Help Me to Think for Myself: What Place Does Religion Have in Education?
“A clever person has all the right answers. A genius has all the right questions.”
- Some clever person
Out the window of the bus, the French countryside swished by. The late afternoon sun poured honey-like into the moquette seats on our side of the bus, making the children, my colleague, and I, feel lethargic and drowsy. We were headed homeward from a class trip visiting the Lascaux caves in central France. My head swam with dream images of smudgy bulls and horses rubbed into stone by hairy and calloused prehistoric fingers, when Christian interrupted my reverie with a question.
"Mister Michael,” he began—our school insisted the children mix the formal with the familiar as a compromise between the more formal-minded French teachers who wanted titles, and the Montessori teachers who wanted to be on a first-name basis with the children— “Who is it that brings me my presents at Christmas, my parents, or Santa Claus?”
Uh-oh. Should I tell Christian the truth, that Santa Claus doesn’t exist—at least, there is no good argument or evidence for the existence of Santa Claus—or should I tell him what his parents have probably let him believe: that Santa brings him his presents?
In a very neutral tone, with not an ounce of mockery or sarcasm, I said, "Which is more likely? A large, jolly old man who lives in the north pole and employs an army of tiny elves makes, by hand, all of the presents for all of the children in the world (whose families don’t adhere to religions that practice other gift-giving traditions). This man somehow knows everything about you, including not only what you want, but even how you’ve behaved during the year. He watches you all year long and if you behave badly, he either deprives you of presents, or gives you a lump of coal.”
“Every Christmas Eve,” I went on, “he loads a giant sack full of all of the presents and all of the coal onto a magical flying sleigh driven by eight magical flying reindeer. In a period of 24 hours, he travels to every household, lands on the roof, and slides down the chimneys, placing the presents under every tree, including yours. After he delivers the gifts, he wiggles his nose and goes back up the chimney again.”
Here, I had to take a breath, ignoring the children’s cries of, “What if you live in an apartment?” and “How does he get in if your chimney is broken?” and “Does he deliver presents to igloos?”
“Or,” I continued, working hard to maintain a measured and flat tone, “You have parents who love you. They know you very well, because they have raised you from the time you were born. To them, you are the most precious person in the world.”
“To express this incredible love they have for you, they work very hard to provide for you. With the money they earn from working, they buy things that they know you’ll like, wrap them up, and put them under the tree at Christmas time. They give you presents every year just to experience the joy of seeing your face light up. They give each other presents, too, because giving is something that makes us human beings feel good.”
“The tradition of Christmas has a long history by the way. It arose out of a combination of Christian and Pagan customs and stories. Your parents like to tell you stories, because human beings love stories. Sharing stories contributes to the richness and fullness of human life. The stories don’t have to be true to be enjoyable, or to teach us lessons, or to fill our lives with magic. Taking pleasure in a story is enough.”
“Some stories, both true and fictional, are so precious to human beings that we like to hear them over and over again. So every year your parents go along with the stories and participate in the traditions either because they strongly believe in them, or because they get pleasure from them, or both. Either way, they relish the coziness of winter time when they get to pause and spend time with you and the other people that they love.”
“So,” I concluded. “Again, which seems most likely?”
I assure you, I did my very best to make my description of both scenarios completely unbiased. Any sneer in my voice, any giggle bubbling up behind my words might have revealed my opinion the matter, and, in spite of my position being correct, I did not want Christian to adopt my perspective.
For even though Santa Claus is, in truth, a myth, I preferred that Christian come to that conclusion on his own through an exercise of sound epistemology, rather than just take my word for it. I felt it was better in the long run to let Christian practice the critical thinking tools he needs to figure out the Santa Claus question for himself.
Now, while belief in Santa Claus is relatively harmless—though one could argue that encouraging children to believe anything that can’t be shown to be true is at least a little bit harmful—sadly, Santa Claus is only one subject area in which children become indoctrinated into a set of unwarranted beliefs; another subject area is religion.
I suppose it’s only natural for parents to pass on to their children religious tenants. One can stomach the dishonesty and allow leeway for the emotional connection a parent has to his or her culture or heritage, even if it does result in passing on to their children morbid beliefs such as that women are inferior and should be covered up, or a wafer turns into the body of a human being.
One can feel for a parent who, having been indoctrinated by his or her own parents, feels the desire to pass along comforting beliefs and associations to his or her children. In the end, parents are responsible for a child’s safety, and believing that her child is a wretched sinner who will burn in eternity if he doesn’t adopt her beliefs can tend to make a mother, to put it mildly, overprotective.
But an educator has no such excuse. He or she must always point children, as much as is possible, toward a path to the truth of reality—to the extent that it can be obtained. A Montessori educator, in particular, must shed his or her personal beliefs when working with children and carry him or herself like, as Dr. Montessori says, “a humble scientist.”
Scientists leave their unwarranted beliefs and assumptions outside the door as soon as they enter their laboratories, and well they should: biases cloud vision and move one further away from, not closer to, reality.
Now, while scientists attempt to answer questions about reality by removing bias, questioning, observing, measuring, and testing, religious believers, by contrast, attempt to answer questions about reality by simply adopting beliefs in spite of a lack of evidence for those beliefs, and in the face of evidence that contradicts those beliefs. What’s more, at the end of the day, it’s the methodology of the scientists, not the religious believers, that has become the best tool humanity has developed for determining the nature of reality.
In rejecting scientific methodology in favor of religious dogma, religious educators do significant harm to the children in their charge. The educator’s task, at minimum, is to point children toward an exploration of the universe that is in keeping with scientific methodologies, not to spoon-feed childern harrowing tales as if they are true.
This is why education must necessarily be secular. Simply put: like a scientist, the first and most important job of an educator is to teach children how to think, not what to think. Along with that, to operate ethically, an educator must teach children only those facts about their universe that are true, that is to say, that can be, and have been, verified empirically via the scientific method. In doing so, an educator fosters, not suppresses, critical thinking skills.
TEACH HOW TO THINK, NOT WHAT TO THINK
Religious and secular educators both have in common a certain relationship to life’s big questions, but while the religious educator asserts—unjustifiably—that his or her particular belief system has the answers to those big questions, only to then discourage critical inquiry for fear of the threat questions pose to the belief system, the secular educator accepts, and indeed relishes, not having the answers. A secular educator encourages further questions.
Indeed, when it comes to life’s big questions, the Imam, the Rabbi, the nun, and the priest, all have an agenda. They need the questioning child to accept their religion’s particular set of faith-based answers, which, being based on faith, not fact, are actually non-answers.
At this point, the reader will hopefully indulge me in a brief digression to make something clear: the statement that religious belief is not based on fact is not an insult, but merely itself a statement of fact. It is simply the case, for example, that a claim written in an old book can never be taken to be true just because it is written in an old book.
Any truth claim written down in any book needs corroborating evidence before you can reasonably accept it. This is especially true of claims that have no empirical basis in reality, such as a supernatural claim. For, as the late Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
If you read, for example, in a 2,000 year old tome that a man was tortured and killed by the Romans, well, that claim may not be true, but you can find mountains of evidence of the Romans torturing and killing people, so you could go along with it. If, however, you read in a book that that same man rose from the dead, well, to believe that you would need substantially better evidence, since no one has ever been established to have risen from the dead.
Getting back to the point, in contrast to the religious educator, the secular educator has an altogether different agenda: to step back and guide the child toward finding his or her own answers to life’s big questions, and to encourage the child to ask more.
Consider a child in a Montessori Catholic school who’s grandma recently died. This child likely receives the comforting—if dubious—impression from his religious teacher that his grandmother is in heaven, and that he will eventually see her again. (If, and only if, said grandma professed to believe in the dogma at the moment of her death. That part, of course, the religious teacher likely leaves out.)
That same child in a secular Montessori classroom receives, on the contrary, emotional support as well as an invitation to explore questions such as: what happens to us, biologically, when we die? What do various cultures and civilizations believe about death? What is the most healthy way to handle grief? A question in a religious classroom that leads to a sophistical sermon, in a best-practice Montessori classroom leads to a fantastic research project.
What’s more, the secular educator helps the child to know how to ask questions; how to seek, not necessarily find, the answers. The child in a secular Montessori classroom benefits little from a pithy “24” as the answer to the question, “What do I get when I multiply four times six.” The child in the religious Montessori classroom benefits even less in hearing, “heaven” as an answer to the question “Where is my deceased grandmother?”, since, unlike “24,” “heaven” is not a verifiable answer that can be demonstrated to be correct—which basically means it’s not only false, but dishonest.
A better answer to the first question would be to point to a reliable process for finding the answer. The secular educator says something like, “I don’t know, let’s take six things four times, count them all together, and see what we get.”
All Montessori educators, indeed, have many materials that lead children through the process of multiplication. They can hand the child some colored bead bars and shows the child how to count them. They can lead the child to the Checkerboard or the Large Bead Frame, or invite the child to get some friends together to play the bank game, or even show the child the Japanese technique of multiplying using criss-crossed lines. What’s more, Montessori educators of all stripes can show the child not just how to perform multiplication, but how to check and verify that his or her answers are correct.
Unfortunately, verification that a religious belief is correct proves anathema to the pastor or the nun, because religious claims can’t be verified on any rational basis.
To be fair, Sister Mary-Catherine could also show a child how the process of multiplication works. But for the child’s less concrete questions, such as the question about grandma’s destination after death, Sister Mary-Catherine then must be inconsistent, and, necessarily, dishonest. She must stop all inquiry and revert back to pretending to have the answer: heaven.
But a secular educator knows that the answer to a question about something as mysterious and profound as death could also focus on process: “I don’t know,” she could say, “Why don’t you get a friend and do a research about life cycles of animals, plants, and humans? Or you could learn about cognitive science, or about how biological systems shut down and decay. You could even do a project about what various human civilizations believe about death. Let me tell you a fascinating story about how and why the Egyptians buried their monarchs with all of their beautiful treasures!”
More importantly, the child given the tools of sincere inquiry, rather than a stopgap false answer, will not help but lead himself or herself to the correct conclusion about death: that all the evidence we have shows that grandma’s brain and heart have stopped and that she is dead. All of the brain functions that make up her personality are no longer active, so as far as we know they are no more. Her body will break down and become part of the universe again. Isn’t that a beautiful notion? And, since, as far as we know every human being is unique, no one like grandma will ever exist again in quite the same way.
A child discovering that information can then be helped to deal effectively with grief, and even be led to a deep appreciation for the preciousness and fragility of grandma’s life, knowing that it was the only life she will ever have. This, in turn, may lead to a deep appreciation of the child’s own life.
It’s no mystery why religious educators discourage children from learning “how” to think: following evidence where it leads, using logic and exercising critical thinking skills and sound epistemology—in other words, using the best tools we have to determine the true nature of reality—can never lead a clear-thinking person to religious belief.
As an example, I once said to child in my class, “I have a 2-euro coin in my pocket. Do you believe me?” She said yes. Later that day I told her I had a magical chocolate unicorn in my pocket that grants wishes. “Do you believe me,” I asked. “No.” “Why did you believe me when I said I had a coin in my pocket and not a unicorn? I didn’t have either.” She replied, “Because coins are real and unicorns aren’t.” Children get it. It takes a religion to discourage this kind of sound thinking.
Discouraging questioning with regard to their religious dogma and giving children pretend answers to life’s big questions, are examples of the disservice that religious educators do to children. By leading children to believe that this life is just a place to wipe their feet before the real party begins after they die, religious educators deprive children of the reality that, as far as we can tell, this one life they have is precious and extraordinary, they can make their own meaning from it, the universe is knowable, and no one, not even (and especially not) Sister Mary-Catherine, has all the answers.
Given that realization, the child appreciates how precious and unique this life is and begins to explore its wonders and search for his place within it. The fact that life ends needn’t diminish life’s beauty. After all, does the value of a book diminish because eventually the story ends? On the contrary! As any comic book fan knows, the rare issues are the most valuable. The editions of which there exist only one become worth a fortune.
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
Not only does religious education deal with questions questionably, both in in discouraging critical inquiry and pretending to have the answers, but the methods of religion to impart this information proves problematic, being reliant on rote memorization and deference to authority.
All Montessori teachers, to be fair, find themselves in danger of falling into the trap of equating “memorizing” with “learning.” Indeed, an alien being coming down to our planet would likely fail to contrast a group of children reciting math facts or verb conjugations in a secular Montessori classroom with a group of children reciting morning prayers in a Christian Montessori classroom. Both memorizing math facts and reciting prayers utilize the lowest level of cognitive function: Recall.
By “lowest cognitive function”, I’m referring, of course, to Bloom’s Taxonomy, which divides the way people learn into three domains, one of which, the cognitive domain, emphasizes intellectual outcomes. The Taxonomy further divides the cognitive domain into categories that it arranges progressively from the lowest level of thinking, simple Recall, as stated before, to the highest: Evaluation of information. The levels in between, ranked in order, are Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, and Synthesis.
A child’s work that accesses multiple domains, as it does in best-practice Montessori classrooms, results in improved attention to detail, increased comprehension, and expanded problem solving skills.
These are the outcomes that any sentient being, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, with cognitive faculties would see were they to observe children engaged in active experiences in a classroom environment, which necessarily invite the children to work on, say, the math facts from a multi-tier cognitive perspective, especially when the aforementioned work accesses the higher cognitive levels.
A child performing cubing with the Trinomial Cube, for example, Evaluates the most effective way to work with and Synthesizes what she’s learned by designing a follow-up project, such a poster or 3-dimensional model.
She finds excitement and satisfaction in the Application of the math facts as she Analyzes the variously-shaped prisms, categorizing them and deriving their values.
All of this leads to deep Comprehension of not only the math facts, but of how they relate to real-world objects in space. After plenty of repetition with this and other work, over time she can’t help but Recall her math facts.
Again, a Catholic or Christian Montessori school teacher could achieve the same cognitive aims when it comes to some true and empirically verifiable fact, such as the product of six times four, but, sadly, when it comes to religious claims, Recall is necessarily the highest level a child can ever attain.
This is to be expected when the truth of a claim is dubious. After all, the less valid a claim, the harder its adherents will defend it against critical inquiry. This is because the aims of accessing multiple domains to study a religious doctrine become dangerous to the upholding of the doctrine, as they necessarily result in the conclusion that the doctrine cannot be true.
Imagine, for example, a child exploring the resurrection of Jesus with an acute attention to detail, to take just one benefit of learning across multiple cognitive domains. Which inconsistency do you imagine would derail his or her acceptance of a man rising from the dead first: the fact that there is no contemporaneous non-Christian historic evidence that such an event took place, the fact that no one has ever risen from the dead, the inconsistencies in the gospel’s not-eyewitness accounts of this supposed resurrection, or the fact that the only information we have about this alleged historical event comes from a 2,000 year-old collection of word-of-mouth stories told by believers that has been written down by anonymous authors and translated, retranslated, and interpolated by countless anonymous illiterate scribes over the millennia?
No thinking person, child or adult, inquiring honestly and armed with the tools of critical thinking, could ever reasonably come to the conclusion that any person, let alone Jesus, if he even existed, rose from the dead.
Yet the nun or priest running the Catholic Montessori classroom will insist that it is true; the only way she or he will be able to get an inquisitive child to believe it is to shut down critical inquiry and just make him memorize it.
No responsible educator worth his salt would ever spoon-feed a child any fact, let alone a fact that wasn’t, in fact, a fact.
In point of fact, a large part of the problem here, setting aside for a moment the requirement of rote memorization, is the insistence on the part of said nun or priest that the claim she or he wants the child to commit to memory is the infallible truth.
On what basis does Sister Mary-Catherine or Father O’Malley stake the truth of this resurrection claim? Lacking as it is in evidentiary support, and devoid of any sound or valid arguments to support it, the only way to accept the unlikely claim that a man rose from the dead is to defer to a long chain of authority figures, some of whom are, alarmingly, impossible to verify even exist.
At the far end of the chain is the unseen, unverified god who is claimed to have “revealed” the resurrection to the other links in the chain: the Popes, Bishops, Cardinals, Priests, etc., etc., who have passed the disputable claim along through the ages.
The chain then ends with Sister Mary-Catherine standing before the child, getting him to recite that a man rose from the dead as though it is the truth, as though such a thing were even possible, verifiable, or even logically consistent, and insisting that the child believe it purely on the grounds of her authority—which, it should be emphasized, is one of the only ways a child could accept such a claim.
A responsible educator would never yank a child’s chain in this way.
For the secular Montessori educator, the facts of reality are the only authority. Six times four does not equal twenty-four because the educator said so, or because 2,000 years ago someone wrote it down in a book.
Six times four is twenty four because if you take six things four times, you will get twenty four things. And this is true whether this educator calls him- or herself a Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu. It is true whether the educator and child are in a religious classroom, a secular classroom, or on Mars.
Furthermore, the secular educator leads the child to discover these facts of reality for him or herself, distancing himself even further from a position of authority.
Of course, in certain fields of inquiry that educators and children alike access, people can rightly claim authority. Scientists, musicians, doctors, mathematicians, artists, athletes, and others who have achieved accolades in their field can certainly be relied upon to make reliable assertions about the universe.
The difference, however, between Sister Mary-Catherine referring to the Bible and the secular educator referring to a paper by Einstein, is that people like Einstein gain their authority from empirically verifiable truths about reality.
Einstein’s outlandish (at the time) claim that spacetime is physical and that gravity results from its curvature is true because anyone, layperson and scientist alike, can observe the bending of light around a massive object and verify that it is so.
It took Sir Arthur Eddington sailing out to a remote island armed with a camera and going up against the worst weather possible to confirm Einstein’s theory. Einstein’s ideas are being confirmed even today. We now have photographs of black holes. We have detected gravitational waves.
By contrast, when Isreal first became a nation, it took all her government’s resources and all of her best archaeologists to scour the Sinai peninsula for any evidence, even the most minute shred of it, to confirm the accounts in the Bible, and they found nothing. The Bible’s stories and accounts continue to yield not a shred of evidence. 2,000 years and still no evidence that anyone has ever risen from the dead.
Because they are so far-fetched, religious claims must necessarily rely on the coercive techniques of authority. Whereas, verifiable reality, not an invisible sky man who allegedly wrote a book, nor his child-molesting minions, gives Einstein his authority.
Unlike religious figures, then, authorities who make claims that can be tested, verified, and empirically shown to correspond to reality, therefore, are the only real authorities, and are therefore the only authorities to whom the secular educator can refer a child in good conscience.
JUST THE FACTS, FATHER
Moreover, the problem of religious educators drawing on their false sense of authority to make children memorize doctrine compounds when we consider that many of the “facts” they feed to their flock are erroneous, unverifiable, or downright false.
Tragically, around 45% of the American public believe that the earth is less than 6,000 years old. Father O’Malley, standing before his class of children, is likely among them. He will tell his children that the book of Genesis in the Bible is true. The earth was created in six days, he’ll say—though the Bible contradicts itself on that point within the first page—and that following the lineage of patriarchs from Adam all the way to Jesus, we will discover that the age of the earth is about 6,000 years old.
Except that we have no good evidence to show that any of that is true. We have an old book, well, a collection of 66 old books, that says it’s all true. That ought to be sufficient evidence, right? Well, if writings in an old book can be considered good evidence, then Valhalla, or Zeus, or Brahmin existed also. Writing something in a book doesn’t make it true.
If we use scientific methodology and observable evidence instead of an old book to discover the actual age of the earth, we will see that it comes out to be 4.543 billion years old. Father O'Malley wouldn’t even have to reinvent the wheel to discover this fact. He could put down his old book and find out the real age of the earth by doing a cursory Google search. So why would Father O’Malley represent information dishonestly to his children?
A secular educator, if he wanted to practice good ethics, would never do such a thing. What’s more, a secular educator wouldn’t even broach the topic until a curious child came to him and asked the question, “How old is the earth?” Then, he will refer the inquisitive child to his classroom library of factual books, the contents of which have been empirically verified, corroborated, and passed peer review—a process that all scientific claims must go through before they can be gifted the title “fact.” Once the child explores in that book, he may even make connections and discoveries beyond the age of the earth, such as the ages of the other planets, or how the earth was formed. Left on his own to explore, the child will likely stop listening to Father O’Malley and find his own way through this wondrous universe.
THE INVISIBLE DRAGON IN THE CLASSROOM
A colleague of mine dreams of opening a Catholic Montessori school. One afternoon while a group of us were sitting around a table, she told us all about a material on her classroom shelf: a miniature altar, with a tiny cup for pretend wine, and a tiny plastic wafer. With excitement in her voice, she told us how the children in her class bring the little altar, cup, and wafer to a rug and perform the eucharist ritual, the one that is supposed to transform the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Then they put their hands together and say a prayer to the Christian god.
"Isn’t it precious?” she intoned to all of us.
The answer: of course not. Of the many things wrong with this scenario, the most glaring has to be the layers of make-believe going on. In a real church, the priest and all the parishoners are already pretending that the eucharist ritual does anything. They pretend that the wine in the goblet becomes a man’s blood and that the wafer becomes part of his body. (Which part, one is compelled, gigglingly, to wonder.) And pretend they must, because submitting the wine and wafer to rational scrutiny before and after the ritual will certainly show that neither magically transforms into a person’s body or blood, no matter how hard one believes.
And then, of course, there is the obvious fact that we have no evidence of a god. So to whom are these young children being taught to pray when they put their hands together and look piously up toward the ceiling? Observed with the unbiased eye of a scientist, as Dr. Montessori would have us do, we see that the children are really only learning to talk to themselves.
Yet, Sister Mary-Catherine teaches the child the eucharist ritual and the existence of the Christian god as if they are facts about reality. Being that these “facts”, however, are unfalsifiable, they cannot be said to be facts.
A claim that is falsifiable can be shown to be false. If I claimed, as my colleague has claimed, for example, that a grotto in France contains water that has healing powers, all you would need to do to falsify my claim is to think of a statement or conduct an experiment that would show my claim to be false. One way to do this would be to bring a cancer-afflicted person to said grotto, have him drink the water, and note down whether his cancer goes away.
My colleague, however, would protest. She would say the lake has healing powers, but it can’t cure cancer. Well, then, we might rejoinder, what does it mean for this water to have healing powers if it can’t cure the mother of all modern diseases? Can the water regrow a lost limb? No. Can the water cure a headache? No.
When pressed in this way, my colleague moves her claim incrementally backward until the grotto, at first possessing magical powers of healing, now only makes one “feel good.” When asked what would be the difference, then, between walking into a cool lake on a hot day and ingesting the water in this grotto, she burst straight out the corner in which she’d painted herself to again assert, with greater conviction, that the water has healing powers. Her justification for this claim? That the water has been “blessed.”
An inquisitive person, rubbing her hands together in anticipation of the opportunity to ask another question, would be right to then ask, what does it mean for something to be “blessed?” Suppose a priest were to take two identical bowls of water into a chapel and lock the door shut, so that no one could see what he was doing. Now suppose that while inside the closed chapel the priest were to bless one of the bowls of water. When the priest then emerges from the chapel with the two bowls, how could anyone tell which one was blessed?
Does the blessing change the chemical composition of the water? Does it make the water taste differently? In what tangible way could we measure the difference between “blessed” water and regular water? If we were to say that the water was “tap” water, or “mineral” water, or “tonic” water, we could easily differentiate between the three types of water. Surely we could do the same for water that is blessed? Unfortunately, we can’t.
This claim, then, that the water is blessed, having no way to show that it’s false, is unfalsifiable, and therefore does not warrant our acceptance that it’s true.
A responsible, secular educator, first and foremost, would not begin with a claim, let alone an unfalsifiable one. The most a secular educator would say about the eucharist wine and wafer would be that Catholics believe they become the blood and body of their god. That Catholics believe it, we can establish, is a demonstrable, falsifiable fact. (Not counting, of course, the many parishoners and clergy in Catholic communities who don’t believe any of it and are just going with the flow out of duty, peer pressure, or fear.)
On the question of whether the wine and wafer actually become the blood and body of a person, a secular educator might lead the children in an experiment and leave it up to them to discover the answer. They might, for instance, go on a Going-out to a church and bring back to school a sample of the holy water. They could then place a bottle of the holy water next to a bottle of normal spring water. Using certain chemicals, they could compare both waters’ ph values and chemical composition.
If they found that the two were the same, they could safely conclude, not necessarily that the holy water isn’t holy, but that, at the very least, its chemical makeup is no different than normal water, and we would therefore have no reason to believe that the water is holy.
To be charitable, sampling one bottle of holy water would only show that that particular bottle of holy water is no different from normal water. It would say nothing about holy water in general. Perhaps the priest made a wrong gesture during the “blessing,” or maybe his mind wandered during the crucial incantation. One would have to sample every single drop of holy water in every corner of the world to prove that holy water wasn’t real, right? Wrong.
Science and scientific inquiry works partially on induction. Since we have never experienced real holy water, that is, we have never been able by scientific means to determine the difference between holy water and normal water, it is reasonable for us to conclude that the claim that water is holy doesn’t, erm, hold water.
Besides, it isn’t our responsibility to prove that water is not holy. The responsibility lies with the person who claims holy water is real to present us with real holy water to support his or her claim.
At any rate, the children may or may not come to the conclusion that holy water isn’t real. The point is that the educator has led them through the process of asking questions about the world and testing and verifying results. (Although, I would argue that children who are thinking critically conducting such an experiment wouldn’t help but come to the right conclusion.)
Moreover, the entire enterprise might lead to a discussion about what it means to say water is “holy.” A secular educator would be happy to engage in this discussion and provoke the children toward exploring these questions. After all, if there is no difference between water that it holy and water that is not holy, then the concept of holy water is meaningless. But the responsible educator would leave it to the children to reach this conclusion themselves.
THE NEVER-ENDING STORY
The human experience abounds in stories. Telling stories is one thing that religious and secular educators have in common. The difference, of course, is that the stories of religious educators, at least the ones that pertain to their religion, have no evidenciary support. In other words, they can’t be shown to be true.
Take, for instance, the story of the Isrealites’ flight from Egypt. Father O’Malley may gather a group of children to instruct them in this tale. In doing so, he may tell the children the whole familiar story: how the Hebrews were trapped in Egypt as slaves, and how Jehovah, their god, allowed them to escape by sending plagues and murdering all of the first-born Egyptian children. He might, if he wanted to seem progressive, celebrate with his children the Jewish holiday of Passover, which is a celebration of the murder of the Egyptian children.
Father O’Malley will then tell the children about how the Isrealites trekked across the desert to the Red Sea—led by a cloud of smoke and a pillar of fire, no less—whereupon Moses parted the waters so they could cross, only to close the sea up again and drown the pursuing Egyptian armies. He will tell all of this with all the reverence that can be expected of a man who believes clouds of smoke and pillars of fire can lead people places, and that a body of water can be magically cleft in two.
What Father O’Malley will leave out, however, is that none of that has ever been established to have happened. The Egyptians, who were meticulous record keepers and who left behind many catalogs of their trades dealings with other cultures, and who, to be sure, kept slaves, never once mentioned having a host of Hebrew slaves. Nothing in Egyptian literature mentions a single plague, or the unusual dropping dead of all of its first born children in one evening.
You would think that millions of people walking on foot across the desert would have dropped a few things, or left some evidence of their travels: a campsite, the odd sandal, or a bit of cloth. And if an entire army was swallowed up in the Red Sea, one would expect archaologitsts to discover a treasure trove of Egyptian artifacts at the bottom of said sea. As of yet, for the past 2,000 years, archeologists have found nothing.
In fact, as I mentioned earlier, in the mid-20th century, when Israel became a nation, they set about gathering a team of their best archaeologists to scour the Arabian Peninsula and other areas of Biblical interest for evidence left behind from the characters in the Biblical narratives. They found not a single chariot wheel, not a scarab necklace, nothing.
If, then, Israel’s own team of crack archaologists have found no evidence that even one iota of the Exodus narrative ever happened, then what right does Father O’Malley have to deliver the tale to children as if it were fact? In what other profession, save for the arts, perhaps, are fictional narratives passed off as fact? Certainly not in education.
The secular educator also tells fanciful stories. Consider the Montessori Story of the Coming of Life. In that story, the educator tells the children about what happened after the earth formed and settled into a beautiful pearl. The rains came and started to break down the rocks, which crumbled and deposited lots of toxins into the seas, filling them up and shrinking them.
To remedy this, a very heroic creature came upon the scene in the form of a tiny blob of jelly. This tiny blob of jelly liked to eat the toxins in the sea, and so it started eating and eating, making more of its kind, eventually joining up with other blobs of jelly to help out the cleanup process.
These blobs of jelly started to clump together and specialize, so that one decided to function as the part that eats the toxins, the other digests, the other moves, and so on. These little blobs became the first multicellular life. After a time, these multicellular blobs floated to the top of the water and discovered that they liked a certain gas in the air and they liked to feel the warm sunlight. So, when the tide came, they drifted out to the very edge of the water, and when the tide receded, they stayed put on the land, soaking up the sun and drinking in that delicious gas. Those creatures were the first plants.
The story goes on like this, tracing the development animals, from fish, to amphibians, to reptiles, mammals, birds, and, finally, humans. At the end of the story, when humans finally appear, the secular Montessori educator will say that it was as if the earth was preparing itself for the human being’s arrival, with soft grass for their feet, stores of minerals in the cellar, and lots of fertile land for them to grow food.
Of course, both the Exodus narrative and the Story of the Coming of Life contain fanciful bits. It’s as obvious to any thinking person that a floating pillar of fire can’t lead anyone anywhere as it is that a tiny blob of jelly can’t like something, or have any kind of agency. The difference lies in the truth value of the stories in general.
I once told the Coming of Life story to a group of parents at a school in Germany. One of the parents, a biologist, was aghast after hearing the story and accused me of lying to children. “The blob of jelly didn’t just ‘appear’,” she protested, “And it didn’t decide to specialize or decide to do anything.” She had a point.
But where the Coming of Life story plays fast and loose with the truth, it does so deliberately to appeal to the charactistics of the child at the elementary stage of development, what Montessori theory calls the “second plane” of development. When children think of the blob of jelly as a “hero”, it feeds their need for hero worship. Thinking of the blobs of jelly getting together to specialize appeals to the children’s herd instinct. Giving the little characters in the story agency allows the child to think of them as characters in a narrative, and therefore feel gratitude toward them. The framing of the story helps draw the child toward a deep understanding of its contents.
Aside from the manner of telling the story, everything about the Coming of Life story is demonstrably factual. The story outlines, albeit in a fanciful child-friendly way, the actual process of the development of life on our planet. All of the events in the story correspond to our current scientific model of evolution by natural selection. The current scientific model of evolution is, by every standard of evidence across multiple disciplines, an established fact.
The Exodus story, on the other hand, simply did not happen. No evidence from archaeology, geneaology, or any related field, has been found to support the truth of the story. To teach the events of the Exodus story as though it were real history then, is to teach a lie.
We might excuse Father O’Malley for teaching the Exodus story if he were to introduce it as an allegory, or as a metaphorical story, in the same way a secular educator might introduce the Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. That would be fine. But as soon as Father O’Malley asserts that the story is fact, he is misrepresenting reality, and this is something an ethical educator must never do.
In short, responsible educators teach real, demonstrable facts. If they need to dress up those facts in a manner that appeals to the characteristics of the children in their charge, so be it, but they must never present erroneous or non-facts as though they are facts. To do so would be to violate educational ethics.
MAGICALLY FALLACIOUS
Religious educators will reply that they don’t need evidence to support thier religious beliefs, for they arrive at religious “truths” through faith. But is faith a reliable way to get to what’s true? If you truly believed with all your heart that the pen that you’re holding in your hand will float in the air after you let go of it, would that make it so?
You can probably think of many instances in which faith—the belief in something without evidence—not only doesn’t lead to truth, but actually leads to contradictory conclusions. Muslims, for example, believe that theirs is the true god, while Christians believe Muslims are wrong about that. Muslims, in turn, believe Christians are wrong. Both can’t be right, and yet both claim to have arrived at the truth through “faith.” Faith in this case, as in many other cases, has led to a contradiction.
Religion abounds with this kind of poor thinking, called since Aristotilian times “fallacious.” A fallacy, in logic, and in life, is an error in thinking in which a conclusion doesn’t follow from a premise that attempts to buttress it. Suppose, for example, a friend were to tell you that the prophet of his religion split the moon in half because for thousands of years his ancestors believed that to be the case. Would the fact that your friend’s ancestors believed the moon was split in half make it a fact? Clearly it would not.
Because fallacies are so prevalent in human discourse, they have been given formal names. Your friend justifying his belief that the moon is made of green cheese because his ancestors believed it commits a fallacy called ad populum. Put simply, this is a fallacy because the number of people who believe a claim has no bearing on whether the claim is true.
It turns out that all religious claims are based on fallacies, and every fallacy has been used to justify religious claims. One example should serve to illustrate my point.
Why should you accept the claim that Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, was visited alone in a cave by the Angel Gabriel? A devout Muslim might tell you because it is written in the Quaran. But something written in a book doesn’t make it true. In appealing to his book, which he believes is holy, to assert the truth of his claim, your Muslim friend is committing the fallacy of appealing to authority. Why should his book have any authority? And even if his book did have authority, would that make every claim in the book true? As the leader of Germany, Hitler had plenty of authority. Are the claims in Mein Kampf therefore true?
Well, your Muslim friend might then say that 8 billion Muslims believe it, and so it must be true. But this would again be an appeal to numbers, or ad populum. Thousands of Icelanders have begun to again worship the norse god Thor. Does that make Thor real?
Have you ever heard a religious person say, “Well you can’t prove it isn’t true, so it must be true.” This is also a fallacy. Here, your Muslim friend shifts the burden of proof. It isn’t up to you do disprove his claim, it’s up to him to support his claim with positive evidence. By assigning you the task of disproving his claim, he is de facto asserting that his belief is justified until you show that it isn’t. Not only is his belief not justified, but discourse works in exactly the opposite manner.
In a court of law, for example, it is never the defence’s job to show that the defendant is innocent. Rather the prosecution must make a case, with compelling evidence and good arguments, that the defendant is guilty. The jury, voting not-guilty, is telling the prosecution that he has not made his case. Your Muslim friend thinks that Muhammed is guilty of having been spoken to while alone in a cave by the Angel Gabriel. He must make his case if he wants you, the jury, to accept it.
One of the most common errors in thinking committed by the religous is called special pleading. A Christian creationist might, for example, tell you that the universe could not have been created from “nothing” because everything in the universe has a cause, and so the universe must have a cause. He will then leap straight from “everything in the universe has a cause” to that cause being his god.
But if “everything” has a cause, you rejoinder, then surely god must have a cause too. Here, the Christian makes an exception for his god by saying his god is eternal and uncaused. I’m sure you see the error here. “Everything” means everything that exists, and if god exists, then he falls under the set of all things. If the Christian wants to claim god as an exception, he must justify why god is the exception, and then explain how he knows that.
There are two additional fallacies built into this claim, however. The first is called a composition/division fallacy. Even is we grant that “everything in the universe has a cause”, it doesn’t follow that the universe itself must have a cause. The parts of a totality needn’t necessarily contain the same properties as a totality itself. If I told you that because this brick is small and shaped like a rectangular prism it means that the great wall of china is also small and shaped like a prism, you would rightly have me committed.
Finally, by playing fast and loose with the meaning of the word “universe” your Christian friend commits a fallacy of equivocation. It’s clear what he means when he says everything in the universe must have a cause, but how his god fits into that set is unclear. To counter your claim that even his god must have a cause because he is something in the universe, the Christian will equivocate and say that god is not part of the “universe”, but outside of it. So, does the universe refer to everything in our local bubble of space and time, or does it refer to everything that exists period? The Christian’s definition will shift depending on how he wants to justify his claim.
From all this you can see that religous educators, in teaching children that religious doctrines are factual, are actually teaching children erroneous ways of thinking. Reliance on faulty thinking in the form of logical fallacies produces erroneous or contradictory conclusions and results in poor reasoning. Is this how children should navigate the world?
Worse, in many other aspects of life, a religious educator probably goes about her life in a perfectly reasonable manner. I’m sure on her way to school Sister Mary-Catherine looks both ways before stepping on the gas when a traffic light turns green. Not relying on the traffic light as a sole authority, she, reasonably, looks for evidence that no cars are about to plow into her. Oddly enough, when she gets safely through the intersection, she perhaps thanks Jesus.
A secular educator fosters, encourages, and celebrates, not inhibits, a child’s critical thinking skills.
THE MORAL LOW GROUND
It is harmful enough that the claims of religious educators are not verifiably true, but it compounds the harm when their false claims, from women being unequal to men, to homosexuals deserving to die, to endorsing slavery, to injunctions to murder unbelievers, are at their core, immoral.
In Rudolf Steiner schools, better known as Waldorf schools, for example, the teachers are trained in a religion called anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is a Chrisitan mystical religion that, among other crackpot notions, holds to reincarnation. According to the beliefs of their founder, Rudolph “Boom-boom” Steiner, people who lead immoral, depraved lives in their previous life reincarnate in their subsequent life with brown skin. Guess the color of the skin of people who in their previous life led perfect, pure lives.
If this patent racism isn’t sinister enough, Waldorf educators tell countless lies to the children in their charge. In one of the more egregious examples of their dishonesty, in lieu of a factual response to children’s questions about how mechanical things work, like photocopiers or Television sets or automobiles, Waldorf educators declare that it’s all done by a little gnome. (This before sweeping away further questions.)
The reason for the little gnome? Well, according to anthroposophist beliefs, worldy things are inhabited by an Atlantian—yes, as in, the lost city—demon called Ahriman. When children interact with modern things, they could become possessed by Ahriman, and so Waldorf educators must protect the children from this demon. Telling them that gnomes inhabit modern technology is a way of guarding children against being possessed.
But the real sinister motivation behind the gnome is that too much knowledge is harmful to children. According to their doctrinal beliefs, if a child gains a certain kind of knowledge at a certain “stage of their development,” their “soul” can be irreparably harmed. If one could compile a list of immoral actions, surely obfuscating knowledge from children because an old Christian mystic believed that modern technology is haunted by demons would top the list.
In Waldorf schools, anthroposophists not only lie to the children about gnomes and demons, they also prevent them from using certain colors. In the early grades, for example, children are forbidden from using the color black. Why? A Waldorf teacher will dishonestly claim that black is forbidden because it is a harsh, undesirable color. But the real reason black is forbidden has more to do with the aforementioned racism and demons.
Put in a more positive way, anthroposophists encourage children to use or be exposed to certain colors. Walk into a Steiner school and you’ll see the walls painted solid colors. Why? Because the colors are supposed to help the children’s “spirits” or “souls” develop. Without defining or even establishing the existence of spirits or souls, one can immediately see how justifying the use of color in this way has the immoral consequence of piling falsehood on top of falsehood.
Anthroposiphists also teach children to reject modern medicine and psychiatry, to embrace astrology, and to believe in wood sprites and other kinds of folk spirits. The lying continues. Immorality pervades religious thought.
Secular educators also may have to present children with immoral goings on, especially in presenting lessons in history.
History is full of atrocities perpetrated by human beings against one another, both for religious and non-religious reasons. But where immorality presents itself in, say, a study of World War 2, a responsible educator will provoke discussion among the children and ask them if they can determine the morality of immoral acts in history.
Such discussion would include a consideration of the needs, desires, and beliefs of both sides of an issue, and would most certainly not include a blanket statement that such and such an action is right or wrong because “God says so." Rather, it would be rife with questions about what makes such an action wrong, if, indeed, the children deem it wrong.
Critical inquiry can lead to deep conversations even among very young children about what constitutes immoral or moral behavior. Making such judgements doesn’t come from on high in a secular, ethical classroom. It results from conclusions children reach after thoroughly and as impartially as possible exploring the issue.
It’s unfortunate that in today’s post-Enlightenment world, where African Christian mystics murder young girls for being witches, where American Christian Evangelicals scheme to turn the U.S. into a white-supremacist Christian nation, where Catholic child-rapist priests gain protection from the criminal Catholic Church by being shuffled around from diocese to diocese, where a teacher gets beheaded in Paris for the crime of encouraging critical thinking in his students by showing a picture of the “prophet” (cough, cough) Mohammed, and where the word “antisemitism” gets wielded by Isreal as a shield from criticism of their brutal attacks on Palestinians, who themselves lay claim to the land they live on by some “divine decree,” religion still manages to cling white-knuckled to the perception of holding the moral high ground.
It has become taboo to criticize such atrocities perpetrated in the name of religion, and, as a way of protecting precious belief systems from harm, all too often religion is offered refuge in the niggling benefits that it engenders. Could not alcoholics recover from their addiction without recourse to silly beliefs? Could not, and do not secular individuals give to charity, feed and clothe the poor? Is it not possible for secular educators to teach their children benevolent ways to behave without underpinning the good actions with false beliefs?
It calls to mind the challenge issued by journalist and atheist activist Christopher Hitchens: name one moral action carried out by a believer that a non-believer cannot do. I bet you can’t. No one has yet been able to. As a corollary, name one horrible action carried out in the name of religion, that a secular person would never do, and before I get to the end of this sentence you will already have thought of dozens. Genital mutilation, witch burning, slavery, disenfranchising and covering up women, shielding predator priests are exclusively the domain of the religious.
Religious educators, as a consequence, at the very least, must either gloss over, marginalize, or somehow justify these evils in order to maintain the level of cognitive dissonance necessary not to break down and weep over how much their pet beliefs have poisoned the world. They, in turn, pass this cognitive dissonance onto their students.
The secular educator, on the other hand, in providing future generations with valuable critical thinking skills, inadvertently, or perhaps mindfully, acts to engender activism in today’s youth, thereby arming current generations with tools to fight such heinous acts, and future generations to avoid committing them.
I give the reader credit in being able to discern which educator teaches from the moral high ground.
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
It’s unfortunate that religious educators charge themselves with the task of working with children, since, thanks to the patriarchal roots of religious ideas, it is children in religious doctrines, sadly, who suffer most. Bible believers are told to rejoice in dashing babies against rocks. All throughout the Christian and Jewish holy book children are murdered, sacrificed, ripped from their mother’s wombs, and more. Never forget that the punishment prescribed by the “good book” for children who mouth off to their parents is the death penalty.
Indeed, for all the hemming and hawing that religious adherents do about the rights and sanctity of life before we are born, they haven’t a care for us once we pop out of our mothers’ wombs.
Rather, Christian educators teach children that they are wretched, depraved sinners who, through no fault of their own, were "born into sin.” To add insult to injury, the poor children must, in order to shake off the generations old curse that the Christian god is supposed to have laid upon them for a crime a woman (a woman!) committed and that he failed to prevent 2,000 years ago—not that any of that ever happened—supplicate themselves to a celestial mob boss or suffer eternal punishment in an impending afterlife.
If that is not enough psychological torture, the religious deny adolescent children access to reproductive care and tell them that every sexual urge that their bodies naturally cry out for and crave is a grave sin, and that they must abstain from sexual activity in order to please their imaginary god. The rotten fruits from this poisoned tree speak for themselves in the appalling statistics of child sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy rates in the more religious states in the country where I was born.
It the secular world, educators and others, who are crying out for sex education in schools, condom distribution in Africa, and access for adolescents to reproductive care. The secular world knows, indeed, the date shows, that information and prevention, not abstinence, are the best remedies for teen pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
In Catholic churches, children are left alone with celibate older men who have a track record of sexually abusing children, and told these men have ultimate authority from the creator of the universe, leaving these men all the power structure they need to abuse as they please, knowing that they will not be punished, but rather they will just be given a new post in a different location. If this sounds ridiculous, recall that 1,000 children suffered molestation at the hands of over 300 predator priests in Philadelphia alone. (This is not to say that the number of victims is even important. One molested child is a tragedy.)
You might immediately want to rebut that molestation and child abuse happens in secular communities as well. But you would be half right. The fact is, according to the Abel Harlow study (https://religionnews.com/2014/01/09/startling-statistics/) child sexual abuse is more prevalent in “faith” communities. A startling (though not surprising) 93% of sexual abusers identify as religious. “Other studies show that sexual abusers within faith communities have more victims and access to younger victims. With these kind of statistics, one wonders why we let religious educators around children at all.
By contrast, can you imagine, should a secular educator molest a child, that this person would just be given another job at a different school, only to have his crimes swept under the rug, which is exactly what happens to sexual offenders of a religious stripe? Never. A secular offender would be prosecuted to the full extent of the secular law, have his name put on a registry, be compelled to announce his offense to every house along his block, and more. The secular world takes steps to prevent crime, not justify it.
In cases where this does not happen, in cases where a secular person has been shuffled around—and if this author is overlooking a particular case, he invites the reader to comment below—this author will be the first to speak out against the atrocity in question, not to hand-wave the crime away and say, “That person is no real secular educator.” In the secular world, to the best of our ability, we bring crimes to justice in the here and now, not in some proposed afterlife.
Then again, there is no doctrine in “secularity” that commands people to murder, to enslave, to mutilate children’s genitals—-and suck out the blood using the cleric’s mouth—-to stone homosexuals, or to condemn children to death. In fact, there is no “secular” doctrine at all. Any secular educator who perpetrates a crime against a child truly is acting alone. And a sympathetic, responsible secular person would support bringing that person to justice, rehabilitating him, and making sure he would never be allowed to teach children again. Would that the same could be said of the religious.
In a broader sense, the secular educator doesn’t bring children down. She builds children up. In secular Montessori schools, we feel a reverence for children and we communicate to children that they are anything but helpless, wretched individuals. Rather, they are capable, knowledgable, and able to guide their own education and pursue their interests to better the world, this world, the one world we know exists.
Let us never forget the unfortunate Native American children in Canada who have been unearthed in mass graves, murdered by their Catholic caretakers in “Indian Boarding Schools.” About 357 of these houses of horror were run by Christian denominations and staffed by clerical murderers who, between the years 1860 and 1978 murdered more than 1,000 children, at one school alone.
That we trust our children to religious educators at all, given these statistics, boggles the mind.
The author makes no apology, incidentally, to his religious colleagues and friends who don’t condone such atrocities. Those among the religious moderates who take a stand against evils committed by their religious counterparts in the name of their religion deserve little sympathy. In fact, if they could dispense with blowing hot air for a moment, perhaps they could also answer to these charges.
At the very least, they must explain, for one thing, why they alone have the correct interpretation of the injunctions in their holy books, which are the same books used by the abusers and murderers among their ranks, and, for another, how they resolve the “true Scotsman” fallacy that their head-in-the-sand finger-pointing invariably forces them to commit.
After all, what evidence does a moderate, peace-loving Christian have to substantiate his view of the doctrines over the witch-burning, child-murdering zealot? Both covet the same book. Both believe said book is the unerring word of the creator of the universe, and both sorely lack evidence for their beliefs. How is an outsider to tell which is the “true Christian?”
It has been said before, and I emphasize it here: at the very least, moderate Christians provide cover for extremist Christians by legitimizing not only the horrible beliefs and doctrines of their holy books, but by supporting unsubstantiated belief and lack of critical thinking, and, worse yet, by placing money in the tithe baskets in support of their criminal organizations. This same goes for adherents to Jewish and Muslim faiths alike.
Should my religious educator friends—or former friends by the end of this article— protest that religion is not harmful for children, then let me hereby throw the gauntlet down and herby challenge any religious educator who may be reading this—and you’re welcome to post your rebuttals in the comments below—to allow me to come into your classroom and read any passage I like from your holy book of choice. How many of you would permit me to read the story of Jepthah, who allows god to murder his daughter in exchange for victory in battle, or the centurion who asks Jesus to heal his child sex slave—not free him, mind, but heal him. Or the prostitute whom Levite cuts into pieces and sends to the other tribes of Israel as punishment for…wait for it…being the victim of gang rape. Or how about the injunctions in the Quaran to “cast terror into the hearts of the [unbelievers]; strike them; bend their necks (Quaran 9.5)? What dish from the putrid buffet of horrors shall I read aloud to your indoctrinated children?
Let ye, oh religious educator, permit me to read this stuff to your children, or forever hold your peace.
In contrast to the harm done to children by religious educators, secular educators do actual good by children. In the first place, they foster in children a love of the truth, which arms children against abuses, and not just the egregious ones mentioned above.
Even lying to children is tantamount to child abuse of some form. Telling children an eternal sky daddy watches over them at all times and will punish them in a lake of fire for not believing unbelievable things, indoctrinating children with false beliefs, forming in them self-hatred engendered by telling them they are wretched and worthless, cannot be considered anything but abuse. And if children don’t believe your wicked assertions, in spite of your having no evidence to back up said assertions, you say there is something wrong with them is victim-blaming of the most insidious kind.
Secular educators help children to develop their skills. They encourage children to seek flow and optimal experience in good, fulfilling, personality-constructing work in a beautiful environment and in peaceful collaboration with others.
Secular teachers teach children not that they are low and beneath some creator god that they as meager humans could never understand, but that the world is knowable, that they have power to understand it. They can find their own answers. This leads to the desire in children to improve the world, not simply sit back and let it die because of some unproven god’s “will.”
Secular educators empower children with a sense of self; they give children a sense that they can make a valuable contribution to the world. Children in secular schools take pleasure in learning, because the things they are learning are true and can be shown to be true. Children in secular schools suffer zero cognitive dissonance. Not only that, but children in secular schools are taught not only to value the truth, but how to seek it out.
If religious “education" is child abuse, then secular education is child liberation.
LAST WORDS, THE FINAL NAIL IN SANTA’S COFFIN
None of this is to say we should avoid teaching religion in secular schools. In spite of its evils, religion is prevalent in all we do as educators.
Religious paintings permeate the subject of art, religious people made strides in science—demonstrably in spite of their religious beliefs—religious music is the staple of the Western, African, and Native American musical traditions, religions are a staple of every human civilization. Not that any of this has any bearing on whether religion is true. Religion is simply integral to the human experience.
It may surprise you to hear that this author supports teaching religion in schools. Every classroom should break out the History Question Charts and discuss the beliefs of different civilizations. Children should learn about Aztecs sacrificing humans, about Buddhist Kamikaze pilots ramming their planes into boats, about Christians leading crusades against Muslims, and on and on.
The difference, of course, is that religion, all religions should be taught, and no one religion should be taught to be the “true” religion—setting aside the fact that “true religion” is an oxymoron. Advocating for one religion over any other would be tantamount to indoctrination.
In learning about all religions, children learn that religion is purely a mythological construct, a byproduct of human evolution, and nothing more. They learn that religion arose from the need for humans to believe in a higher power so as to explain what they didn’t understand. When lighting struck a preshistoric bush, those early humans ascribed the phenomenon to a god. As we learned about how lighting works, we dropped the belief in Thor.
Likely, human need to believe stems from our evolutionary ancestors’ desire to survive. A superstitious human walking by a bush 250,000 years ago and hearing a rustling in the bush might immediately think there was a lion in the bush and run. Whether a lion was in the bush or not, that human would survive to reproduce. Whereas, the more studious human, who investigated the rustling in search of an explanation would get eaten by the lion. Thus, superstitious, fearful people survived to pass on their genes to us. Hence: religion.
None of this is to say religious people are stupid or fearful. This author wants to be absolutely clear that he has nothing against religious people. Religious beliefs and their propagation are the targets of this article.
People can be religious if they want to. But when it comes to educating children, they must leave their religion at the door. Religion has no place in education. Children will always reach the correct conclusion if given the tools to observe reality in an unbiased manner, with a mind toward questioning everything rather than making up answers.
It’s no more imperative for a person to teach the tenants of their religion as it is for this author to teach the children Dungeons & Dragons.
In other words, offering children a healthy exposure to all beliefs ensures that they don’t pick just one, or take just one in particular to be true. The philosopher Daniel Dennett says it best in his book Breaking the Spell: children should be taught about all religions and customs from all human civilizations at all times. Because an informed public is the hallmark of democratic education.
As the setting sun drew its orange-pink shades over the dimming day, I found myself on the verge of sleep, lulled by the sound of the wheels and the slow rocking of the bus, when I was startled awake by Christian and his friends arguing in the seat in front of me. Curious, I poked my head in to ask what was up.
“Mr. Michael,” Christian gasped, “Santa Claus totally can’t be real.” “No?” “No way. Listen, even if he spent only five minutes at each house, in a 24-hour period that would only be about 250 houses. There are way more houses than that in Paris alone!”
As he scrambled to get the words out, his friends scribbled figures on napkins, trying to do the math. They looked up from their figures, laughing, giddy with the excitement that comes from discovering the truth, likely relieved to no longer be suffering from cognitive dissonance.
These children used math to come to the truth. They used their own skills of logic, reasoning, and simple long division to uncover the lie that the jolly fat man brings them presents. “It doesn’t matter, though. Santa Claus is still a fun story,” Christian reassured me. Cue the heartfelt rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” echoing throughout the bus.
Indeed, if nothing else, religions tell stories. There is nothing wrong with stories. Stories teach us things, stories keep us in line, stories help explain the world, serve to entertain us, or coerce us into certain behaviors. Secular educators can also tell stories, and for the same purposes. The harm comes when horrific religious stories are properted to be true.
In the end, we come back to the titular question of this article: what place does religion have in education?
The ethical, responsible educator can only answer the following. As information, as a mere historical comparative survey, as an antidote to a child’s indoctrination into any one particular religion, the teaching of religion, as mythology, as a human construct, as the byproduct of human evolution, holds an important place.
For helping the child to discover what’s true about the world, for helping her to gain critical thinking skills, for helping her to learn self-actualization and eschew appeals to authority over appeals to evidence, as a means to avoid faulty fallacious thinking, as a means toward fostering in them morality, and as a means to stave off abuse, the answer should be clear: in education, religion holds no place whatsoever.
Works cited for the claims in this article are available upon request.
This article is dedicated in loving memory to Samuel Paty, an educator whom I did not know personally. Mr. Paty was beheaded in Paris in October 2020 at the hands of Islamists for the crime of teaching critical thinking. May the physical stuff that made up Mr. Paty live on as it dissipates back into the universe, and may the beliefs of the Islamists who killed him die out forever at the hands of other responsible secular educators everywhere. Rest in peace, Mr. Paty.