Religion and children
Encyclopedia
Children usually acquire the religious views of their parent
Parent
A parent is a caretaker of the offspring in their own species. In humans, a parent is of a child . Children can have one or more parents, but they must have two biological parents. Biological parents consist of the male who sired the child and the female who gave birth to the child...

s, though they may also be influenced by others they communicate with such as peers and teachers. Aspects of this subject include rites of passage
Rites of Passage
Rites of Passage is an African American History program sponsored by the Stamford, Connecticut US public schools. The program consists of an extra day of schooling on Saturday for 12 weeks, service projects, and a culminating educational trip to Gambia and Senegal. Gambia and Senegal are the...

, education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

 and child psychology, as well as discussion of the moral
Morality
Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...

 issue of religious education of children.

Rites of passage

Most Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 churches practice infant baptism
Infant baptism
Infant baptism is the practice of baptising infants or young children. In theological discussions, the practice is sometimes referred to as paedobaptism or pedobaptism from the Greek pais meaning "child." The practice is sometimes contrasted with what is called "believer's baptism", or...

 to enter children into the faith. However, some form of Confirmation is then a ritual when the child has reached the age of reason and voluntarily accepts the religion. Ritual Circumcision
Circumcision
Male circumcision is the surgical removal of some or all of the foreskin from the penis. The word "circumcision" comes from Latin and ....

 is used to mark Jewish and Muslim infant males as belonging to the faith. Jewish boys and girls then confirm their belonging at a coming of age ceremony known as the Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah respectively.

Education

A parochial school
Parochial school
A parochial school is a school that provides religious education in addition to conventional education. In a narrower sense, a parochial school is a Christian grammar school or high school which is part of, and run by, a parish.-United Kingdom:...

 (US) or faith school
Faith school
A faith school is a British school teaching a general curriculum but with a particular religious character or has formal links with a religious organisation. It is distinct from an institution mainly or wholly teaching religion and related subjects...

 (UK), is a type of school which engages in religious education
Religious education
In secular usage, religious education is the teaching of a particular religion and its varied aspects —its beliefs, doctrines, rituals, customs, rites, and personal roles...

 in addition to conventional education. Parochial schools may be primary or secondary, and may have state funding but varying amounts of control by a religious organization. In addition there are religious schools which only teach the religion and subsidiary subjects (such as the language of the holy books), typically run on a part time basis separate from normal schooling. Examples are the Christian Sunday school
Sunday school
Sunday school is the generic name for many different types of religious education pursued on Sundays by various denominations.-England:The first Sunday school may have been opened in 1751 in St. Mary's Church, Nottingham. Another early start was made by Hannah Ball, a native of High Wycombe in...

s and the Jewish Hebrew school
Hebrew school
Hebrew school can be either the Jewish equivalent of Sunday school - an educational regimen separate from secular education, focusing on topics of Jewish history and learning the Hebrew language, or a primary, secondary or college level educational institution where some or all of the classes are...

s. Islamic religious schools are known in English by the Arabic loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...

 Madrasah
Madrasah
Madrasah is the Arabic word for any type of educational institution, whether secular or religious...

.

However, religion may have an influence on what goes on in state schools. For example, in the UK the Education Act 1944
Education Act 1944
The Education Act 1944 changed the education system for secondary schools in England and Wales. This Act, commonly named after the Conservative politician R.A...

 introduced the requirement for daily prayers in all state-funded schools, but later acts changed this requirement to a daily "collective act of worship", the School Standards and Framework Act 1998
School Standards and Framework Act 1998
The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 was the major education legislation passed by the incoming Labour government of Tony Blair.This Act:* imposed a limit of 30 on infant class sizes....

 being the most recent. This also requires such acts of worship to be "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character". The term "mainly" means that acts related to other faiths can be carried out providing the majority are Christian.

The creation-evolution controversy
Creation-evolution controversy
The creation–evolution controversy is a recurring cultural, political, and theological dispute about the origins of the Earth, humanity, life, and the universe....

, especially the status of creation and evolution in public education
Creation and evolution in public education
The status of creation and evolution in public education has been the subject of substantial debate in legal, political, and religious circles...

, is a debate over teaching children the origin and evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 of life, mostly in conservative regions of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

In France, children are forbidden from wearing religious symbols at school
French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools
The French law on secularity and conspicuous religious symbols in schools bans wearing conspicuous religious symbols in French public primary and secondary schools...

.

Religious indoctrination of children

Several authors have been critical of religious indoctrination
Indoctrination
Indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology . It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned...

 of children, such as Nicolas Humphrey, Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...

 and Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...

.

Labelling of children as religious

Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...

 has been particularly critical of the unquestioned labeling of children with their parents' beliefs. He describes the caption of a picture in the Independent of a school nativity play, where four year olds playing the Three Wise Men are described as "Shadbreet (a Sikh
Sikh
A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism. It primarily originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of South Asia. The term "Sikh" has its origin in Sanskrit term शिष्य , meaning "disciple, student" or शिक्ष , meaning "instruction"...

), Musharaff (a Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...

) and Adele (a Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

)". He describes the caption as grotesque, and makes his point by asking the reader to imagine the caption reading "Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist)". He suggests there is little controversy over such labeling because of the "weirdly privileged status of religion".

Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...

 suggests saying "child of Christian parents" rather than "Christian child", and hopes that the phrase will also make children aware that belief is not something that is inherited automatically like eye colour; that they do not have to follow in the religious footsteps of their family. He has tried to raise people's consciousness of this matter, and hopes that phrases like 'Christian child', 'Muslim child', or 'atheist child' will "grate like fingernails on a blackboard".

Religion as a by-product of children's attributes

Richard Dawkins proposes that religion is a by-product arising from other features of the human species that are adaptive. One such feature is the tendency of children to "believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you" (Dawkins, 2006, p. 174). He compares children's gullibility with the tendency of moth
Moth
A moth is an insect closely related to the butterfly, both being of the order Lepidoptera. Moths form the majority of this order; there are thought to be 150,000 to 250,000 different species of moth , with thousands of species yet to be described...

s to fly towards a flame, a similar rule of thumb
Rule of thumb
A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination...

. Using distant light from the night sky for navigation works most of the time, but can still fail catastrophically, as happens when they spiral into a nearby flame.

The psychologist Paul Bloom sees it as a by-product of children's instinctive tendency toward a dualistic
Dualism (philosophy of mind)
In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical....

 view of the world, and a predisposition towards creationism
Creationism
Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...

. Deborah Kelemen has also written that children are naturally teleologist
Teleology
A teleology is any philosophical account which holds that final causes exist in nature, meaning that design and purpose analogous to that found in human actions are inherent also in the rest of nature. The word comes from the Greek τέλος, telos; root: τελε-, "end, purpose...

s, assigning a purpose to everything they come across.

See also

  • Abortion and religion
  • Child abuse
    Child abuse
    Child abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...

  • Children's rights
    Children's rights
    Children's rights are the human rights of children with particular attention to the rights of special protection and care afforded to the young, including their right to association with both biological parents, human identity as well as the basic needs for food, universal state-paid education,...

  • Daugherty v. Vanguard
    Daugherty v. Vanguard
    Daugherty v. Vanguard is one of a number of federal cases decided over the past decade in the United States pertaining to the scope of allowable religious expression and/or activities in public schools. In the court’s summary judgment issued in September 2000, U.S...

  • Democratic education
    Democratic education
    Democratic education is a theory of learning and school governance in which students and staff participate freely and equally in a school democracy...

  • Emmanuel Schools Foundation
    Emmanuel Schools Foundation
    The Emmanuel Schools Foundation is a charitable trust which has been involved in education since 1989.ESF sponsored four schools: Emmanuel City Technology College in Gateshead , The King's Academy in Middlesbrough , Trinity Academy in Thorne, Doncaster and Bede Academy in Blyth, Northumberland...

  • Homeschooling
    Homeschooling
    Homeschooling or homeschool is the education of children at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, rather than in other formal settings of public or private school...

  • Indigo children
    Indigo children
    Indigo children is a pseudoscientific label given to children who are claimed to possess special, unusual and/or supernatural traits or abilities. The idea is based on New Age concepts developed in the 1970s by Nancy Ann Tappe...

  • Islam and children
    Islam and children
    The topic of Islam and children includes the rights of children in Islam, children's duties towards their parents, and parent's rights over their children, both biological and foster children. Also discussed are some of the differences regarding rights with respect to different schools of thought.-...

  • Military use of children
    Military use of children
    The military use of children takes three distinct forms: children can take direct part in hostilities , or they can be used in support roles such as porters, spies, messengers, look outs, and sexual slaves; or they can be used for political advantage either as human shields or in...

  • New atheism
    New Atheism
    New Atheism is the name given to a movement among some early-21st-century atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises." New atheists argue that recent...

  • Preacher's kid
    Preacher's kid
    Preacher's kid is a term to refer to a child of a preacher, pastor, deacon, vicar, lay leader, minister or other similar church leader...

  • Religious freedom

External links

  • Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality By John Hartung Skeptic, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1995. Includes the responses of Israeli children to the account of the Battle of Jericho in the Book of Joshua
    Book of Joshua
    The Book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Hebrew Bible and of the Old Testament. Its 24 chapters tell of the entry of the Israelites into Canaan, their conquest and division of the land under the leadership of Joshua, and of serving God in the land....

    .
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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