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Odd that this has never come up in the year now, almost, that I’ve been doing this. No one’s ever asked me what I do for a living, what my day job is. I’m a teacher, primarily working as a private tutor for gifted children and those with learning disabilities. I have some other gigs as well, but these days, I primarily think of myself, at least in terms of what I consider to be my “job,” as a teacher. More generally, I think of myself as a scholar and a philosopher and critic of religion, but my job as an educator is very important to me and, I think, an integral part of my Satanic philosophy.
To any who might have stumbled on my work and may be reading this from a more traditional perspective and who might be concerned about the influence that a Satanist might have on young minds, let me say that your concerns are entirely warranted. It is absolutely my intent be as subversive as possible in my teaching with regards to traditional institutions, norms, and values. And I believe that all that I need to do that is to teach children to think for themselves. Indoctrination is completely unnecessary, and in fact I try to avoid anything of the sort. But if this sounds at all radical to you, I’ll note that this philosophy of education has actually been quite popular for the last century or so, and is an integral part of popular teaching philosophies such as Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia.
While I had some excellent teachers during my formative years, I believe that my public school education was lacking overall. I think that that’s true for most people in most parts of the world. In mathematics, for example, I was taught mathematical facts and methods for performing calculations, but never how to think mathematically and to use math to solve problems. As with much of what I consider to have been my true education, those are skills I had to acquire later in life. The specific matter of mathematics education is brilliantly addressed by the math teacher Paul Lockhart in his 2009 book, A Mathematician’s Lament, which is expanded from his 2002 essay of the same name. Quoting here from the essay, Lockhart writes, “If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done — I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soulcrushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.” One might question whether or not the poor education I received in mathematics was better than no education in the matter at all, and on that point I’m torn. I’ll say this: while the foundations in arithmetic that I gained in the early years of my public education have proved useful, everything beyond that has been entirely useless or even counterproductive. The mathematics I use in my daily life — whether for practical purposes or for recreation — are predicated to the furthest extent I can tell either on the basic arithmetic of my elementary school years, or on what I have chosen to learn on my own.
I can think of two areas of thought that are, within public school education, even more destitute than mathematics: philosophy and strategy. Despite the criticality of both towards living a good, productive, and fulfilling life, I received not the slightest hint of education in either. At best, I knew the names of a few philosophers when I graduated high school, though nothing at all of their thought, and nothing of even the most elementary aspects of strategic thinking. For a long time I had assumed that the former field was abstract and irrelevant to my life, and the latter simply a matter of intuition. My life from the point at which I realized how misguided I had been has been a rabid and desperate game of catch-up. Fortunately, I’ve found that I’m able to teach myself far more quickly and effectively than the great majority of my public school teachers.
One of my main influences as an educator, the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, likewise has some major concerns with contemporary education:
We are turning out, as if through a mould, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible.
Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult… instead of awakening the integrated intelligence of the individual, education is encouraging him to conform to a pattern and so is hindering his comprehension of himself as a total process.
Education and the Significance of Life, 1953
We typically think of education as imparting something, putting knowledge into a person’s mind, but this is at odds with the etymology of the word. “To educate” comes to us from the Latin educare, meaning “to draw out.” What is being drawn out is the person being educated, as the result of a process of complexification of the self through the integration of self-knowledge and world-knowledge. Krishnamurti’s take on the purpose of education is that it is “to create human beings who are integrated and therefore intelligent.” As Satanism values intelligence and self-knowledge, I see this as being a properly Satanic undertaking.
In his book Flow, from 1990, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this process as being integral to the growth of the self:
It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.
…Complexity is often thought to have a negative meaning, synonymous with difficulty and confusion. That may be true, but only if we equate it with differentiation alone. Yet complexity also involves a second dimension — the integration of autonomous parts. A complex engine, for instance, not only has many separate components, each performing a different function, but also demonstrates a high sensitivity because each of the components is in touch with all the others. Without integration, a differentiated system would be a confusing mess.
Even the notion of education as imparting is problematic because it implies some standard body of knowledge and wisdom that must necessarily be understood as having certain qualities: goodness, perfection, sufficiency, completeness, and many others. If something so foundational as knowledge is to be standardized, the body of knowledge which is to be so standardized must possess those qualities or else we are necessarily imparting students with flaws and failure. And all of this seems especially unnecessary in a world where unimaginable quantities of information and human knowledge are literally at our fingertips. What students need is not knowledge but rather the ability to evaluate, integrate, and utilize information.
To look at this from another angle, as the sciences have advanced, it has become increasingly difficult and now effectively impossible for anyone to work as a scientific generalist, because the field has become broad enough that there is simply far too much ground for any one person to cover. What was once “natural philosophy” has become physics, biology, chemistry, and so forth, and within physics we have mechanics, biophysics, quantum physics, and many others, and many of those fields have their own sub-fields, and so likewise we have chemists and biologists who are themselves likely very specialized rather than being generalists in their respective fields. Why then do we seem to have this notion that we can and should generalize and standardize education? Certainly some degree of standardization is warranted early on, but to take another example from mathematics education, not everyone needs to learn calculus, trigonometry, or even advanced algebra. What is of primary importance is for students to learn the foundational concepts, to learn to think mathematically and to solve problems, and to be able to teach themselves. More advanced classes should certainly be available to those with a mathematical interest or who are planning on going into fields of work where such mathematics will be of use; for everyone else, it’s a waste of time. Those who have learned how to think mathematically will be able to acquire such skills on their own should they ever become necessary, but for most people, they never will be.
Religion must be a part of our educational curriculum as well, but as with most things, it needs to be handled differently. For one, while there are many good reasons for giving Christianity a particular focus within the educational systems of the West, that focus should not be taken to the exclusion of other religions and systems of thought. As to Christianity, as biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins points out in his 2006 book The God Delusion, the Bible and Christianity have had a monumental impact on our history, culture, and language and should therefore enjoy similar stature within the classroom. I have consistently argued that one cannot understand the modern world without a broad and nuanced understanding of the world’s religions, and where better than the classroom to establish that understanding? I myself received almost nothing by way of the history of Christianity; it emerged periodically when its role in historical events was particularly unavoidable, but it was never the focus. Likely, the administration thought it too controversial a topic to approach in a secular context, even though I’m entirely confident that it would be possible to do so while remaining respectful of religious views on the matter. And what I learned of other religions often just mapped their concepts onto a template of Western religion: Muhammad was the Jesus of Islam, the Buddha was the Jesus of Buddhism, and so on, when Muhammad and the Buddha played very different roles in their respective religions than Jesus played in Christianity.
But while Dawkins argues that a secular education in religion is important, he emphatically argues against religious education as an upbringing within a religious system of thought, even going so far as to make the case that such should be interpreted as a form of child abuse and thus be made illegal. Returning to The God Delusion, Dawkins opens his argument with a quote from his colleague, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey:
Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas — no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.
In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.
This is a difficult problem. I think we can likely agree that inculcating children with absurd worldviews is morally and pragmatically problematic in the extreme, but there are practical and epistemological concerns that make the issue more intractable. Nuance and careful thought are required here, and the approach that Humphrey and Dawkins are taking is clumsy, infantile, ridiculous, and dangerous.
The most obvious problem with this line of thinking is how ridiculously impractical it is. A ban on religious upbringing in the United States, in addition to being blatantly unconstitutional, would be met with outright armed revolt, which I would argue would not be at all unjustified, much as I might disagree with the worldviews of those who would take up arms on this matter. But it would certainly be a very undesirable result for everyone. Even in the more secular parts of Europe, I expect there would be mass protests at such an invasive intrusion into private life.
What concerns me more is that this would require that some government agency be established, or an existing one repurposed, with the job of deciding not only what is true and what isn’t, but as well, how the world and our knowledge of it are to be rightly and legally interpreted. Such a thing would be definitively fascist and Orwellian. In terms of my political alignment, I’m a social democrat, but here I would align with the libertarians in seeing this as a role that should never, under any circumstances, be held by a public institution. Obviously, numerous government agencies have an interest in figuring out what’s true and what isn’t — housing agencies, for example, need to know demographics and habitation rates and housing prices and need to sort that information out from whatever market information the real estate sector might prefer that the government hold to — but this is a different matter from ruling on a body of knowledge that is legally, exclusively, and enforceably to be considered fact by all of society.
One might counter that it is already the job of the Department of Education to make such a pronouncement — after all, they have to know what to teach in public schools. But I would respond that, at least from the standpoint of public education, figuring out what to teach is a pragmatic matter first and foremost (or at least it should be), and significantly distinct in quality and scale from a legal mandate regarding what is allowed to be taught to children in general, by anyone and at any place or time within the legal jurisdiction.
And to me, such an approach, and even the perspective that such an approach would ever be desirable, seems manifestly cowardly, as I believe all censorship to be. As the state of the world attests, we have good reason to be concerned about religious indoctrination, but I believe that the best response to that concern is to face the source of the problem head-on, with courageous and critical public education, rather than trying to hide from the problem and pretend that it doesn’t exist.
There are, after all, very good reasons for believing that religiosity is something intrinsic to human nature. Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell, from 2006, explores religion as a phenomenon that has arisen as a natural byproduct of human evolution. Walter Burkert’s 1972 book Homo Necans focuses on how religion may have emerged early in our ancestry as a result of our transition from prey species to apex predator. While their arguments and conclusions differ, we can find in the informed literature on the matter no viable perspective in which religion is simply a passing trend, and indeed, state efforts to repress religion have historically ended in utter failure. To take a couple examples, both China and Russia have historically repressed religion. Russia seems to have given up the matter as futile; according to a Pew Research Center article entitled “Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe” (2017), religiosity in Russia is on the rise, and given recent pronouncements tying Orthodox religion to Russian nationalism, it seems more that the leadership has decided that religion is something to exploit rather than something to repress. Interpreting religiosity in China is a much more difficult matter, as the primary religious tendencies in that region – Confucianism and what we, for lack of a better appreciation of the nuances are forced to call folk religion — bear little resemblance to Western religion, but more Pew Research studies indicate that, despite the brutal repression of the Uygur Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist minorities, those religions persist. And in the history of Christianity, we can look to the Diocletianic Persecution, in the wake of which Christianity not only failed to be eliminated but actually became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Given even a superficial understanding of human nature and religiosity, none of this should come as any surprise to anyone, and Dawkins and Humphrey have expressed nothing less than a manifest stupidity in not thinking their argument through. I think it’s likely that repression of religious education in the West would create a persecution complex and paradoxically serve to intensify the religious indoctrination of children, in defiance of whatever laws and punishments were to be established against it.
The better approach, I think, would be to make philosophy and philosophy of religion core parts of the public education curriculum. Teach children about different religions, and teach them how to think about religion in general, as well as how to think about philosophical questions. Even this will be met with some resistance, but there remain many influential contemporary philosophers who identify as Christian and who approach philosophy from a Christian perspective, as well as those who approach philosophy from other religious backgrounds, so it cannot be the case that a philosophical education inoculates people against religion. We can only say that religious philosophers are not religious only because they are ignorant of possible alternatives and counterarguments, and if religion is something that can be maintained only through ignorance, it ceases to become something that is at all desirable for human society. I don’t believe that to be the case.
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