As my daughter Joy, currently 8, is growing in understanding as well as curiosity, and as I myself am becoming increasingly aware of the deficiencies in the education that any child in America will receive, whether in a private or a public school, it’s becoming quite clear to me that I should begin to look to supplementing her education, with things that she is unlikely to hear elsewhere, but must know.

The Bible. An atheist teaching the Bible to his children? What on earth!

As much as I’d be happy for our society to be rid of all superstition and myth, the fact is that the Bible and Christianity are an intrinsic part of American culture (though it is waning); she should at least be able to get references to Noah’s Ark, Adam & Eve, etc. Besides that, I think the person most at-risk of falling prey to Evangelical persuasion, is the one who has no preexisting knowledge of the Bible; and given that it’s a virtual certainty that she will encounter attempts at persuasion by Evangelicals, it’s wise to arm her with knowledge.

This past Christmas, some readers may be surprised to discover that I purchased DVDs of Superbook and The Flying House at Amazon for my kids for Christmas. These are Christian Japanese animations from the early 1980s, promoting an interest in the Bible and biblical stories among children. Both series (by the same creators) feature a girl, a boy, a robot, and a professor, and traveling through time to experience (grossly simplified) biblical events. I bought them as much for my wife and I, who’d grown up on them and were feeling the twinge of nostalgia when we purchased them. But I had little fear that brief exposure to a Christian children’s TV series would undo our efforts to promote critical thinking in our children.

Indeed, no worry was warranted, as Superbook actually wound up being a small tool for critical thinking about the Bible, rather than a source of indoctrination. I was gratified to discover that among the stories covered in the first Superbook DVD, is the story of God telling Abraham to kill his son Isaac. How wonderful, when my children then turn to me with the “WTF?” look on their faces, that I am not compelled to explain that God was merely testing Abraham’s absolute obedience to Him, and that Abraham did the right thing by choosing to obey God and murder his son; I can simply shrug my shoulders, return a bit of the “WTF?” look right back at ’em, and tell them why the Bible (as opposed to I) thinks Abraham’s response was just super.

No atheist or anti-Christian indoctrination needed, here. The only difference necessary for installing a healthy skepticism of the Bible in my children, in contrast to the daily Bible readings I was offered as a child, is that I need offer no defense on God’s behalf, to explain away His righteously horrific acts. “Daddy, why did God tell Israel to kill all the children and babies in the city, too (or, in some cases, keep the young virgin women only, and haul ’em away)?” Shrug and give the “WTF?” look. “Daddy, why is humankind being punished for a sin our ancestors committed?” Shrug-and-wtf. “Daddy, why is it justice, rather than blind vengeance, for an innocent person to be given the death sentence, rather than the actual murderer?” Shrug and… you get the picture.

Glory be, and “thank God” for the freedom to not be compelled to pretend things make some strange sort of sense, when in fact they don’t make any at all.

Intelligent Design vs Evolution. Believe it or not, I’m all for teaching Intelligent Design as an alternative viewpoint to Evolution (provided it’s done objectively). Because, despite the fact that it doesn’t even begin to qualify as science, and spends virtually no time at all attempting (and far less succeeding) at actually building a case for Intelligent Design (choosing instead to attempt to tear down Evolution, after which they’d still have to build a case for Intelligent Design), it’s an annoyingly pervasive belief in society, that my children will have to encounter/deal with, and suppressing false, insistent information isn’t nearly so effective as education about it. Besides, nothing demonstrates how ridiculous the arguments from the anti-evolution crowd are, like putting them up next to the mountain of solid evidence for evolution.

(Of course, the people who are vehemently arguing that ID be taught as an alternative “scientific theory” to evolution, have no intention of objectively presenting the arguments from both camps, if history is any indication: instead, they’ll present the arguments for ID (that is, rhetoric), and the arguments they pretend are what evolutionists present, just as they’ve always done. I’m not in favor of that.)

Critical Thinking. Something that was (naturally) quite lacking in my own upbringing, and is critically important to evaluating the truth of all claims, whether they’re made by the Bible, religious institutions, politicians, news media, or history teachers. This is actually, of course, my first priority, but I felt the other two would be more sensationalist interesting placed first. 😉

Among the tools I would like my children to have under their belt, is to be able to detect strawman arguments (as I hinted just above), by simply going and verifying that the claims being argued against, are in fact claims that are being made (and not just ones that have been either set up by the opposition for the purpose of being knocked down, or possibly grossly oversimplified versions of real claims, or actual but decades-outdated claims that no one makes any more). That alone certainly would have saved me a lot of anti-science BS when I was a kid.

Another extremely useful skill, is knowing how to properly handle “statistics” and “studies”, given that such a very large number of claims rest on these, and are built upon them in such a way as to demonstrate a severely poor understanding of how to use them. Checking everything from the reliability of the techniques used to collect the data, to how the presentation of the data is manipulated to sound more significant than it actually is, to deriving a particular conclusion when alternative explanations have not been considered. Understanding the difference between correlation and causality is an especially important and frequently-neglected tool.

History. When we take a day off to celebrate Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, but remain mum on his documented and vicious abuse of the natives to America; when we condemn Cuba for its totalitarian Communist regime, but neglect to mention the role our own despotic presence played, suppressing and squelching any and all power that the elected Cuban president, or autonomy that the nation, possessed; when we gloss over the facts of modern history as it’s being made, by pretending that WMDs was actually a viable reason for invading Iraq, or that it had something to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or that (most importantly) we didn’t completely botch nearly every possible aspect of the war military action; that’s when it’s clear that my child is not going to learn everything she ought to know from government-funded (or private, parent-pandering) academic institutions.

I never liked History/Social Sciences as a kid; I always found it excessively boring. Perhaps because most history texts are scrubbed clean of any of the controversial bits (and therefore, of most of anything that’s interesting). But now, as I’m an adult, and I continually discover the wide disparity between common knowledge and the truth (at least, as apparent by the actual available documentation) about our role throughout history, and indeed our role in the present-day world, I can’t help but find out more about the truth, as I can find it. And naturally, I want my kids to know the real truth (such as is available) as well.

(Such disparities have ever been my downfall: as a fundamentalist Christian, I got into the Harry Potter series of books precisely because there was an obvious disparity between the truth, and the misrepresentations that had become so very widespread in Evangelical Christian circles.)