Humanists have good reason to unite a coalition of the willing to dispel harmful myths, teach positive values, and provide the educational foundation for an outlook that embraces all of humanity as one people. The Kochhar Humanist Education Center will offer lifelong education resources toward these ends and provide policy recommendations that stimulate society to break down the barriers of prejudice and leave a common and rational approach to knowledge in its place.
The Situation
According to a December 2006 Financial Times/Harris poll, between fourteen and eighteen percent of Americans consider themselves atheists, agnostics, humanists, or otherwise identify as not religious. An additional four percent, including Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, Pagans, and others, do not identify with the predominant Christian doctrines. Humanists and adherents of minority religions by simple dint of their minority status, should find it essential to join forces to guard against discrimination and to enhance outreach and educational efforts. The deleterious effects of this mistrust and the social ostracism that can come with discrimination is a weight on society’s progress.
Public Policy and Advocacy
One of the priorities of the Kochhar Humanist Education Center will be reducing discrimination against minority groups, including nontheists and people of minority faiths. Raising awareness can help remedy the problem of prejudice and discrimination, make the lives of adherents easier, and create a more open and truly pluralistic society. The Kochhar Humanist Education Center endeavors to work toward this goal through a public policy initiative with a distinctly informative role. This initiative will create greater awareness on the issues we most value and provide vehicles for people to effectively share information and express their humanistic views.
This initiative includes a well-developed online letter center--with model letters, talking points, letter writing templates, tips on submission, media contacts, and examples of published letters to the editor--as well as citizen guides, which will be succinct, page-long documents that will guide activists and ordinary citizens who want to take action on social and moral issues. In addition, case studies will be solicited that aim to showcase effective efforts made to reduce or publicize discrimination and make strides to reduce ignorance, and activist training sessions will take place on high school and college campuses, focusing on campus-level grassroots organizing. Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, an annual scholarly journal published by the American Humanist Association, will recieve the additional resources of the Kochhar Humanist Education Center, and will be expanded in frequency and content to incorporate humanistic perspectives on interfaith relations and history.
Curricular Educational Initiatives
To embark on lifelong humanist education, it’s reasonable to begin with early childhood. The Kochhar Humanist Education Center will draw on the expertise of both existing and start-up youth programs to create a national educational curriculum for humanist youth. Local groups have expressed strong interest in creating youth programs, but have not previously had the resources or understanding of how to properly launch their own programs.
The Kochhar Humanist Education Center will build on its youth education initiative by constructing an adult education curriculum with public courses in humanism. A nationally replicable curriculum that includes modules in church-state separation, rationally constructing morals, and fighting discrimination will benefit significant numbers of those interested in a humanist perspective.
Impact of Activities
The Kochhar Humanist Education Center hopes to impact the level of community activism among chapters and affiliates of the American Humanist Association by providing case studies and citizen action guides; they will bring to light issues on minority religions and ethnicities that humanist chapter members may not have considered before. It will also expand existing efforts like Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism and utilize other resources in working to eliminate the pernicious effects of ignorance and discrimination. Through position papers it will elucidate the humanist movement’s thinking on important issues and help educate the larger public on the importance of a broader rational view of knowledge.