Helping Children Become Humanists

here is more to humanism than just knowing the history of humanism. Unlike religion, there are no texts to memorize and quote by rote nor do we see any transfer of knowledge.

If we want children to learn about humanism, we have to teach them how to think and use critical thinking skills in every day life. According to Philip E. Johnson, the classic “I know, you don’t, and I’m going to teach you” does not work for esoteric and value laden concepts, such as humanism.

Let’s remember that, as humanist parents, in addition to wanting kids to learn about humanism; we’d like them to become humanists. And that’s a different world. Indoctrination is more or less okay if kids are expected only to remember. But if they are expected to think, indoctrination won‘t do it. Still, becoming and being a thinker and a humanist can be learned, and taught.

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The crucial part of this, of course, is the processing part—moving from experience to analysis to generalizations. The teacher was thus functioning entirely as a facilitator of the learning, not as an expert in electricity, not simply telling the children facts. The source of the content was the kids’ own experiences. That process is inductive reasoning, and the very basis of much of our learning. And the skill of the analysis of one’s own experiences and thus the development of generalizations is transcendent; it can be applied to many other issues in addition to electricity.

Johnson stated these skills help all of us, not just children, learn to believe the natural, as well as in ourselves, instead of the supernatural, which is what humanism is all about. With this process, taught properly, children will become critical thinkers and humanists without indoctrination.

http://www.goddiscussion.com/76303/helping-children-become-humanists/

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Imagine a world where most people know how to use critical thinking skills, logic and reason. What a wonderful world, indeed.

Camp Quest for your kids. Great place.

http://www.campquest.org/locations/ohio

Not in Ohio, but one of the other locations (there are many). One of the most rewarding experiences in my life.

http://www.criticalthinking.org/


The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators ... They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens.

~ William Graham Sumner, Folkways, 1906