Teaching Tolerance, the educational publication from my beloved Souther Poverty Law Center, has published many excellent sets of lesson plans on educating students on religious differences and espousing religious tolerance. I’m very pleased to see that they have now published a great lesson plan on respecting non-religious people–atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, deists, and free thinkers–as well!. The three sets of lesson plans cover grades 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12, and while it is geared towards the public school classroom, many of the lessons could easily be applied to homeschoolers.
Teaching Tolerance explains the need for such a curriculum:
Students often learn the importance of respecting people of different religions, and of respecting religious beliefs that are different from their own. But what about people who do not hold religious beliefs at all? Too often the right not to believe is excluded from lessons about tolerance.
Yet atheists and others who do not believe in God experience discrimination because of their nonbelief. In this lesson, students learn about episodes of anti-atheist discrimination; and they develop ways to educate others about respecting nonreligious, as well as religious, diversity.
I couldn’t agree more! I’ve seen a fairly high level of expectation of tolerance of their religious views from Christian homeschoolers, but don’t often see the same level of tolerance extended by them towards the beliefs non-religious homeschoolers among us. I think of that absurd “don’t call it ‘Christian mythology’” nonsense from a while back, as one example. The non-religious are expected to treat religious text as sacred and factual, out of “respect” for the Christian homeschoolers…who don’t seem to realize that they’re treating the non-religious homeschoolers with the same level of disrespect they believe they’re being shown.
An interesting read and could be helpful for understanding how to respectfully discourse w/ the homeschooling nonbeliever.
