Teach Your Children Well

They're already facing some serious challenges coming their way before all that long, let's teach them the difference between absurdity and reality, the gift of critical thinking.  That's been heavily drummed out of us these past two or more decades and it shows in the mess we've created during that interval.

Dan Arel, in his book "Parenting without God,"  argues that, in a society "ruled by absurd religion and other dogma," critical thinking is more important than ever.

One important thing to teach our children is how to think critically. It is easy to tell them they should, but it is not as easy to teach them how, mainly because we may not be that great at it ourselves.

How many atheists do you know who are anti-GMO or anti-vaccination? We know these can be smart people who took on a position that is full of emotion, misinformation or bad research methods.

...Our children should be using this method every day in all matters of life. With claims from friends, family, parents, and teachers, they should be well prepared to question everyone and everything. Doing this also allows them to become their own person and not simply a carbon copy of what people are telling them to be.

 

Many of us, especially those who grew up in religion, had it engrained that the questioning of claims is frowned upon and God has an exact plan for who we should be. Many never break out of that cycle and allow those they consider authorities to dictate how their lives should be led. The generation we want to raise would be a generation that questions everything, from religion to government and even science.

We often imagine we cannot question science, but the core of scientific research is questioning. That is what peer-review is all about. Theists, especially creationists, often claim we all have faith in science, or call science a religion because we simply accept what scientists say. This could not be further from the truth. However, this is something important we should be teaching our children. The method in which we apply critical thinking to science, the scientific method and the rigorous testing scientific ideas are put through ensures that only sound ideas come out the other end as scientifically valid. All the others are discarded as nonsense or failures.

In Canada, of course, we struggle under a government that abhors critical thinking.  The Harper government is intensely faith based.  It believes in belief and spurns facts and science and demonstrated proofs.  How many Harper supporters do you know who defend their choice on raw belief, on faith in this prime minister?  My experience suggests it's not so much a matter of intellectual dishonesty as it is intellectual laziness that creates a willingness to avoid critical thinking whenever possible.  It's perhaps the intellectual equivalent of reversed polarity.