I am from Queensland and while I was in primary (public) school we had religious classes for about an hour each week. Almost everyone in my class thought it was a joke, but we went along with it mainly because the guy teaching the class was genuinely nice and we didn’t want to offend him (he was also an amputee).

        DV82XL said:

And indeed this is exactly what has happened. As I wrote up thread there was a

However the argument that this can be somehow balanced out by allowing religion a role in this process is short-sighted to the extreme. First, one group of demagogues won’t neutralize another under the best of circumstances. More importantly though is that at a fundamental level religion too has no use for a questioning population with a good grounding in dialectics, making their program little more that the other side of the same coin.

Agreed. Frankly, the best solution is probably to do classes in logical fallacies and propaganda techniques (examples can be taken from some high school classes taught today – my thoughts on the “universally evil male and universally victimized female” meme I was force-fed by multiple teachers do not bear repeating in polite company), with social indoctrination *explicitly* left in the hands of the parents.

        Matthew said:

And, of course, there is the other side of the coin. If you give the state complete power over education, you have the spectacle of children being indoctrinated into whatever philosophy is favoured by the government the day or even just the educational establishment.

And indeed this is exactly what has happened. As I wrote up thread there was a well considered plan to temper public education with conditioning that would produce a pliant, and obedient workforce, modeled after the Prussian system all over the world, in fact it was the impetus for public education to being with.

Consider the following:

” A lower middle class which has received secondary or even university education without being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and the National Socialist Party in Germany. The demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was generated out of this proletariat’s exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self-improvement were not sufficient.”

–Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History

In the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves any mystery dissipates. School is a conflict pitting the needs of the social machinery against the needs of the human spirit.

However the argument that this can be somehow balanced out by allowing religion a role in this process is short-sighted to the extreme. First, one group of demagogues won’t neutralize another under the best of circumstances. More importantly though is that at a fundamental level religion too has no use for a questioning population with a good grounding in dialectics, making their program little more that the other side of the same coin.

        drbuzz0 said:

Much as I dislike parents indoctrinating their children with religion, I don’t think it can or should be stopped.

That really tramples parental rights when you start talking about telling parents that they can’t tell their children that there is a god and read the bible as well.

If parents can teach their children to pray, then they can pay someone else to do that.

It really gets to the point of tyranny when you pry into homes and private institutions to verify that children are not told there is a god.

And, of course, there is the other side of the coin. If you give the state complete power over education, you have the spectacle of children being indoctrinated into whatever philosophy is favoured by the government the day or even just the educational establishment.

        DV82XL said:

The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.

I guess that is some of the goal as it stands, but I again would go back to something that I have said before: With government, there rarely, if ever is a single unified goal. The school system is administered at the national, regional and local level by a combination of elected officials, appointees, administrators and so on. No doubt there are some who do indeed intend to create an educational enviornment which will aid in developing young minds. There are a few who did want that, but after spending long enough in the system, gave up on it. There are others who want to indoctrinate students and some who want to push a given agenda. A hodgepodge of policies, commonly designed by committee.

My experience with the public educational system exposed me to a number of concepts which were obviously full of compromise. A few others which were clearly a vestige of a age past and just not removed and others that were fairly descent.

I can give a couple of examples. The New York Regence Board (the governing body for New York State schools) had a concept that they wanted all schools to implement which was to have something called a “preformance prompt” which was a plan for integrating classes in a way that would make the subjects more unified.

Anyway, the idea was actually very good, in principle, but it was very obvious that it had been an issue of “design by committee” where the descent concept got watered down, cut back and compromised to the point that it didn’t really do anything useful and became a burden to fulfill the requirement, as opposed to an opportunity. The school didn’t commit much to it and just did a half-assed job on it because they had to do it.

I saw this all the time. Concepts like a health class – good in principle. High school students really would benefit from learning the facts about things like STD’s and safe sex, the issues of drug use and social problems it causes and so on. Of course, when it came down to it, it was a waste of 45 minutes. It was a class that was spent watching film strips from the 1970’s and “learning” about drugs from laughable material not much better than “Refer Madness” with a huge focus on pot and how it makes your head explode and kills everyone within a 75 foot radius. Of course, only limited info on things like sexual hygene.

Now, we all know why this is the case. It’s a political committee thing or someone trying to avoid getting sued or voted out. So anything like condoms and birth control is basically out. (it was actually mentioned and talked about, but only briefly and usually indirectly) They can’t even mention abortion or anything even indirectly related to that one. The official state line on drug policy is that pot is the biggest single problem.

Then another example I can think of would be gym class. Again, in principle, given the state of health these days, it would be a good concept to have physical education. Yet, when implemented, it turns out to be a lot of wasted time standing around with the jocks whacking the dweebs with dodgeballs.

Good intentions, I would think, but completely devoid of much useful after making its way through the paperwork and committees.

Where is everything else? The other subject are folded into these three and taught as extensions. For example mathematics has a grammar in counting and definitions; a logic in its operations; and a rhetoric in proofs. You can subdivide almost every subject that way.

Presenting them this way helps create a very rational and analytical mind, which is why it was the norm for over a thousand years. why is it not any more? The great H. L. Mencken, wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else.

Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system in the West is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern. The Germans designed a system of indoctrination that would supply their factories with workers and the army with solders, preconditioned to expect other to do their thinking for them. This was not lost on those that fought Germany during the last half of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th. This was the model that was used to build the public schooling system everywhere.

I like the idea of teaching scientific methodology. It’s obviously not taught enough.

I don’t know how long he was seeing her. I suspect that he started before the divorce (which would not have been that big a deal, because they were already basically separated and on their own.) I don’t know how long. I don’t especially want to know. I don’t ask. She is actually a fairly nice woman who I like just fine, but I know why my father kept it low profile (it may not have even been serious to begin with). He did not want us to feel his affections were a matter of competition and he did not want us to think it was “another woman” or to hate her for it. It really wasn’t anyway, but it would have been hard if he had moved right in because after the divorce I know I felt like I wanted to spend more time with both parents and make sure that they still had a good relationship with me.

I think it would also be a little disrespectful to move onto someone else so immediately and would be embarrassing to my mother. I would say both my parents still have enough respect for each-other not to do something tactless for the sake of it. Neither of them will speak ill of the other in front of us. Although, I often get the impression that they have to bite their tongue. It would be a difficult thing to put the offspring between sides like that.

If he had been a homosexual? It would have been hard, because I think I would have been left so confused. Did he just marry my mom because he felt obligated to marry a woman? Did he really love her but he later realized he preferred men more than women? Did he always know he was gay, consciously or was it one of those self-denial things? Had he stuck it out for the sake of us? It was confusing as is. It would be a lot to bite off at once.

        leg said:

This is why I disagree with DVX in that I think religions SHOULD get special privileges because religions are a counter to government. I agree with him that religions should not get automatic respect – they need to earn it..

Arguably there was a time when the Church provided a political balance to offset the power of the State, but those days are long past. There are more than enough organizations that serve as watchdogs, and action groups that no one class of these need be afforded special privileges, particularly ones that claim contact with the supernatural. And that is exactly what they are; in essence no different in kind to those that think they can see the future in a crystal ball, or the fall of Tarot cards.

Please understand I do not wish to see the dissolution of organized religion, I am not suggesting that people should be told what to believe. In that regard Marxism would be no different than any other militant faith, demanding unquestioned acceptance of its precepts.

What I think is wrong is forced indoctrination of young people which is being done in faith-based schools, as I’m sure many here would have an issue with a school that had students carting about a copy of Das Kapital all day and expected them to work reference to it into all their other studies. This is the fundamental hypocrisy here: the right to catechize kids with one form of superstitious nonsense is defended as fundamental to the workings of a free society, but doing it with another is sedition. I’m sorry you can’t have it both ways.

The other thing that makes me laugh, is that Christian faiths in particular, make a central tenet out of voluntary acceptance of dogma, almost all require that adherents go through some ceremonial affirmation of this. So if the Spirit is going to fill their hearts, why the need for brainwashing beforehand? I don’t recall being told that I had a choice in the matter as I had already been baptized and thus committed.

We have matured to the point where we can have a level playing field in these ideas. It is a violation of our claim that we are for freedom of thought and then defend some (not all) groups’ privilege of cultivating their ideas in children, regardless and without oversight.