Defeating Terrorism
An old friend from grade school reacted adversely to the pic here which I had shared on Facebook, and my comment: “A terrific idea from a wonderful human being.” He wrote: Like the message Craig Shields, but it didn’t work with Hitler or the Japanese, it won’t work with Terrorists.
I respond: Well, here’s one point of education that I would think would be very powerful: An understanding that the Judeo-Christian and the Muslim Gods are the same entity with two different names. “Both” Gods are omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent beings. Yes, religious people in both cultures use different words to name our God because they speak different languages.
More importantly, educated people are more prosperous, less desperate and hateful, less susceptible to terrible ideas, and more capable of seeing through propaganda than their counterparts who were denied these fruits.
You are so right Craig. Educated people also tend to have less children.
Craig,
You wrote:
“More importantly, educated people are more prosperous, less desperate and hateful, less susceptible to terrible ideas, and more capable of seeing through propaganda than their counterparts who were denied these fruits.”
Quite true, but unfortunately it’s only a generalization which has many exceptions. Let us hope that the exceptions are not of sufficient strength and influence to overpower those who are capable of seeing through the propaganda.
While we can all sympathize with Mala’s yearnings and plight there are qualifications to what she demands as a lesson for the rest of society. She is from a culture that does not want to school women and only give the advantages of reading, writing and some ability with numbers to men. Within this context I absolutely agree with her. With more cinicism the social engineers will also admit that those women with more education tend to have fewer children.
But outside of this context the argument than any education is better than none is less convincing. When a young person works in a field next to the more experienced they add to their education. But when terrorists come into a village in Africa and round up the children as recrutes for their army they are also giving them an education. There is a large difference between schooling that aims to help the person and indoctrination for specific political or cultural goals.
American schooling is disaster in the making. At the primary levels we have turned to measuring students and teachers with standardized testing. That testing is supplied by private corporations with little or no oversight. Some of what passes as “testing” is now indoctrination with certain idealogies dictated by the heads of private corporations. Mass schooling has always tended toward hearding children toward conformity but there is now a growing faction that argues that “science” should be reduced to teaching religios beliefs (creationism.)
Everywhere we have shifted the balance in schooling between the individual and the demands of industry to creating unquestioned adherance to scientific and cultural dogma. It is only because as “Mark Twain” observed we don’t let our schooling interfere with our education that at least the large numbers of the young do continue to question and yearn for truth.
There are disturbing trends in American schooling. About that there can be no question. Fortunately there are also organizations which are well aware of the problems and have been, with varying effectiveness, countering them. One of the organizations is “Americans United for the Separation of Church and State”, of which I am a member. Among other things, they effectively oppose teaching creationism as if it were scientific. Another organization is the American Civil Liberties Organization (ACLU).
For more information about Americans United…. you can visit this website:
https://www.au.org