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If you were looking for oddities, you came to the right place. I'm an unschooling mom and writer living on the Canadian prairies.
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wild (but not uncultivated) musings of a Canadian unschool momHome | Archives | contact Born and Raised For It5:35 PM - Jul. 6, 2006 - Add to the Wildness
I was taught to think critically about the world by my parents. The only rule was: Question Everything. I remember my mother often asking me questions that forced me to evaluate not just words, but what people really meant and what their motives were. Rather than be controlled by someone else’s religious ideas, my parents directed me to explore and discover my own beliefs. However, that method was not without its pitfalls. The problem with applying critical thinking to the spiritual realm is that you can't see it. You can't evaluate it using your five senses in a lab experiment. There are huge limitations to the amount and type of data that can be collected. People recognize the benefits of holding some sort of higher belief. But belief in what? Does it matter? I was taught that beliefs are a personal choice. Right on, Mom and Dad. That is a liberty I still espouse today. The thing is, within that overriding liberty, it's very easy for a culture to put limitations on the personal choices of people. The simplest way is to render certain types of information irrelevant. To place more assumed value on some types of information than others. This is done with presuppositions. Rather than teaching just facts, society teaches you to assume what the nature of a fact is. It teaches you to assume certain parameters that exclude some information from the realm of "factual" or "useful." It even teaches you to place some types of information in the category of "hateful," "negative" or "dangerous." Very, very few people ever stop to ask whether society is right. It's too painful an examination, and it does indeed make you feel slightly insane. That's because, generally, it also means questioning the teachings of the people you love most. It's not a matter of their agenda; it's a matter of their existence within the same fabric as the one you question. We all go through this as we grow up. We find we disagree with our parents on deep things, like our philosophy of gender roles. We find we disagree on career choices and the wise use of money. We disagree on religion, politics and lifestyle. Society has tried to resolve these transitions with the introduction of post-modern thinking. All truth is relative; my truth is my truth, and yours is yours. So, wait. In other words, truth doesn't exist objectively. Well, I found out differently. -Radical statement! Full of religious presupposition! Actually, I found out differently before I ever had a religion. So hold on a minute before your presuppositions jump all over mine.
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