It's the same as the difference between giving a person a meal (instruct them on the specific issue of God existence or indeed lack thereof), and giving them the ability to cook for themselves (teaching them to tackle every ideology that is a dogma, criticize every theory that is proposed, value empirical evidence not authority, etc). In fact the two are so different that one of them is no different from indoctrination.
So while critical thinking, scepticism, freethought, moral relativism, social justice, etc. are philosophies, they are also tools to protect against dogmas. Dogmas like economic ones, e.g., capitalism (there is little empirical evidence for it's base claims), political ones, e.g., communism, libertarianism, (again little empirical evidence for their axioms, that all people are biologically equal (individual differences ALWAYS exist), that all people are morally equal, etc.) and on and on to include religious dogmas, and to include unfalsifiable ideas about other people.
These are important things for children to learn because they protect them from being taken advantage of economically, from endangering their health (homeopathy), from jeopardizing their sanity (spiritual people tend to have a much higher incidence of mental diseases), and most important from being victimized, marginalized, abused (think women's or LGBT's position in the major religions and their abuse by them).
Learning not only to question but how to question is an invaluable gift that every pedagogical paradigm should provide its students.
No comments:
Post a Comment