fetched as it sounded, is it?

Training is a process of conditioning, an orderly and highly efficient procedure by which a man learns a prescribed pattern of facts and functions. Education, on the other hand, is an obscure process by which a person’s experience is brought into contact with his place and his history.

(from “Discipline and Hope”)

H/T: Dry Creek Chronicles

There has occasionally been a furor over public schools’ teaching of sex ed. I remember a few discussions along the lines of “What’s next?” The answer is here. The New York Times reported this weekend that some schools are supporting first-graders’ decisions about their gender identity. Cameron has an excellent rundown at his blog.