Oxford Amnesty Lecture, 1997. Published as Nicholas Humphrey, 1998, “What shall we tell
the children?”, Social Research, 65, 777-805; also as, 1998, “What shall we tell the
children?” in The Values of Science, ed. Wes Williams, pp 58-79, Oxford: Westview Press.


WHAT SHALL WE TELL THE CHILDREN? 1


"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," the proverb goes. And
since, like most proverbs, this one captures at least part of the truth, it makes sense that
Amnesty International should have devoted most of its efforts to protecting people from the
menace of sticks and stones not words. Worrying about words must have seemed something
of a luxury.
Still the proverb, like most proverbs, is also in part obviously false. The fact is that
words can hurt. For a start, they can hurt people indirectly by inciting others to hurt them: a
crusade preached by a pope, racist propaganda from the Nazis, malevolent gossip from a rival.
. . They can hurt people, not so indirectly, by inciting them to take actions that harm
themselves: the lies of a false prophet, the blackmail of a bully, the flattery of a seducer. . .
And words can hurt directly, too: the lash of a malicious tongue, the dreaded message carried
by a telegram, the spiteful onslaught that makes the hearer beg his tormentor say no more.
Sometimes indeed mere words can kill outright. There is a story by Christopher
Cherniak about a deadly "word-virus" that appeared one night on a computer screen.2 It took
the form of a brain-teaser, a riddle, so paradoxical that it fatally twisted the mind of anyone
who heard or read it, making him fall into an irreversible coma. A fiction? Yes, of course. But
a fiction with some horrible parallels in the real world. There have been all too many examples
historically of how words can take possession of a person's mind, destroying his will to live.
Think, for example, of so-called voodoo death. The witch-doctor has merely to cast his spell
of death upon a man and within hours the victim will collapse and die. Or, on a larger and
more dreadful scale, think of the mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana in 1972. The cult leader
Jim Jones had only to plant certain crazed ideas in the heads of his disciples, and at his signal
nine hundred of them willingly drank cyanide.

"Words will never hurt me"? The truth may rather be that words have a unique power
to hurt. And if we were to make an inventory of the man-made causes of human misery, it
would be words, not sticks and stones, that head the list. Even guns and high explosives might
be considered playthings by comparison. Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote in his poem "I": "On the
pavement / of my trampled soul / the soles of madmen / stamp the print of rude, crude,
words."3
. . .
. . .
. . .

I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child
receives at home, where parents are allowed – even expected – to determine for their
children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.
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.

More more, turn to http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/1998WhatShallWeTell.pdf

@huxley
Your posts always remind me of this anecdote by Anthony de Mello =====>


The young disciple was such a prodigy that scholars from everywhere sought his advice and marveled at his learning.

When the governor was looking for an adviser, he came to the Master and said, "Tell me, is it true that the young man knows as much as they say he does?"

"Truth to tell," said the Master wryly, "the fellow reads so much I don't see how he could ever find the time to know anything."

huxley:
In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense.

Nonsense like atheism and secular humanism.

tell them to walk by faith and not by sight