Education is a BIG Threat

It’s a dirty little secret that dogmatic political and belief systems abhor people with knowledge who can think for themselves. Inevitably, an open mind in different human beings exposed to different cultural exchanges will generate differing views of the world and man’s relationship to it. But if your political system or belief system proselytizes one true path and no other, feeding young minds with abundant facts, challenging those with creativity to create, and allowing individuality and individual expressions of opinion can be fatal to your core values.

From dogmatic control based on repetition and rote learning by “one true path” fundamentalists to censoring the educational material allowed to be used in the classroom under the guise of protecting some rather extreme views of the world, education is particularly vulnerable to social unrest. It is why at a university level, tenure was invented – to allow established professorial experts to say and embrace unpopular academic positions. While we can certainly point to certain advances that would never have happened without religious support – the preservation of thought through careful monastic transcription or the Jesuits’ ability to grow our vision of mathematics – religion more often than not gives rise to intolerance of inventive thought… which all-too-often gives rise to violent attack against students and their schools.

Excluding the aberrant school shootings that seem uniquely to plague American schools (e.g., the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012), according to a just-released study entitled Education Under Attack (prepared by a coalition of the United Nations, human rights and aid organizations): “There were 9,600 attacks worldwide, with incidents recorded in 70 countries, with the worst problems in Africa and parts of Asia and South America. There was a pattern of deliberate attacks in 30 of these countries, where such violence was used as a ‘tactic of war,’ said [Diya Nijhowne, director of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, who added…] ‘These are not cases of schools and their staff just caught in the crossfire…They are bombed, burned, shot, threatened, and abducted precisely because of their connection to education.’” BBC.co.uk, February 27^th.

The perpetrators feel morally justified if not mandated to apply rigid teaching systems, censorship or murderous pressure to espouse their fundamentalist views, from keeping girls out of classrooms (and temptation) – isolated and ignorant in their homes so that they will fulfill the subservient and captive rolls of homemakers/baby-makers – to setting fire to schools and slitting the throats of boys attending traditional schools in Northern Nigeria, because Western education and culture is forbidden under the teachings of the local Islamists. “After the death of its founder, Sheik Yusuf Mohammed, the acting leader Sanni Umaru, clarified the meaning of Boko Haram which he said is not that ‘Western Education is a sin, but rather that Western Civilization is forbidden.’” Femi Ibrahim on Academic.edu.

Think of the Taliban who put a bullet in the head of a vocal teenager, Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, in 2012. He believed with every fiber in his body that girls must not be taken out of their immediate family situations to be schools… that the education they might receive could distract them from or make them rebellious against their God-imposed mandate to tend the hearth. Where are most of these incidents? It’s not hard to guess.

“The country with the greatest number of attacks was Pakistan, with the most common assault being the blowing up of school buildings… Colombia was the most dangerous place to be a teacher, with 140 murders and thousands of death threats.

“For school pupils, Somalia was the country where children were most likely to be pressed into becoming soldiers… Syria's conflict has seen deadly attacks at universities in Aleppo and Damascus and there were high levels of attacks on students in Yemen and Sudan.

“The perpetrators have included government forces, armed insurgents, terror groups and criminal gangs. They have committed murders, abductions and intimidation.” BBC.co.uk. What makes these attacks even more difficult to comprehend is that they are often pressed upon vulnerable children, unable to defend themselves, and sent for schooling by caring parents. But whether it’s the “hand of the true God” administered by a Texas educational administrator or the hand of a more malicious and murderous Taliban or Boko Haram terrorist, the root cause of this behavior is intolerance laced with ignorance and accelerated by an incredible feeling of moral justification. My way is the only way is the only correct way is a really tough message to sell to an educated human being.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and if Christianity is about not sitting in judgment and “casting the first stone,” tolerance and brotherly love, there are a whole lot of “Christians judging Muslims” who really need to re-read the New Testament and look at themselves in a clear and bright mirror.