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Comment by bdfh42 | Hacker News Reader

Don't panic - I was taught all sorts of daft stuff in school - when I think back on it a staggering proportion of (say) history or geography was completely untrue. It helps in a way that some of it was so crazy it got me questioning the basis for the rest. Thats when you stop being taught stuff and start researching and learning.

Not suggesting that every pupil taught creationism will respond in this way - many are probably pre-programmed by the religious affiliations to believe it anyway - but the intellectual health of the pupil body is not a lost cause.

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How do you know you have re-learned all of the stuff that you were taught wrong and not just a portion of it?

The answer is the same as if you were taught strictly the correct stuff:

Constantly learn more. Re-evaluate your knowledge in the light of new facts. Find the places where pieces don't fit and investigate further. This is the only sane and rational policy on knowledge one can have for them-self.

Heck even when teaching someone "correct" things, it is impossible to avoid this. There have to be abstractions and almost-but-not-quite generalizations. There is so much knowledge in the world that you have to build a general foundation to bootstrap better understanding. People are pattern machines, so patterns need to be presented, for easier consumption, then revised later.

I don't - but I do question most things. Like in every other activity - you get a feel for things that seem untrue (and yes I recognise the potential for vast error there) and put them to one side for further thought - or just forget about them of course.

It helps that I am a developer - analytical and algorithmic thinking is a great start point. Learning some statistics helps - you can see through a lot of nonsense if you can get at the source data.

That's an interesting point. There's a great panic about creationism, but when you discuss e.g. the tremendous fallacy of the standard "WWII started on December 7, 1941 and was won by the United States" narrative, you generally get shrugs.

I'm not defending the teaching of creationism at all, but it might be worthwhile to look at the whole curriculum with a critical eye rather than concentrating on biology.

The people who can freely dispel from themselves the intellectual dishonesty and lies that they've been taught to accept as fundamentals, is low.

You sound like you weren't heavily ingrained into the dogma to begin with, and had a tendency to autodidact, which helps kill off the rest and make your own conclusions. Yet most people don't and they take whatever they're formally taught for granted, or selectively choose to believe whatever fits their ideological predispositions.

Many of these kids will be stuck with lifelong delusions. Their parents may mold them to a certain path, but their schooling will solidify it completely.

Even still, this is a very abhorrent thing to do.

"Hey kid, everything you know about history, geography, geology and natural science is a lie! Read up on the facts and realize you've been living in a matrix all this time!"

I mean, people with perseverance can totally get through it and then in retrospect have a laugh at the bullshit they were taught, but even with this in mind at best the whole thing is a major inconvenience.

It may have helped that I was brought up a Catholic. Perceiving the shaky foundations of Christianity and the astonishing hypocrisy of that particular version probably helped clarify a lot of things for me and gave me the freedom to revisit the prejudices that had been foisted upon me in my early youth.

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