From: Mark Walker (mdwalker@quickclic.net)
Date: Wed Oct 24 2001 - 09:00:55 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Emlyn O'regan" <oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au>
> Mark Walker wrote:
> > Ideally, I suppose, we should be enrolling our children in
> > transhumanist kindergartens. What was it that the Jesuits
> > used to say? "Give
> > me a child until he is 15 and he is mine for life."
> >
>
> No no no!
>
> All we've should really have to do is to help our kids to think for
> themselves, and trust their own judgement. If they can do this
successfully,
> and don't end up transhumanists, this is not a fault with the children!
>
Emlyn, I agree with yo--the Jesuit analogy was half meant in jest. What we
want to do is educate our children not indoctrinate them. Some cynics think
there is no real distinction between these activities, i.e., 'education' is
simply a term of praise for a type of indoctrination we find favorable. It
seems to me there is a difference in terms of the goals of these
enterprises. The telos of education is to engender understanding, the
purpose of indoctrination is to inculcate belief. Thus, one could be the
best educated person on the planet about Darwinian theory and still not
believe that it is true. On the other hand, one would not be successfully
indoctrinated in Darwinian theory unless one believed Darwinian theory. What
I am suggesting is that we might have to ask ourselves whether a necessary
condition for furthering transhumanism is to educate the young about
transhumanism, not indoctrinating them a la the Jesuits. The problem of
course is that, unlike children, most adults are not prediposed to exploring
or adopting radically different belief systems. If this is the case then
transhumanism may be destined to remain on the margins of the periphery of
society for the foreseeable future.
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