Richard Dawkins’ genius for publicity – which can only be rivalled by giants like Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins and Miley Cyrus – has reached tragic proportions. He has turned his fire on Ahmed Mohamed, a 14 year old boy who was arrested for perpetrating a bomb hoax on his school. Ahmed had merely brought a home-made clock to school; many have suspected that his families Islamic faith had more to do with his arrest than any evidence of malice. MIT, NASA, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed outrage that a teenager would be penalised for showing inventiveness, creativity and an interest in science.
President Obama quickly joined that chorus, tweeting: “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great!” But, while he strongly disagrees with Ahmed’s arrest, Richard Dawkins takes exception to praise for the young man’s technical expertise.
If the reassembled components did something more than the original clock, that’s creative. If not, it looks like hoax http://t.co/bBcaWoJpbd
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 20, 2015
It’s fine to disassemble & reassemble a clock. http://t.co/bBcaWoJpbd But don’t claim it’s your INVENTION. https://t.co/fZFF59vV0n
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 20, 2015
This is part of a disturbing pattern of behaviour on Dawkins’ part. First of all, he makes outrageous statements which generate an enormous amount of free advertising on Twitter. That is forgiveable. But second, he makes statements which demonstrate some ignorance about the challenges that teachers face in reaching, motivating and educating youngsters. Quite frankly, any high school teacher would want to encourage the sort of inventiveness that Ahmed exemplified; we are delighted that MIT, FaceBook and the White House will be encouraging teenagers to explore the world of technology and engineering.
No teacher in his or her right mind would then quibble over Ahmed’s claim to have invented the clock. You seize whatever enthusiasm a student generates with both hands and pray that it becomes infectious. But the world of the child seems mysterious to Dawkins. His recent blitzkrieg on fairy tales ended in rapid retreat and capitulation, but he quickly returned to his battle to protect children from their parents, unleashing his fury against an Islington Council which considered removing pork from school menus. Now, many Jewish and Muslim children attend schools in Islington, so bacon and ham might not be the most popular choice in the school canteen. A council spokesperson suggested another difficulty:
Young children, some as young as four-years-old, of different religious and ethnic backgrounds may not know which foods contain pork, or may not realise the importance of avoiding it due to their culture or beliefs.”
But Dawkins believes that it is wrong to appease conservative religious communities with more user-friendly menus. He is not worried about a rising tide of Islamo-facism or Jewish fundamentalism. In Dawkins’s mind, the fate of democracy is connected to his ability to get a jar of honey through airport security; but he would not argue that pork consumption is essential to international security. Rather, he is outraged that someone would label a child “Jewish” or “Muslim”; or, worse, imply that these children have important religious “beliefs”.
How can the “beliefs” of a four-year-old child be “important” to her if she doesn’t even know what her beliefs are?”
Well, perhaps the child loves her parents, values her family and finds it reassuring to belong to a well-defined tradition. Maybe the child actually finds her religious beliefs to be a source of comfort and joy. And why does Dawkins put “beliefs” in inverted commas? Can he seriously deny that children have religious beliefs? It is simply a matter of fact that they assent to the truth value of certain propositions: for example, that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad received a message from an angel. A four year old child cannot critically assess those religious beliefs – but a four year old child is in a poor position to critically assess most of her beliefs, including what she’ll learn in “The Magic of Reality”.
Jesus might well have told his disciples that the faith of a child was as valid as any adults’; for Dawkins this is an thought crime. The kingdom of heaven might be open to children, but secular universities won’t let them in and they cannot vote in a liberal democracy. For Dawkins, there is just something illiberal about Jesus sufferance of little children. Dawkins wants to raise our consciousness, to warn democrats of the injustice of tolerating religious parents.
Religion is the one exception we all make to the rule: don’t label children with the opinions of their parents.”
But, to be brutally honest, I think Dawkins just made that rule up. Let’s call it his “Blank Slate Assumption”. It sounds familiar simply because it is similar to a rule which we do follow: a rule which says “don’t fault children for sharing the opinions of their parents”. It is not dangerous, or even illiberal, to recognise that young children share many beliefs with their parents. However, we should allow that until children are equipped to critically assess their parents’ convictions we cannot hold them responsible for their shared beliefs. To be fair, Dawkins concedes that children can share their parents’ national and cultural affiliations and he accepts that we can label children accordingly. So he allows that it is acceptable to refer to children as Irish or Scottish or British, Romanian or Hungarian, Russian or Ukrainian. However, Dawkins argues that this common practice does not violate the Blank Slate Assumption.
First, some say that labelling a child Muslim, say, or Catholic, is no worse than labelling her French or Swedish. But it’s not a good comparison. Citizenship of a country, whether we like it or not, has legal implications. Your country issues your passport, you are allowed to vote in its elections, you may even be drafted to fight its wars. But if you know somebody’s nationality that doesn’t tell you their opinions about anything. That French person may be left wing, right wing, pacifist or warlike, pro or anti-abortion, the death penalty, vegetarianism, Windows, Macintosh or Linux.”
But while “nationality” can refer to a legal relationship between a state and a citizen, it does not only refer to legal citizenship. A Scottish nationalist might not describe himself as British, yet he will still be a law-abiding British citizen. There is no Kurdish national state, but there are many Kurds. Nor does nationality reduce to ethnicity: different ethnicities were meant to merge into a new national identity in the American “melting pot”. One’s nationality is not primarily about race or legal registers; it is about identifying with a larger community; it is about language, literature, music, tradition and history.
It seems to have escaped Dawkins piercing insight that knowing a person’s nationality often does allow us to make good inferences about his or her beliefs. Knowing whether someone thinks of herself as Ukrainian, Russian or European enables us to infer important information about many of her beliefs about politics, history and even economics. And it is perfectly obvious that pledging allegiance to the flag and standing for the national anthem will have an effect on a child’s political beliefs: that is rather the point of the exercise.
Our national identity can have a profound impact on how we live our lives: in fact, it can determine our relationship with our state. Consider beliefs that Dawkins would take for granted like “you can always trust a police-officer” or “the police are only here to help”. These are politically charged beliefs in many parts of the world, including regions of the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Some nationalities fight very hard to have their culture and language recognised by their state’s education system. Sometimes the minorities’ complaints are justified; sometimes not. But it is clear that belonging to a national group can nurture controversial opinions.
It goes without saying that our national identity is not our only identity; certainly our nationality will not determine many of our tastes and opinions. But a person’s religious identity does not entail very much about their tastes or preferences either. For example, conservative evangelical Christians can disagree about Keynesian economics, proportional representation, the death penalty, global warming, vegetarianism, or if they prefer Windows, Macintosh or Linux. British evangelicals and American evangelicals tend to have very different opinions about heath care and gun control. Geography and income will often have a more profound effect on our votes than a statement of faith.
Absolutely none of this “negates the ideal, held dear by all decent educationists, that children should be taught to think for themselves.” That is one ideal pursued by teachers; but decent educationalists do not presuppose that bright students will reject their parents’ religion. Decent educationalists simply give students the intellectual tools to assess and criticise belief systems; then they help students to form, clarify and defend their deepest beliefs. Many students, to their own great surprise, conclude that their parents aren’t all that unreasonable.
Nor should decent educationalists assume that religious children are indoctrinated; as Michael Brendan Dougherty points out in The Week
I don’t intend to force religious convictions on my children or indoctrinate them any more than I intend to force on them good manners, or indoctrinate them in the conviction that “might does not make right.” I simply intend to teach, guide, instruct, and correct. Rarely will that even involve formal lessons. Most of it will simply be implied… Children will notice their parent spending 20 minutes a day praying the rosary. Or their parents consoling each other with words from the Psalms… A child notices and then does exactly what Richard Dawkins fears indoctrinated kids won’t do: she asks questions.”
So a good, liberal education will not naively assume that all faith is blind and every religious belief irrational; in fact, a decent educationalist will recognise that different worldviews can offer different insights, and therefore we should listen to all perspectives. It is difficult to understand a religious perspective when one has not experienced it; traditions, rites of passage, ritual, celebration, art and fellowship all shape how the religion’s core beliefs are interpreted and lived out.
One can reject Buddhism or Islam; but that does not mean that one should reject everything that every Buddhist or Muslim has ever had to say! Different religious communities will see practical, societal problems from radically different perspectives. By listening to those perspectives, or even by debating with them, we might perceive new solutions. At the very least, we would learn to justify and defend our own world-view, and how to live with those who profoundly disagree with us. But to truly understand a religious perspective, one has to live it. Hence the value of allowing parents to raise their children in the family faith. We allow diversity and debate to flourish.
Every child should be encouraged to be inventive and creative. It is good that Ahmed Mohamed’s deeply religious parents allowed him to take risks to further his education. Although no-one could have predicted the trouble Ahmed got into, he has promoted the importance of technology and engineering to the English speaking world. The fact that he gained a little notoriety by getting arrested won’t hurt technophiles at all; teens love a little rebellion. But Ahmed has also neatly demonstrated that the religious child is not a brainwashed child. So long as that child is taught how to reason critically and is not insulated from other points of view, he or she can be as open minded as any secularist. Indeed, such a child can be much more open-minded than Richard Dawkins. Perhaps we should be more concerned to warn children about the dangers of slavishly following celebrity intellectuals.