Listening to the radio this morning I was very pleasantly surprised to hear about Camp Quest

This is a summer camp for children of atheist, agnostics, humanists and freethinkers that has been going for a while in the U.S. and has now moved to England.

The main aim of this camp is to teach the children moral values and critical thinking with one of the activities focused around a game in which the children are told there are two invisible unicorns in the forest and their job is to prove they don't exist.

Anyway, my son was listing to this as we drove to school and he is chomping at the bit to go Especially as they teach evolution.

Also, couldn't resist putting this video from their website here as this is the sort of thing that these children will be exposed to, which is good..

[youtube]Z3SAGDZXLxI[/youtube]

Even though I am far from religious, I am not 100% on board with the idea of this camp. I am all for teaching children critical thinking, which is the part I happily agree with. It's just there is such a fine line between teaching them how to think and teaching them what to think.

I am more enthusiastic about the tinkering camp:

[youtube]hvHViFc0ekw[/youtube]

I think my son would love this as well.

To come to the defence of Camp Quest, I don't think that they are going down the road of teaching children what to think, in fact, I'm sure they are very careful not to be accused of any form of indoctrination as this is exactly what they are trying to get away from. Rather, they are teaching the children how to think for themselves. As they say, they don't teach the children that there is no God but instead teach that it is OK not to believe.

But time will tell and if my little sproglets ever go I'll report back

The Camp is for children of atheists, not for atheists themselves. The people running the camp do not know if the children are atheists or not, but will teach them how to think, not what to think.

For example, the camp takes place near a woods. The children will be asked to prove that there are no unicorns living in the woods, and they will get £10 if they do so. This is a valuable lesson on how you cannot prove a negative

(July 3, 2009 at 5:11 am)leo-rcc Wrote: Even though I am far from religious, I am not 100% on board with the idea of this camp. I am all for teaching children critical thinking, which is the part I happily agree with. It's just there is such a fine line between teaching them how to think and teaching them what to think.

I agree ... when I first heard of it I was pretty much as intellectually offended as I am by the idea of religious camps. Maybe one can argue they are necessary to balance the zealots but I'm not sure.

Kyu

I need to show that first video to my nephew. He believes the earth is 6000 years old. Unfortunately he's 27 so he's too old for that camp......or is he?