EUGENE, Ore. -- Parents and teachers have been misled by the traditions and culture of the Western world about the nature of children and how they should be raised, anthropologist Ashley Montagu said Friday.
'We're the inheritors of a long tradition of errors concerning the nature of the child, which are largely derived from the Bible, especially the New Testament,' the Princeton University lecturer said during a visit to the University of Oregon.
'This has seriously affected every aspect of our attitude toward the child and the function of the family,' said Montagu, the final speaker at the UO College of Education's second annual summer conference on the socialization of children.
He said the traditional view is that man is evil and has to be turned into something that resembles a reasonable facsimile of a human being to be rescued from his original sinfulness.
'That's utter nonsense,' Montague claimed. 'It's untrue, but it's worse than that -- it's extremely destructive of the humanity of every human being that has been brought up in this tradition and, in course, became not a human being but the most destructive creature on the face of this earth.'
Montagu, author of more than 50 books, including such best-sellers as 'On Being Human' and 'The Natural Superiority of Women,' said the problem is that, as parents and teachers, 'we teach proved answers, not questions.
'We don't teach children how to question, how to use their noggins, how to think. It's the very antithesis of learning how to think, to engorge them with large quantities of facts.'
Instead, he suggested, parents and teachers should help children to develop and cultivate their childlike qualities. The spirit of the child, he said, is the spirit of humanity.
'Parents could learn from so-called 'primitive cultures' to respect their children and never treat them harshly in any way,' Montagu said. 'Each person needs to be treated as a unique human being, and every child is entitled to his birthright of complete spiritual and physical self-realization.'
