If something is intuitively obvious, why do children need to be actively indoctrinated in it?

[laconicsax]

This morning, Laconicspouse and I had the misfortune of sitting at a table next to some very loud evangelical pastors and a Young Life group leader. We would have preferred to converse freely with each other, but these guys were so loud we could barely hear each other without shouting. They spent at least 45 minutes (we left before they finished) mostly discussing different ways to reach out and 'save' high-school aged kids. They made the following points:

-High school is a critical age to reach these kids because they're getting to the age where they're more likely to doubt the Gospels.
-It's important to remember that the more enthusiastic you can make a child about Christ, the more likely it is that you can bring their parent (and that parent's money) into your ministry.
-It's important to develop close 1-on-1 relationships with high-school aged kids and it takes a lot of passion to do so.
-It's best to get them out of their homes as much as possible with personal counseling sessions, youth-group activities, and ministry community service trips.
-The expense of trying to set up a youth-outreach program at a school of 2400 is nothing next to the number of potential parent donors--bringing in $12,000 in donations from that initial expense is reasonable.
-Community service trips to homeless centers is important because the kindness of a warm meal will open someone's heart to Christ.
-Homeless persons who you can save will become donors once they get back on their feet financially.

Disgusting. These people were loudly bragging about using children to get money from their parents, about volunteering at a soup kitchen to secure potential donors, and about working to take children from their families. All for the "glory of Christ."

(The near exact words were, "...they're getting to an age where their parents and other outside influences can start to keep these kids from seeing how Christ is intuitively obvious. That's where we need to step in to make a difference in their lives.")

If Christianity is so "intuitively obvious," why is it necessary to actively go out and indoctrinate children in it? Shouldn't it be just as effective to witness to them once they're adults?

[d_b]

1. because children are naturally bad

or something like that.

[Why Syzygy]

2. Evangelism

makes my heart ache. (especially the kidnapping part)
And the "in the name of God" dellusion.

Young Life's financial statement:

http://www.younglife.org/AboutYoungLife/FinancialStatement.htm

Net Assets 258,049,815

[laconicsax]

4. That's a lot of money!

I'm not sure what's worse--the fact that it's all about the money or that they're so open about it.

[Why Syzygy]

5. It might partially explain their lobbying power.

eta: I think the worst part is the scare tactic employed to meet their ends.

[conscious evolution]

3. It's basic Marketing 101.

If you can brand the consumer at an early age,when critical thinking skills are not fully developed,you will have a sucker,I mean customer,for life.

Whats fucked up is that it starts when children are toddlers with all of the santa and easter bunny bullshit.

[RagAss]

29. It sure is ! n/m

[moobu2]

6. Because it spreads somewhat like a virus (a mind virus)

and children are more susceptible to it and adults that haven’t been infected often build up an immunity.

[Occam Bandage]

7. Natural selection is intuitive and obvious once it is learned and understood.

I still think it should be taught in schools, because childhood is when children form worldviews, and I approve of rationalist worldviews. If I approved of a supernaturalist worldview, then various aspects of Christianity would seem obvious and intuitive within that worldview, and I would believe it was best to instill that worldview in young minds.

[laconicsax]

8. I don't question the right to hold the belief, only the methods in carrying it out.

These people were discussing the best ways to limit a child's contact with his/her family as to limit the non-evangelical influence. These are the same people who scream bloody murder about parental rights to exercise total dominion over a child and yet they want to do as much as they can to subvert those same parental rights when it doesn't fit their agenda. Not because there's a danger of child abuse, but because they feel that the parent might interfere with their plans of indoctrination.

Step 1: Isolate the child from his/her parents.
Step 2: Indoctrinate the child in your beliefs.
Step 3: Reintroduce the child to his/her parents.
Step 4: Use the child to pressure the parents to accept your beliefs.
Step 5: Get money from the parents.

:puke:

[Occam Bandage]

15. That's pretty much the way our entire educational system works.

I don't imagine you use the puke smiley when thinking about the exact same step-by-step process occurring for education in the physical sciences, in history, or in mathematics.

[ZombieHorde]

17. Which part of step 4 "Use the child to pressure the parents to accept your beliefs"

happens in our educational system?

[Occam Bandage]

24. Children often come home and happily tell their parents all they've learned.

Especially when it comes to the sciences, parents often learn things from children. Additionally, if parents were to react negatively to what the child was learning (assuming that the information in question is part of the state-mandated curriculum), and were to withhold support for the child's learning of that information, the school would rightfully pressure the parent to be more accommodating during a parent-teacher conference. The only difference is in what is being taught.

[ZombieHorde]

26. The example you have offered seems like a likely scenerio to me.

But my small amount of personal experience with schools has been, "You don't need to believe what I teach, you only need to understand."

Thanks for the example. I wonder if the D.A.R.E. program is another.

[laconicsax]

18. Because our educational system doesn't work that way.

Step 1: Isolate the child from his/her parents.
Step 2: Indoctrinate the child in your beliefs.
Step 3: Reintroduce the child to his/her parents.
Step 4: Use the child to pressure the parents to accept your beliefs.
Step 5: Get money from the parents.

Step 1 is different. Schools take kids from their parents with the parents' permission. Some parents don't want their children to be a part of the system and they are allowed to home-school their kids. If they don't want their child taught something specific, they can get their child excused from class. What the guys I was sitting next to were talking about was doing everything possible to prevent the parents from having any influence on their children. Schools invite the parents into the process.

Step 2 is different. Schools don't indoctrinate students into belief systems, they compel a student to learn about a subject, prove that they have a basic understanding of it, then move on whether or not a student 'believes in' what they have been taught.

Step 3 is different. Schools don't reintroduce a child to his/her parents because they haven't isolated that child from their parents in the first place.

Step 4 is different. Schools don't use children as tools to pressure the parents to accept beliefs.

Step 5 is different. Schools get money from parents through taxes.

[ZombieHorde]

25. "Natural selection is intuitive and obvious once it is learned and understood."

If it needs to be learned, how can it intuitive?

[RagAss]

9. Only a lie needs repeating.

[cosmik debris]

11. That's not true.

Can you support your position without repeating it?

[RagAss]

12. The pine tree in the garden.

[Occam Bandage]

14. That's completely untrue.

A good mathematics teacher will often explain a particularly important mathematical theorem in several ways, to ensure the audience understands the full meaning and importance of the theorem. If a student does not understand, he will repeat himself, taking care to explain the logical steps the student may have been unable to grasp by him/herself the first time around. That does not mean that the theorem is a lie; it only means it was too hard for the student to understand the first time around.

[Why Syzygy]

16. Another factor

is how suspicious someone's husband is.

[RagAss]

21. True. But the theorem is just that....a thereom. ....

it is not Absolute Truth, which needs no sponsorship from the mouth of man. The OP was referring to a conversation regarding Absolute Truth and the need to "drum" it into the heads of children.

[struggle4progress]

10. You seem to think "intuitively obvious" is an objective quality that a fact or notion can have,

but "intuitively obvious" has only a contextual meaning

There's really nothing odd about the notion that some education might be necessary for an idea to become "intuitively obvious"

It is "intuitively obvious" to most of us, for example, that our dreams are not "as real" as the ordinary material world, but this insight is a cultural innovation that had not yet become commonplace at the time the Homeric poems were written: thus, this "intuitively obvious" fact was not "intuitively obvious" for most of human history

Similarly, Einstein got a Nobel prize for an "intuitively obvious" explanation of the photoelectric effect: after Einstein had explained the phenomenon, it became "intuitively obvious" in a way it had not been before the explanation

Disclaimer: I am only responding to the leading question of the OP, which raises other issues concerning a conversation which I did not myself witness

[Sam1]

13. Yes, Yes, Yes!

"Wax on, Wax off."

[laconicsax]

19. The leading question of the OP was rhetorical.

I don't think that anything needing to be taught is intuitively obvious. That's why 'common sense' observations about the world have a tendency to be wrong. The earth isn't flat, it isn't fixed with the sun going around it, heavy objects don't fall faster than light ones, etc.

[struggle4progress]

20. The world is large, but our heads are small. What is "intuitively obvious" to anyone must depend

on that person's experience and assumptions -- and different people have different experiences and assumptions. That something may become "intuitively obvious" without having before been "intuitively obvious" seem clear enough to me: in my own life, I can take as evidence the number (probably thousands) of times in my life where someone else's offhand comment completely changed my understanding of something, essentially by making some point of view "intuitively obvious" which had not previously been so. If you have never had such forehead-slapping moments, then of course you will not see such evidence, and I'll simply refrain from speculations about what the absence of such moments would mean

[laconicsax]

22. I think you're missing the point.

If teaching something requires a lengthy effort involving repeated 1-on-1 sessions, then it can not be considered intuitively obvious.
Similarly, if the person intending to teach that thing expects the process to require a lengthy effort involving repeated 1-on-1 sessions, then they should not consider the material to be intuitively obvious.

The people loudly carrying on next to me were discussing the effort required to get a child to accept Christ. One of the guys, speaking of the effort, made the comment I quoted in my original post. All five at the table agreed on the difficulty in converting a child to their brand of Christianity and all five agreed on the "intuitively obvious" nature of their beliefs.

It may be obvious to those who believe in it, but it is moronic to claim that it is intuitively obvious when doing so comes on the heels of discussing the difficulty in getting others to adopt their beliefs.

[struggle4progress]

23. I disagree with you, and so you conclude I cannot possibly have understood what you are saying

Here is an old and apocryphal joke-story, which you may have heard: A Harvard mathematics professor in his lecture makes a claim and says "Gentlemen, this is obvious!" Then he pauses and mutters to himself, "But is it really obvious?" He paces back and forth, thinking about the matter for some minutes. Then, suddenly, he brightens, announces happily "Yes, it is really obvious!" and resumes his lecture

It is a good story, because some things are "obvious" in just that way -- that is, they are "obvious" when viewed from the proper perspective even if not at all "obvious" from various other perspectives, exactly as one can easily view Mt Hood when standing on one part of Mt Adams but not see it when standing on another part

So I don't consider it at all moronic to imagine that considerable work may be necessary before one can recognize some facts as "intuitively obvious" -- in part because not everything one person finds "intuitively obvious" will be "intuitively obvious" to another person

[laconicsax]

27. I concluded nothing about you.

I suspected that your attention had focused on one part of my post you felt you could best counter. So far, you have shown that my initial suspicions may have been correct.

I cannot speak to your motive--maybe you feel that my observations and subsequent post would become invalid if you cast enough doubt on a rhetorical question. Maybe you just like to argue on the Internet. I don't know and frankly, I don't think it matters much.

I think we'll have to simply disagree on what constitutes intuitive obviousness.

I say that obviousness has an inherent objective quality to it--that it can be quantified to a certain degree. The greater the effort required to fully convince someone of a new idea, the less obvious that idea can be said to be. Special knowledge required to grasp that idea increases the effort required.

The idea that (relatively speaking) the earth revolves and the sun stands still is less obvious than the idea that that the earth stands still with the sun moving around it.

The idea that the sun is over one million times the size of the earth is even less obvious than the idea that it is much smaller.

The idea that bats are more closely related to birds than people is less obvious than the converse.

The obviousness of an idea says nothing of whether it is correct or accurate, only the ease with which it can be grasped.

[RagAss]

28. Your position makes perfect sense, if the topic was the manifest universe..

The OP's topic is Divinity, which exists outside of time and space and is equally accessible/inaccessible to all sentient beings regardless of their capacity to understand. "Intuitive" as I read it, is apart from logical deduction and concept. It is felt first and often finds the one who feels it at a loss for words to define it.

This makes the conversation overheard by the OP all the more comical to me.

[struggle4progress]

30. Nyeh. I generally don't like gossip or rants about the idiocy of private citizens, based on

second-hand stories that I have no way of verifying. Your reactions to much of the conversation you reported may be natural, and I might have had similar reactions had I overheard the conversation. But so what? The world is chock-full of people whose views I don't share -- and it's cheap and easy to try to build self-esteem by sneering at other folk

I responded to the one issue in your post that I thought deserved any significant attention: namely, your claim that something cannot "intuitively obvious" if thought or experience or education is necessary to see it. I disagreed because most of my own effort to "understand" anything consists of attempting to find vantage points from which that thing becomes "intuitively obvious" -- an exercise sometimes trivial and sometimes rather difficult

[Silent3]

32. Perhaps we need to make a distinction...

...between "intuitively obvious" and "intuitively sensible".

I'd use "obvious" to describe an answer or solution that, given enough background for a given problem space, is attainable by anyone with an average amount of brain power (which could mean "average" for those who study a given field, rather than average among the general population) without assistance from others.

For instance, I could talk about the solution to a calculus problem as being "intuitively obvious", but that description only makes sense in the context of people who start out knowing something about calculus. There's obviously no obviousness about the answer to a calculus problem for someone who sees nothing but meaningless scribbles when they look at a calculus equation.

If a bunch of average calculus students look at a calculus equation and most leap to the solution very quickly, I'd call the solution to the equation "intuitively obvious". If most of the students stare and stare and scratch away with paper and pencil for quite some time, remaining puzzled, I'd say whatever solution the equation has can hardly be deemed "obvious".

It could be that as soon as you tell the students what the answer is, many will have an "Ah, hah!" experience. Upon leaning the answer the students might get a feeling that they "should have" thought of the answer themselves. It might be tempting to call that sort of answer "intuitively obvious" as well, because of that clarity that comes with getting the answer, but here's where I'd invoke the description "intuitively sensible" instead.

If an answer can't be attained quickly given the proper background information, and even receiving that answer doesn't produce a sense of recognition or satisfying clarity, then the word "intuitive" probably doesn't apply at all.

If the subject matter is religion, what religious ideas does the OP wish to claim that others claim are "intuitively obvious"? What is the problem space of religion? Is the supposedly necessary background for understanding that problem space nothing more than basic human life experience, or something more than that? How often is anyone taught what might be called "basic principles" of religion without first, or instead, simply being taught a list of supposed already-solved answers? Once you've already given someone the answer you think they're supposed to reach the opportunity to judge intuitive obviousness will have vanished -- the most you could then gauge would be intuitive sensibility.

[anonymous171]

31. Why teach children anything at all? Schools are tools of the establishment man. nt

[knitter4democracy]

33. Why are they selling God?

I remember reading that quote in a Russian newspaper article about a big evangelical push in Moscow, and it really stuck with me. Why are they selling God? Why do they put a cross or a fish on everything that can take it and then sell it in their special stores? Why do they act like they're pushing a brand and not living a faith?

Those are major reasons why I left the Church of the Nazarene (an evangelical denomination). I disagreed with some theology, but it was the putting it into practice part that I really got sick of.

I've found that my daughter has always been very comfortable with our faith and that our son has not. I wouldn't be surprised if he left the faith as a teen, but I would if DD did, just because of how she is and who she is. Sure, I teach them the stories and why we do what we do, but I know that evangelical kind of indoctrination, and I'm really uncomfortable with it.