A Message from Executive Director Fish Stark

(April 10, 2026) — I just landed in San Antonio. I’m here to attend the National School Boards Association, equip school board members across the country with tools to fight back against Christian Nationalism, and recruit new members for the Association of Secular Elected Officials.

One of the things I thought about on the plane: The Christian right knows damn well what they think children should learn in school.

What do we think?

Of course we oppose pushing conservative Christian theology on schoolchildren. But one of the things I learned studying developmental psychology that’s stuck with me the most is: It’s nearly impossible to replace a thought by negating the thought. You have to substitute a positive thought. In other words, we have to do more than say “you can’t teach that in a public school.” We have to put forward a positive vision for what children should learn instead. 

We don’t want to simply turn the tables and preach about humanism in public schools. We’ve always believed in the freedom of conscience and the separation of religion and government, which means no special privileges or promotion for any belief system. Not theirs, not ours.

When I think about what I want school to do for my future kids: I want them to seek knowledge, not fear it. I want them to know the world in its full breadth, the beautiful and the hard parts together, not sit and map their own narrow corner of it. I want them to be confronted with ideas that challenge them, that make them uncomfortable. I want them to see ideas in three dimensions, to turn them over and over in their hands and poke and stretch them and find their cracks. I want them to learn how to ask good questions about what they’re told that yield greater insight – or even contradictions. As the humanist author Zora Neale Hurston put it, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” That sounds like a good thing.

I want them to understand what we know to be true about the world – the hard facts of science, the architecture of mathematics, history including all the ugly parts, from multiple perspectives. I want them to learn how to use words to describe and persuade and collaborate and all the things that bring new ideas into being. I want them to learn how to read books. Full goddamn books, all the way through. I want them to muck around in the various arts and sports and see which they find joy in. I want them to learn how various jobs are done and have the opportunity to try some out. I hope occasionally the teacher turns off the lights and puts on a good movie. I hope they make friends and get in arguments and figure out how to resolve them with enough adult supervision but not too much meddling. I want them to learn about life and how to live it joyfully and confidently and responsibility, and that there are multiple routes to a stable living and a satisfied heart.

There’s always been a tension in American education between folks who believe that the purpose of school is to teach kids the right things and the people who believe the purpose of school is to teach them the right skills. The latter camp – the one I fall in – was led for many years by John Dewey, one of my idols and an original signer of the Humanist Manifesto, who shaped both the humanist movement and public schools as we know them. “The aim of education,” Dewey said, “Should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think.”

That’s scary for parents who believe the worst thing in the world would be for their child to believe something different than they do.

In a sense, I get it. I think my beliefs are correct and healthy. If I didn’t, I’d have different beliefs! So I’d love for my kids to share them.

But I don’t have a civil right to shield my children from any knowledge that contradicts my ideals. I don’t have a right to their mind. And frankly, I’d rather they have different beliefs than mine that they arrived to freely and confidently than share my beliefs because we stuck them in a box with a tiny hole in it so that only our view of the world could show.

When it comes specifically to the topic of religion and how it’s shaped history, culture, literature, and art, I think the UK and other European countries have a very balanced approach to teaching religious studies in public schools. They meticulously cover the beliefs and evolution of all major belief systems, including humanism, encouraging children to be broadly literate and tolerant of all the beliefs their neighbors might have. I don’t know if I trust our current Christian Nationalist government to implement such a program without bias. But I do think it’s a worthy goal.

So I’m excited to meet some of the school board members who are defending the true missions of schools – as places of learning, inquiry, challenge, and pluralism – against hardcore indoctrination. And I’m excited for our expanded policy team to provide them with more resources to support them in their work. (As always, you should join the Center for Freethought Equality, our c4 sister organization – which is free and takes 60 seconds – to learn more about our advocacy and political work that supports elected officials who care about humanist values. There are elements of what we do I can’t share here, for legal purposes.) 

What do you think? What should humanists say is the purpose of school?

For humanity,
Fish