In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins recognises that children readily adopt the religious beliefs of their parents. Children tend to believe what they are told by their parents without doubting the validity of what they are told. This is why, for a long time, I believed clicking the switch on a certain electrical outlet in my bedroom turned the world upside down. Adults sometimes like to have fun and lie to children.

Dawkins is not worried about lies, but rather beliefs that are not true. Namely religious beliefs. Particularly, the labelling of a child as Christian, Muslim or whatever faith.

When organisations take over the role of parents and deliver beliefs to children, this is a scary thing. But it is only scary if parents are not there to balance those views (hence school are not dangerous). When the opposite happens and parents isolate their children from views they dislike (e.g. pulling them from classes) it may be unhealthy, but it is not dangerous unless the parents are themselves dangerous.

So what if a child’s parents are wrong? What if a child grows up with a set of beliefs which are incorrect and never finds the time to question them? Won’t that harm the individual in some way?

The answer is yes, but the extent depends on the belief. If you’re brought up as a racist, society is there to sort you out. As a criminal, and the cops are there to sort you out. As a greedy capitalist then you will get rewarded or die. As a religious person, then… well there is a whole different argument about what that may or may not do.

What we are doing when we allow parents to teach their kids what they want is to create non-exact clones of themselves. Unless you want to do some Soviet style mind control then that’s what we have to work with and we shouldn’t worry about it. We may think it is a shame that a misinformed parent creates another human with the same incorrect beliefs, but actually it is safer that they do. By creating clones we are forced to convince an adult of out of their incorrect beliefs and into the truth. If we didn’t, our ‘truths’ would not get properly tested. A child’s sponge brain is incapable of doing so adequately.

Let them soak up the knowledge first, then worry about wringing it out later.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 1:04 UTC and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.