A school is a noisy place on a Friday at morning tea time. Among the shrieks, screams, laughter and pounding feet all around me as I wandered in my hi-viz Duty jacket, I still heard a horrified whisper.
“Don’t swear,” said the little boy. “If you swear even once, you’ll go to jail when you’re grown up!”
The kid he was talking to looked concerned, but said, “My dad sometimes says swearwords, and he’s not in jail.”
“No, it’s only for kids,” said the first kid. “Kids that swear go to jail.”
“The bible lady said it today,” the boys explained when I questioned them. “If kids ever swear, they will definitely end up in jail. And then go to hell. It’s true! She told us. It’s in the bible.”
Well. When I was seven – a time of spending Sunday mornings in church before necking slices of sickly iced bun from the bakery – I swore. I went into my wardrobe, closed the door, and sat down under the hanging clothes. “Fuck,” I said, into the warm space between my knees, six times. Then I quickly said sorry six times. I was trying it out; experimenting. I knew that the god at the church we went to forgave everybody if they asked.
But my mouth didn’t seem any fouler, dirtier or pottier. It tasted the same as before. So I ratcheted up the curses. I really went for it, with a bit of shit, and a shitfuck. I even whispered the C word! It dawned on me to be concerned by the idea that different swear words needed different levels of apology. “I’m so sorry, God,” I said out loud a few times. But then, I considered the differences between swearwords. Was one perhaps worth only half of another? I heard my mother swear occasionally, quietly, when alarmed or surprised, but never the F-word, and definitely not the C-word. But I’d begun to lose count. Finally, I decided to say sorry one hundred times, to show God how sorry I was.
But I wasn’t really sorry. And I knew it.
I told a friend the next day at school that I’d said heaps of swearwords alone in the wardrobe. “God doesn’t like swearwords!” She exclaimed. I told her how I’d said sorry heaps of times, though; over one hundred. That was a lot of sorries – she had to have a think about that. “That’s probably OK then,” she said. “I bet Jesus will forgive you. Maybe not God though.”
I started praying to Jesus to talk to his dad for me (God definitely seemed meaner than Jesus). I was pretty sure I was now going to hell, because I also coveted then stole a skeleton-shaped rubber in a plastic coffin from my next door neighbour (sorry, Carla!). I tried to find out more about what hell was like. Nobody could tell me the actual location. And the more I learned about geology, the surer I was that there was no hell on or in the earth. Some people explained that the soul went somewhere else to go to hell. And hell was extremely painful. I was puzzled because I knew already that brains and nerves provided pain. How could a soul feel pain? Emotional torture; extreme mental anguish, they said as I became older. Nobody really knew any details, but gave vague assurances that it was really, really bad. They believed it, and told me that so should I.
These days, though, in the words of Ricky Gervais, cheerful hawker of anti-nonsense, I find hell hilarious, and thank god for making me an atheist.
It’s a little less hilarious when it’s still being peddled to little kids. In December there was an article in the New Zealand Herald about religion in our – supposedly – secular schools. The article was about a father who was very dismayed by his daughter being put in the “naughty corner” (I’m guessing the time out space) after being opted out of religious education by her parents. The school was supposed to have an alternative programme for those whose families opted out.
Opting out is actually quite rare, as the people who run the religious things in schools usually call them stuff like “Morals and Values,” which sounds great! Who doesn’t love morals and values?
So, last year, around half of all schools in Aotearoa closed for thirty minutes each week to allow the churches (who recently described schools as an “under-utilised mission field”) to come in and do their thing at the kids.
As a school teacher, I experienced this, and I protested. I didn’t want to even supervise the classes (the untrained volunteer religious people need help with crowd control), so instead taught critical thinking to the kids whose families had opted them out. (It was great fun, incidentally.)
The students who went to religious class would come back to us buzzing with what they had “learned.”
“Did you know that Adam was the first person in the world?”
“Did you know that the world is actually only 6,000 years old?”
“Did you know that God makes every single thing happen?”
I have met many, many people who insist that science and religion deserve equal recognition in education.
For a start, which religion do they want to have equal footing with science in schools? Jainism? Islam? Rastafari?
Secondly, science is about things that do not depend on personal opinion to understand as true. Scientific truths – like the melting point of iron at sea level, or the biology of various mammals, et cetera – these are things opinion has no effect on, and they cannot possibly be interpreted differently (normal giraffes will continue to have a 50cm-long tongue and a specific digestive system, no matter what your friend reckons).
Church types work hard to be synonymous with goodness, rightness, and tradition, and as a result, seem to encounter few problems sneaking into schools. You’ll be aware that there is little religious instruction in high schools – they try to get in well before those young people have a chance to think critically about the ideas they are presented with.
Children, unfortunately, believe what we tell them, especially when there’s something in it for them, like presents (Hi Santa! I believe in you, and want a BMX, or just some cash!) or, y’know, everlasting life with minimal hellfire and torture.
Sorry, religious peeps. Schools are, these days, inappropriate places for belief. Everything is evidence-based. We teach strategies, skills, information-seeking, questioning, clear reasons why. We help children learn how to learn in different ways. “Because we said so” – the answer to most questions in religion – just doesn’t fit anymore.
I have taught basic, solid science in primary schools, even in a year one classroom, and it always goes down a treat. Kids at any age can find out for themselves that, for example, air is something-not-nothing, and can be compressed and burned. With simple questioning, hypothesising, and insanely fun experimenting, they get new knowledge. The understanding coming from these experiences is deep, profound, and empowering.
Yet there is so much to get done, and such a focus on literacy, numeracy, and the arts, that many primary schools seem not to even have much time for science or technology.
Nek minnit, for half an hour each week, the bible lady comes in and tells them that homosexuals are the devil, dinosaurs were put there to test our faith, God created light before he created the sun, and kids who swear will go to jail.
Nobody told me that bit about swearing when I was small, luckily (and I’m not in jail yet). But I suspected all along that if the god that everybody spoke about was so great, he would be a bit nicer than he evidently was. Questioning the appropriate adults only got me in trouble.
And questioning adults still isn’t usual in many communities. Kids whose families religion at them (just try to try to stop me using religion as a verb!) taunt other children about how they are going to hell. They graffiti “I love JESUS” on school property and their own. Sometimes they fight, attack, hate, lie, steal, but they tick the boxes of belief, acceptance, faith, and sticking to a church-going routine, and take comfort in that.
Like me at seven years old, they can do what they want, then just be “sorry.”
But the kids that do dare to question everything are my favourite thing to watch. They thrive, they bloom, they burn with knowledge; they burst with the confidence it brings.
One six year old girl I taught, questioned by a smarmy teacher on whether she really understood the word she’d just used (“density”) said, bewildered, “It’s comparing how far apart or close together the molecules are. That’s the small parts in everything in the world. Like, air is less dense than water, so that’s why it’s easy to compress gases but hard to compress liquids.” Then she turned to me and whispered, about the teacher, “Doesn’t she know about density? I feel sorry for her!”
Later, her father came to see me at school, warning me that there had been a huge argument about me at home. The girl had told them I didn’t believe in gods. The mother, a deeply religious person, wanted to remove the girl from my class because of this. The father, also a church-going man but a remarkably reasonable one, told me the girl burst into tears. “She’s a good person, and she teaches me about the world,” she’d said.
There was something like evidence there for her. She had learned to learn about the world, and it felt good to know.
Now that that little girl knows about knowing, she will be a difficult one to bullshit, despite religion being smuggled into her life wherever she turns.
But why should kids like her be the exception? Why do we allow this mass brainwashing by church types in places of education – surely more sacred than mere religious addresses – in this day and age?
It is 2013. Humanity has never had so much comprehension at its fingertips. Kids drink up all this knowledge like it’s fresh water, and gasp for more. But the church people come into schools, and literally say knowledge is evil. Look what happened to Adam and Eve when they sought to understand. Don’t, they say. You can’t. Be content with this, they say.
For the first time ever, we are venturing out, out from our tiny spinning rock into the roaring galaxy we live within, and even the sunrise is no longer just a sunrise, but the silent, swift turning of our insignificant planet into a stretched-out sky filled with five hundred billion suns – and it is so marvellous it makes your teeth chatter.
But the church people come into schools, and say no. Don’t. You can’t. We have miracles. Jesus walked on water! There was a burning bush! Be content with this, they say.
And we, teachers and law-makers and politicians and doctors and scientists and engineers and parents and all the rest of us – with no time left for science and technology in the busy primary school schedule, we let them do this. We still close half our schools for half an hour each week, and allow these people in to bring their no, don’t, can’t to New Zealand kids.
It is time we said back to them, with the law, the rage, and the reason in our hands, No. Don’t. You can’t.
Article originally published on Piriahi.
http://piriahi.org/goddamn/