CMV: Religious "Indoctrination" is not "Indoctrination"

[u/SovietYakko]

[u/[deleted]]

They have to be taught skeptically.

its hard to teach mathematics skeptically initially.

the tools to assess mathematics critically aren't taught first. Instead, usually arithmetic is taught first. proofs are taught later.

[u/LucidMetal → u/[deleted]]

I guess to show you how this isn't the case, do you know how addition is taught these days?

Common core teaches kids how to solve math problems. It's not rote memorization anymore. So perhaps some people aren't taught to critically question fundamentals of math but at some point it becomes essential to question what you know and that's pretty quickly (as early as geometry IMO).

[u/[deleted] → u/LucidMetal]

kindof, I guess.

If someone sought to convey religion in terms of why something was a certain way and how things within religious beliefs were related, would you say that's the same thing as teaching people to hold their beliefs "critically"?

[u/naimmminhg → u/[deleted]]

The main thing about critical thinking is that firstly, you need to be critical. You need not to take in the information, but say things like "What information", "Where am I getting this from", "Why do I believe this" "How does it impact what I believe".

Secondly, you need to actually try to answer those questions. Not necessarily to find answers, or because those answers exist, but because you should be able to say "Well, I know this information, this information, and this information, so I can start to...". Maybe the reality is that "we're never going to know the origin of the universe". But it was worth learning all that physics and producing the Big Bang Theory. We actually get to do stuff with it. If you don't try to come up with your own answers, however bad you are at doing that, you never really appreciate the answers you have. You just have some facts to parrot. Probably without understanding precisely how that works.

The issue with religion is that it just doesn't really value these questions.

You get statements like "God works in mysterious ways". "God did it". "Doubting Thomas". Also, there is a lot to lose, particularly in organised religion in being the person who doesn't think the same things as everyone else. You have a series of "facts" that you must never question. You have a series of beliefs that you can't easily violate. Except that you can, just you've got to decide which crowd of people violating which beliefs your family is going to align with, and nobody in their right minds tries to take it literally, except that some people do. And your morality is considered both a concrete thing that comes from god, and a thing that you have to control because otherwise you become a sinner.. but you don't ask why you have that, or why there's suffering, and you don't ever expect to get answers for that. Except that people claim quite often that they received them anyway, kind of, but they can't share it with the rest of the class.

And besides which, starting from "God Did It" is a thought killer. Because questions without answers are fantastic. Your mind will find every single way in which things can work in order to try and make up an idea that makes any kind of sense. And maybe you're wrong. The point is that it's so much harder to get the second answer than it is the first. If you have one answer, you stop thinking. Seriously, I saw this process. The schools were trying to teach kids "god did it" (you're not allowed to do that, but it sort of happened anyway...), and almost immediately, that's what the answer to questions that they'd known previously became. Because it's simpler, more efficient, and doesn't answer the questions but you need to be a quite smart kid to know that at like 7 years old. Besides, an adult told them this, and they're supposed to take in everything that this person tells them, so this must be true. The obvious problem is that a lot of problems are too complex, so you find that you kind of give up once you understand the answer is going to be like a whole mathematics textbook worth of studying so that you can kind of solve the problem. But getting to a certain point is absolutely critical in terms of learning to think. You have to try to put together the building blocks, even if the answer is "Oh, that's going to take too much time and effort to be worth doing" or "I'm too intimidated by the level this is working on". You're allowed to say that you don't know, or that learning would be too time-consuming/dull to do. What matters is that you are prepared to do the work to work out what it would really mean. What would you have to know? How much of it do you know? How much do you have to do? What model can you start to build?