Religious Indoctrination of Children

Excerpt from Alexander the Atheist's blog.

Cognitive Development of Children

Early in the 1920s, Swiss Biologist Jean Piaget started working on his theory of cognitive development. His theory, which remains dominant in educational psychology, describes four stages of logical reasoning capability (Ormrod, 25-30):

Sensorimotor stage
(birth until approximately 2 years of age)
Preoperational stage
(about 2 years until approximately 6 or 7 years of age)
Concrete Operations stage
(6 or 7 until approximately 11 or 12 years of age)
Formal Operations stage
(11 or 12 years of age through adulthood)

Note: While the age an individual reaches a particular cognitive stage of development varies, the sequence does not.

Unsurprisingly, not much religious indoctrination occurs during the Sensorimotor stage due to the fact that children do not really have the cognitive capacity to be indoctrinated and are still learning such basic functions as how to speak. Religious indoctrination really begins during the Preoperational stage and it often starts at this stage because anyone familiar with even the basics of the cognitive development of humans knows children do not have the capacity to use critical thinking to assess religious concepts that are presented as indisputable, absolute truth and reinforced by various authorities like parents and religious leaders. As a result, most indoctrinated children will simply assume the truth of everything they have been indoctrinated with when they become adults.

Two major characteristics of the Preoperational stage are Preoperational Egocentrism and Transductive Reasoning. Preoperational Egocentrism is the inability of children to see things from someone else's perspective because they view their own perspective as the only one possible (does this sound familiar?). Transductive Reasoning is where children combine facts that are not related and conclude there is a cause-and-effect relationship because the two events occurred within a short time of each other. (Ormrod, 27) At this stage of cognitive development there can be no reasonable expectation that children can assess any concepts based on an informed opinion and any form of critical thinking. As a result, religious doctrines must be taken on blind acceptance of authority and faith rather than on their supposed merits.

Even when we get to the Concrete Operations stage children can still not fully grasp all of the concepts they are presented or apply anything close to high-level critical thinking skills to them. While children at this stage begin to understand that others have different opinions, and can realize their own perspective may be incorrect, we are still not dealing with high levels of critical thinking. There is still a dependency on concrete reality, making children unable to reason about "abstract, hypothetical, or contrary-to-fact ideas," giving religious concepts the advantage of not having to face any informed criticism (Omrod, 29). Children at this stage are also incapable of controlling or separating variables or testing more than one hypothesis at a time. There is also a problem dealing with proportional reasoning. As a result, it is absurd to reach the conclusion that children are ready to handle concepts as heavy and abstract as the supernatural mover of the universe and saviour of all of mankind when they cannot even grasp how fractions and decimals are related (Ormrod, 29).