Action Arena #2:
Budding Brights
Introduction
“Growing up a bright” (and staying one) happens, but it is far more the exception than the rule. Most youngsters, surrounded by society suffused with beliefs in supernatural realms, absorb the milieu, the language, and the constraints on thinking. Except for science instruction (and the state of that in primary school is often quite dreadful), there is all too little to uphold and nurture a naturalistic understanding. The reality is that parents must have ways to more constructively cope with dominant social conventions and institutions. By starting with the home situation and on the ground floor of education, caring Brights can confront the dearth of ways and means for nourishing and sustaining the promise of Brights’ beginnings.
Through Web hub activism, we can likely begin to convey some significant ways and means for nourishing and sustaining a perspective consistent with that of Brights all over, along with a “bright pride” that builds nerve and sustains civic involvement.
The site can link together educational specialists, counseling professionals, and others to address the need to foster “roots” of naturalism for pre-schoolers, and to give youngsters stamina to confront what happens in schools. Parents need options, and pre-school institutions serving children need inclusive policies and strategies. Brights can address how our site might put forward sensible, constructive tactics and resources.
Note: Parents and relatives and friends who are brights as a general rule not only oppose the channeling of children into beliefs in supernatural, they are also typically averse to indoctrination of any kind, even in their own naturalistic worldview. They do favor opening doors to children to learn, and to protecting them as they can from imposition of false understandings. However, parents without resources all too often turn to inappropriate institutions to aid them in addressing “character-building” and in answering questions of ultimate concerns, and they struggle when their children ask to do what “all the others” do. Many parents simply are not aware of the music and rhymes and fables that can make the points that parents wish to make, or take just a slightly different tack in order to reduce culturally-induced anxieties. (For example, when other children are taught to “say your prayers,” nascent brights can be taught to “say your promises,” with noteworthy effect.) The Brights hub can be a resource, furnishing to families (and friends, and institutions) centralized access to secular rituals and key resources that are particularly important for pre-school years, when youngsters are first seeking to make conceptual connections through inborn curiosity and first confronting the social expectations of peers.
For the many youngsters who absorb dominant society’s supernatural thinking while growing up, but who eventually reverse course and become brights, is a long and difficult trip—“unraveling and undoing” conceptual and emotional understandings learned in early life. The fewer who face these disquieting personal journeys, the better.