There's Nothing Irrational About Fiction
Sent in by Zen In Darkness: "There's Nothing Irrational About Fiction", an article that responds to the article mentioned in these posts. An excerpt:
It seems to me that the stunning success of the atheist bus campaign has gone to Richard Dawkins's head, for I can't imagine what else can have made him think that it was a good decision for him to now set his sights on to taking down another cultural scourge that threatens the well-being of innocent children: fiction.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Dawkins's next piece of important work will be aimed at helping children differentiate between mythic thinking and science. While Dawkins claims to love Philip Pullman, he also expresses concern that "…looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research."
Research? I do find the idea of conducting a longitudinal study in which a group of children are isolated from anything imaginative rather amusing. But in his apparent conviction that children are incapable of separating what they read about in stories from reality, Dawkins sounds to me not unlike the fundamentalist Christian mums who tried to get Roald Dahl's The Witches banned from my primary school for fear that it would undermine what their kids had learned at Sunday school rather than acknowledging that sometimes, stories are just stories.
Click here to read the whole article.
It seems to me that the stunning success of the atheist bus campaign has gone to Richard Dawkins's head, for I can't imagine what else can have made him think that it was a good decision for him to now set his sights on to taking down another cultural scourge that threatens the well-being of innocent children: fiction.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Dawkins's next piece of important work will be aimed at helping children differentiate between mythic thinking and science. While Dawkins claims to love Philip Pullman, he also expresses concern that "…looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research."
Research? I do find the idea of conducting a longitudinal study in which a group of children are isolated from anything imaginative rather amusing. But in his apparent conviction that children are incapable of separating what they read about in stories from reality, Dawkins sounds to me not unlike the fundamentalist Christian mums who tried to get Roald Dahl's The Witches banned from my primary school for fear that it would undermine what their kids had learned at Sunday school rather than acknowledging that sometimes, stories are just stories.
Click here to read the whole article.
posted by pgenrestories at 10:11 PM
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