Discussion Group Report

"Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Not always true, says Nicholas Humphrey in the Journal of Social Research, Vol. 65. "Words can hurt people indirectly by inciting others to hurt them: a crusade preached, racist propaganda from the Nazis, malevolent gossip from a rival.... They can hurt people, not so indirectly, by inciting them to take actions that harm themselves: the lies of a false prophet, the blackmail of a bully, the flattery of a seducer.... And words can hurt directly, too: the lash of a malicious tongue, the feared message carried by a telegram, the spiteful onslaught that makes the hearer beg his tormentor say no more." Words have a unique power to hurt.

Should we be campaigning for the rights of human beings to be protected from verbal oppression and manipulation? No, says Humphrey; but what about moral and religious education, especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed--even expected--to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong?

Children, he argues, have a right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas--no matter who these people are. And parents have no God-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.

"In short they have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon..."

On the positive side, children also "have a right to be succored by the truth. And we as a society have a duty to provide it. Therefore we should feel as much obliged to pass on to our children the best scientific and philosophical understanding of the natural world--to teach, for example, the truths of evolution and cosmology, or the methods of rational analysis--as we already feel obliged to feed and shelter them."

How can we have the nerve to argue that the modern scientific view of the world is the only true view there is, when the post-modernists and relativists have taught us that more or less anything can be true in its own way? And even if it is truer, who is to say it's the better one? Isn't it possible that particular individuals would be better served by one of the not-so-true worldviews? Might not the more traditional way of thinking actually work better for them? Do we really want everyone living in a dreary scientific monoculture? Don't we want pluralism and cultural diversity? And what about other people's rights, not just children's. Don't parents have their own rights, too, as parents?

Look around close to home. We ourselves live in a society where most adults, not just a few crazies, subscribe to a whole variety of weird and nonsensical beliefs that, in one way or another, they shamelessly impose upon their children. The problem 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 around the sun once a year. More than half do not accept that human beings have evolved from animal ancestors. While we should be careful about relying too much on the results of surveys without examining the methodology, including the wording of questions used in them, there are a number of surveys that show evidence of a great deal of scientific illiteracy in the population.

There are small, but significant, communities where not only are superstition and ignorance firmly entrenched, but where this goes hand-in-hand with the imposition of repressive regimes of social and interpersonal conduct--in relation to hygiene, diet, dress, sex, gender roles, marriage arrangements, etc. Examples are Amish Christians, Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Muslims...and radical New Agers, which are alike in providing an intellectual and cultural dungeon for those who live among them. A mother who believes that holding a crystal to her head is the best cure for depression is hardly likely to withhold such a matter from her offspring. Anthropologist Donald Kraybill, who made a close study of an Amish community in Pennsylvania, writes, "Groups threatened by cultural extinction must indoctrinate their offspring if they want to preserve their unique heritage."

"All sects that are serious about their own survival do indeed make every attempt to flood the child's mind with their own propaganda, and to deny the child access to any alternative viewpoints," states Humphrey. In the United States this kind of restricted education has continually received the blessing of the law. Parents have the legal right to educate their children at home, and nearly one million families do. But many more who wish to limit what their children learn rely on the thousands of sectarian schools that are permitted to function subject to only minimal state supervision. A U.S. court recently recognized that "the whole purpose of such a school is to foster the development of their children's minds in a religious environment" and therefore that the school should be allowed to teach all subjects "in its own way," which meant, as it happened, presenting all subjects only from a biblical point of view, and requiring all teachers, supervisors, and assistants to agree with the church's doctrinal position.