Many years ago, I heard my colleague Michael Tooley advance the thesis that religious education is a violation of the rights of children. There was a fairly persuasive argument for this, which I took to be something like the following. Children have a natural right to an education of at least some minimum level of quality.
1. You are offering a cartoon version of a religious believer. Quite a lot of them would say that their religious beliefs are consistent with, perhaps based on, rational thinking. Some would argue that it is the atheists who are basing their views on blind faith. I'm not sure the fraction of serious religious believers who engage in rational thought in other context is lower than the fraction of atheists who do — do you have any data on the subject?
2. One basis for your argument is moral principle, another is consequences. My guess is that the consequences of what you propose, even in European countries, would be negative and serious. You don't have the option of enforcing the rule "parents must teach their children truth and not falsehood," which is what you are arguing for, because it requires a mechanism to determine truth. In practice your rule is something like "parents must teach people what the legal authorities believe is truth and not what they believe is falsehood," which strikes me as a very bad policy.
If your four year old child notices you a little upset when you hear that the minimum wage in your state is being raised again, and asks you why you seem annoyed, if you explain its effects on unemployment without saying that there are a minority of economists who think minimum wage laws could be helpful, would this constitute a type of economic indoctrination since there’s no way to have absolute certainty on these issues despite what some Austrian economists would say?
The way you wrote this post, you came off as implying that unless you teach agnosticism to children, this is religious indoctrination. Given Alvin Plantinga, David Bentley Hart, Alexander Pruss and many many others’ arguments for the reasonableness of religion, I doubt few academics who have read them would say that religious belief is utterly irrational even if it may, in the end, be false.
Should a Muslim parent not be able to tell their children, “there is one God and Muhammed is His Prophet,” or a Christian tell their children, “God became human so that humans might become God,” or a Hindu tell their children, “Atman is Brahman” without constantly having to qualify such statements?
Can a parent raise a child based on knowledge they believe they have rather than certainty? We can have no certainty that ethical intuitionism is true, or veganism is true, and yet you think we can have knowledge of such things. Will you have your child participate in your veganism or will you make sure to buy them some factory farmed meat to eat along with their Gardein?
So should parents be arrested for not giving their children to a babysitter but instead taking them to church? Should children’s bibles be prevented from being published? Should parents be arrested for teaching their children how they pray and praying together with them at night? Unless your child is old enough to understand David Bentley Hart and Graham Oppy, parents should just hide the religion they practice from their children so as not to to risk indoctrination and hence, risk being hauled off to jail?
These are the sorts of things that would have to be answered in these Scandinavian countries you think should make these types of laws. Different government officials will feel differently about what constitutes indoctrination, and given the ratchet effect, it seems more likely the list of things that constitute indoctrination will only grow.
If the parents say, “this is what we believe and we could be wrong, but here are some reasons why we think so, and we’re going to pray with you and take you to church to receive the Eucharist with us,” would this count as indoctrination? Orthodox Churches give communion to newborns rather than waiting till later like Catholics. This implies the newborn is part of the Church family. It’s essentially a statement without the newborn’s consent. Would this count as indoctrination for you?
In order for this to be practiced in a country, there would essentially have to be a religious indoctrination assessment department that would require the submission of all new children’s religious literature in the country. It would have to read through each publication and to make sure what is being published is free from indoctrination. It would need the power to edit whatever it saw as indoctrination. How else would such a law be enforced? This isn’t the separation of church and state. The state would take over large swathes of religious life if this were to be strictly enforced.
“Don’t parents have the right to decide what’s best for their children?
No, not if they’re deciding something that is objectively unreasonable. “
For something to be objectively unreasonable means we are able to agree that it is unreasonable. This has problems.
A less hand-wavey approach would take seriously the point about guardianship. Parents have the power to consent for the child except in cases of abuse. What counts as abuse?
One approach would be to settle this adversarially. Persons who consider a child to be abused and who are willing to take custody of the child would sue for custody. Then the arbitrator or jury could decide whether the situation was sufficiently abusive to justify removing the child from the parents and allowing the plaintiff to adopt. Religious education would rarely cross this boundary, I suspect.
This has a decentralized aspect, making the plaintiff take responsibility for solving the problem. It makes everyone involved put skin in the game.
A problem might arise, e.g. if the Catholic Church started suing Muslims, etc. But it still seems better than the alternative.
What distinction does this make? We can try to decide once and for all what counts as abuse, and who must do something about it when it happens, or we can create a process by which we discover what counts as abuse, and who is able and willing to correct it. If no one is able or no one is willing, being able to say what the universe thinks we ought to do hardly matters. It is less a matter of calculating the unique solution than maximizing among maybe imperfect alternatives.
Who is obligated to care for children? Those who have accepted responsibility for them. To whom are they obligated? To whoever has the power to take away their responsibility. When should responsibility be rescinded? When it seems likely to be an improvement from the perspective of the child looking back as an adult. This is necessarily speculative and contentious. There will be circumstances where the answer is obvious, and others where it will be difficult and ambiguous.
It's also worth noting that this particular risk of fundamentalism/fanaticism is primarily a thing in the Abrahamic religions. One can also envision a perennialist religious education, that teaches that every religion is an important aspect of the truth.
Two points:
1. You are offering a cartoon version of a religious believer. Quite a lot of them would say that their religious beliefs are consistent with, perhaps based on, rational thinking. Some would argue that it is the atheists who are basing their views on blind faith. I'm not sure the fraction of serious religious believers who engage in rational thought in other context is lower than the fraction of atheists who do — do you have any data on the subject?
2. One basis for your argument is moral principle, another is consequences. My guess is that the consequences of what you propose, even in European countries, would be negative and serious. You don't have the option of enforcing the rule "parents must teach their children truth and not falsehood," which is what you are arguing for, because it requires a mechanism to determine truth. In practice your rule is something like "parents must teach people what the legal authorities believe is truth and not what they believe is falsehood," which strikes me as a very bad policy.
Do you disagree?
If your four year old child notices you a little upset when you hear that the minimum wage in your state is being raised again, and asks you why you seem annoyed, if you explain its effects on unemployment without saying that there are a minority of economists who think minimum wage laws could be helpful, would this constitute a type of economic indoctrination since there’s no way to have absolute certainty on these issues despite what some Austrian economists would say?
The way you wrote this post, you came off as implying that unless you teach agnosticism to children, this is religious indoctrination. Given Alvin Plantinga, David Bentley Hart, Alexander Pruss and many many others’ arguments for the reasonableness of religion, I doubt few academics who have read them would say that religious belief is utterly irrational even if it may, in the end, be false.
Should a Muslim parent not be able to tell their children, “there is one God and Muhammed is His Prophet,” or a Christian tell their children, “God became human so that humans might become God,” or a Hindu tell their children, “Atman is Brahman” without constantly having to qualify such statements?
Can a parent raise a child based on knowledge they believe they have rather than certainty? We can have no certainty that ethical intuitionism is true, or veganism is true, and yet you think we can have knowledge of such things. Will you have your child participate in your veganism or will you make sure to buy them some factory farmed meat to eat along with their Gardein?
So should parents be arrested for not giving their children to a babysitter but instead taking them to church? Should children’s bibles be prevented from being published? Should parents be arrested for teaching their children how they pray and praying together with them at night? Unless your child is old enough to understand David Bentley Hart and Graham Oppy, parents should just hide the religion they practice from their children so as not to to risk indoctrination and hence, risk being hauled off to jail?
These are the sorts of things that would have to be answered in these Scandinavian countries you think should make these types of laws. Different government officials will feel differently about what constitutes indoctrination, and given the ratchet effect, it seems more likely the list of things that constitute indoctrination will only grow.
If the parents say, “this is what we believe and we could be wrong, but here are some reasons why we think so, and we’re going to pray with you and take you to church to receive the Eucharist with us,” would this count as indoctrination? Orthodox Churches give communion to newborns rather than waiting till later like Catholics. This implies the newborn is part of the Church family. It’s essentially a statement without the newborn’s consent. Would this count as indoctrination for you?
In order for this to be practiced in a country, there would essentially have to be a religious indoctrination assessment department that would require the submission of all new children’s religious literature in the country. It would have to read through each publication and to make sure what is being published is free from indoctrination. It would need the power to edit whatever it saw as indoctrination. How else would such a law be enforced? This isn’t the separation of church and state. The state would take over large swathes of religious life if this were to be strictly enforced.
“Don’t parents have the right to decide what’s best for their children?
No, not if they’re deciding something that is objectively unreasonable. “
For something to be objectively unreasonable means we are able to agree that it is unreasonable. This has problems.
A less hand-wavey approach would take seriously the point about guardianship. Parents have the power to consent for the child except in cases of abuse. What counts as abuse?
One approach would be to settle this adversarially. Persons who consider a child to be abused and who are willing to take custody of the child would sue for custody. Then the arbitrator or jury could decide whether the situation was sufficiently abusive to justify removing the child from the parents and allowing the plaintiff to adopt. Religious education would rarely cross this boundary, I suspect.
This has a decentralized aspect, making the plaintiff take responsibility for solving the problem. It makes everyone involved put skin in the game.
A problem might arise, e.g. if the Catholic Church started suing Muslims, etc. But it still seems better than the alternative.
What distinction does this make? We can try to decide once and for all what counts as abuse, and who must do something about it when it happens, or we can create a process by which we discover what counts as abuse, and who is able and willing to correct it. If no one is able or no one is willing, being able to say what the universe thinks we ought to do hardly matters. It is less a matter of calculating the unique solution than maximizing among maybe imperfect alternatives.
Who is obligated to care for children? Those who have accepted responsibility for them. To whom are they obligated? To whoever has the power to take away their responsibility. When should responsibility be rescinded? When it seems likely to be an improvement from the perspective of the child looking back as an adult. This is necessarily speculative and contentious. There will be circumstances where the answer is obvious, and others where it will be difficult and ambiguous.
It's also worth noting that this particular risk of fundamentalism/fanaticism is primarily a thing in the Abrahamic religions. One can also envision a perennialist religious education, that teaches that every religion is an important aspect of the truth.
Would we end up with disclaimers along the lines of "Not religious dogma, do your own research"?