Is Creationism Child Abuse? A Reaction To Lawrence Krauss And Godless In Dixie

I think that’s a difficult question.  Legal definitions are legal definitions, but they should also adjust to circumstances and our knowledge of the world, and if not immunizing your child is serious enough — perhaps we should use stronger words to describe how serious that decision is.

Furthermore, it should be noted that where “child neglect” is discussed, it is often paired with the term “child abuse”  Many places combine the two terms in the phrase “child abuse and neglect” if you do searches. Child neglect is very serious indeed — it is a valid reason, like child abuse, for the government to take custody of your children.

And one of its forms is Educational Neglect.  According to LegalMatch (emphasis and brackets added):

In a family law context, “Educational Neglect” refers to a parent’s failure to provide for a child’s basic needs with regards to school and education.  In most cases, this refers to younger children who are still claimed as dependents of the parent.  It can also include any adult who is legally responsible for the child, such as a stepparent, legal guardian, or custodian of the child.  Educational neglect is often classified under child abuse and neglect laws. ….

Education neglect generally implies the parent’s failure to perform certain duties on behalf of the child and their educational needs.  These can include:

>Failing to ensure that the child receives proper educational care and attention

>Failing to enroll the child in school

>Allowing the child to continually miss school, be delinquent, or truant

>Deliberately interfering with the child’s educational development [cf. original statement by Krauss on Marco Rubio possibly sacrificing the proper education of children for the favor of his constituency]

And although it’s technically different from academic abuse (though very closely related) educational neglect is a serious problem.  As the American Humane Association notes (in a subheading labeled “child neglect” that is under “child abuse”):

Educational neglect involves the failure of a parent or caregiver to enroll a child of mandatory school age in school or provide appropriate home schooling or needed special educational training, thus allowing the child or youth to engage in chronic truancy. Educational neglect can lead to the child failing to acquire basic life skills, dropping out of school or continually displaying disruptive behavior. Educational neglect can pose a serious threat to the child’s emotional well-being, physical health or normal psychological growth and development, particularly when the child has special educational needs that are not met.

Now, to be sure, technically, teaching a child creationism is not educational neglect according to the current legal definition.  If you try to get CPS to come take a child away from parents just because they are teaching them creationism, they’re not gonna.  There’s a lot of law in the way.

But that doesn’t mean that this is the way it should be (especially if politicians know they are impairing the education of children by having creationism taught in schools). This is why I think the evidence indicates that Neil Carter perhaps speaks a bit too strongly when he seems incredulous at the concept of “academic abuse,” and when he strongly criticizes Krauss for comparing the failure to vaccinate your kid to the failure to adequately educate children.  If Krauss is right in discussing the importance of evolution in the future sociological, biological, and economical environment, the claim that teaching a child creationism is a form of educational neglect is an arena for argument.  I suspect that, eventually, as creationism further loses legitimacy, teaching creationism in place of evolution will probably be seen as educational neglect from a legal standpoint, and perhaps may be colloquially seen as child abuse in the same way that many of us see medical neglect or not teaching a child to read as child abuse (even though that’s not the right technical term for it under the law). Maybe it will take a hundred years or longer, but I do suspect that, eventually, evolution will be as basic to our cultural understanding of how to function in the world as basic arithmetic may be today.

Should we be there yet?  I honestly don’t know enough about the environment to know.  But there are serious consequences for teaching creationism that do have increasingly serious implications for children who believe it, from views on global warming to the possibility of them going into different research fields.  And if you actually ask people who believed in creationism for a major period of their lives and then found out evolution was true whether or not they are angry at the way they were raised in ways that may constitute a reaction to some degree of educational neglect — it seems, looking around at comments, that most of them (including yours truly) are, indeed, fairly angry.  And if politicians are perpetuating this bad information knowingly…that is extremely upsetting indeed.

All this is to say that perhaps we should actually incorporate the experiences of ex-creationists in our consideration of how serious teaching creationism to children is before we tell them abruptly, as Neil put it, “STOP IT, will ya?” due to their use of the words “child abuse” as opposed to “child neglect.”

His third point is that Krauss, in openly admitting that he put teaching creationism in that “brutal” arena of child abuse, is calling attention to an exaggeration to “play to the crowd”:

Ah, I see.  So it’s justified because it got you in the headlines. Or your message, which has now changed into something less accurate because you found that stating it less accurately played the crowd better and got repeated in a way that it wouldn’t have if you hadn’t exaggerated your claim.

Perhaps it is an exaggeration in today’s cultural, in additional to its legal, context.  Most think it is extreme (although some minds would be changed, possibly, if they found that Krauss’s nod towards creationism being possibly taught as a source of political expediency was true).  But what interests me is whether or not, exaggeration or not, it is the closest way he can characterize the experience many ex-creationists feel in a way the public will understand.  Perhaps it is beginning a conversation on an instance of educational neglect that is of crucial importance – and not addressing it seriously will perpetuate a disturbing cycle.

In any case, I don’t think this warrants a strong finger-wagging so much as an attempt to bring awareness to a problem that Krauss, as a science educator (and one very much concerned about the future of this generation and of the planet), sees as seriously ignored or dimished.  And Krauss’s characterization doesn’t seem to be quite as far-fetched as Neil makes it out to be – especially when it’s discussed among former creationists.

One more point: Because ex-Christians are a marginalized group in this country (especially the ex-creationist types — as relatively few fundamentalists leave Christianity), I think conversations on their characterizations of religion should be handled in ways that avoid delegitimizing the very real trauma many this minority group faces — a group that arguably constitutes the most qualified individuals when it comes to assessing the way a viewpoint based in creationism may have crippled their potential.  I know from experience that being told sternly that something traumatic for your childhood does not belong in the category of child abuse (or a term with at least as much gravity to it) adds to the trauma.  When I realized that I did not have to have drunk parents who broke my arms and molested me to say that yes, I was physically and emotionally abused…at that point I felt I had a way to express what I was going through that was not around when definitions of “child abuse” were more narrow.

The definitions of “child abuse and neglect” are changing, and thanks to this evolving of law and language, educational neglect has actually become a legitimate thing.  Perhaps, legally speaking, creationism does not fit in that category currently, but given the increasing importance of evolutionary theory, we may be nearing that point.  But in figuring out where we’re at, I think it’s more important to listen to those affected than Neil Carter seems to indicate. Those against religion undergo plenty of abuse already in the United States – my own stance, at least in this predominantly religious culture, is that it’s generally more important to translate their concerns and legitimize them than to aggressively tone-police their expression of them in ways that seem to delegitimize them to themselves and also to the much more dominant society of Christianity.

Thanks for reading.