Hello everyone
I’m new to these forums, but my goal and meaning are clear: I do not tolerate the brainwashing of children by adults who feel that they have the (unconscious or deliberate) right to do so. Nor do I tolerate the nebulous ‘rights’ that South African ‘law’ ascribes to parents and institutional organizations to tell children what they ought to believe.
I do not have children of my own, which perhaps makes me all the more sensitive to what happens to children, since they hold the future of our planet in their hands; yet they have no say in what adults tell them. In this respect I am in thorough agreement with Richard Dawkins.
However, Richard Dawkins probably doesn’t count for much in South Africa …
In the past two months, I have given astronomy lectures to groups of (mostly) Grade 7 children from schools in the northern parts of the Western Cape, notably Klawer, Vredendal and Koekenaap. If you think that you have reached out to children who come from severely disadvantaged backgrounds, think again.
You don’t know what you are talking about.
These children know about mandrax; they know about dagga; they know about police arrests; they know about killings in their neighbourhoods; they know about their father beating up their mother while both are in a drunken stupor, in their pathetically small dwelling called a “hop huis”.
There is, for example, a youngster aged 12 who has killed an innocent peer with an axe, simply to obtain R5; he smiles upon it because the ‘law’ entitles him to freedom. This particular youth has been given the freedom to return to school; it so happens that my wife teaches at that school.
He repeatedly tells my wife that he will kill her.
How does one handle this?
Don’t give me your academic view …
At one presentation, I asked the children what they saw outside earlier in the evening. I was met with blank stares. I picked out a child who was sitting near the door, and asked him to go outside and come back to tell me what he saw (it was 1st quarter Moon). He came back and told me that it was dark outside…
The person who organises these ‘sky-aware’ sessions on his land as part of an environmental awareness programme, has a religious agenda: after every astronomy presentation he embarks on a religious diatribe that drives the children to sleep (thank goodness!) and drives me insane!
What’s the use? We need to get to the adults, not the children …