Reply #151: Teaching ANY academic subject at 5 is daft! [View All]

[Andy B.]

Dawkins' attitude to Neo-Darwinism is as fundamentalist in nature as that of any so-called religious "fundamentalist, and it is interesting to note that Dawkins has attacked religion as being a meme, or set of memes, apparently blissfully unaware that the concept of memes is itself a meme. JAT.

Anyway, why is Dawkins' suggestion daft?

Because it is neither necessary nor beneficial to anyone, least of all the kids on whom Dawkins wishes to impose his programme of early indoctrination.

Like the educational establishments in the US and the UK, Dawkins seems totally oblivious to one simple fact - that whilst these are two of the richest, supposedly advanced countries in the world, their kids do not come top of the world ratings for educational achievement.

In fact, countries which start kids out with simple lessons and practice in socialisation until age 7, or thereabouts, fare far better in the long run. For whilst their kids are naturally way behind in academic subjects at age 7, by age 9 (comparing average performance) they have caught up, and over the next 2-3 years they have comfortably overtaken the kids that were forced into academic learning from day one.
At the same time, the kids now lagging behind don't even have the benefit of well-developed social skills.

Now Dawkins could get that information just as easily as me, or anyone else. So why does he ignore it?

Because, as I said at the start, Dawkins is - in my opinion - first and foremost a kind of religious zealot.
He wants children brainwashed to believe in his materialist creed (see below) as early as possible - regardless of the consequences for the children. IIRC, at the opening part of his series The Enemies of Reason he openly bemoaned the fact that scientists today are not treated with the kind of respect and awe that was afforded to religious leaders before the dawn of The Enlightenment.
Moreover, as Professor Brian Goodwin has pointed out, Dawkins has described his idea of evolution as near as damn it in terms that look mighty like orthodox Christianity with only God left out (see: http://www.bradburyac.mistral.co.uk/dar1.html).

Of course Dawkins isn't alone in his views, though like religious fundamentalists, you never find two people who think exactly alike. When it comes to battling against religion, quite a few evolutionist seem to lose the plot, big time, as in this very public pronouncement from the Marxist geneticist Richard Lewontin in The New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997):

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

An interesting comment, given how frequently people of a religious persuasion are accused of being close minded and not open to rational argument.

(Afterword: No, I don't agree with religious indoctrination either. Though I suspect that in practice kids will have absorbed a basic attitude towards religious ideas long before they get to school.)