Over the last twenty years, we have heard a lot about the danger of religious ideology. What is often missing in the conversation is the fact that secularist ideology is equally dangerous. In 1997, secularist Nicholas Humphrey delivered the Oxford Amnesty Lecture which he titled “What shall we tell the children?” (Published in Social Research, 65 (1998), 777-805.) In the lecture, Humphrey warns against allowing parents to teach their children religious ideology:
“I am talking about moral and religious education. And 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, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas – no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence 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, children 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.”
I have questions. So many questions.
For starters I wonder, who decides what qualifies as “nonsense”?
And once we’ve decided what qualifies as nonsense, how will the state protect this right? By imprisoning parents who dare to deviate from the state-enforced definition?
And what if I think that vision of the good society itself is dangerous, delusional, draconian, fascistic nonsense?
Finally, do Humphrey’s children have a right not to have their minds addled by his nonsense?
