7.0.7 Education Obligations - Overview

Version 1.4 September 2022                                                       (Previous Version)

Humanity as a whole has learned a lot about philosophy, science, history, religion and the arts, but most people, even the well-educated, are ignorant of most of these “known knowns�. 

Education is the long term solution to addressing many of the world’s ills, because it motivates and enables more people to make more informed, reasonable choices.  This education includes critical thinking about all domains of knowledge: philosophy from which we obtain our core values; science and history from which we obtain effecting and ancillary values; religion and culture which help us to express our values; and personal and political guidelines to act on these values.

Oppressive governments and religious leaders fear the impact of a broad liberal education and unfairly restrict access to learning, in case people learn about life under democratic pluralism.  White apartheid regimes kept blacks poor and powerless by restricting their school education.  Educated girls and women may discover that artificial sexist constraints on their behaviour are groundless in nature and any true religion.  Many (though not all) religious schools distort the teaching of science and history, or don't teach it at all, and provide only rote learning.

Our commitment to education has a profound moral basis.  Our commitments to truth, diversity, reality, life, love, responsibility and equality leads to a desire to share our understanding, with appropriate humility, with everyone: we are evangelists for informed reasonableness.  Our value judgments depend on our understanding of the facts and the likely outcomes of our choices.  Reasonable global beliefs about the world and ourselves provide the background understanding so that we can make better choices.  Widespread understanding of reasonable global values enables us to make better moral choices in our personal lives and in political spheres.

There is a religious purpose to secular education: to explain our origins and our role(s) in the world, and provide exemplary models and behavioural guidelines, which are the central elements of the universal narrative of all religions, including REALigion – a Reasonable Global Way. 

We must not confuse education with schooling.  Many children don't learn well in schools, or are turned off learning, or learn the wrong lessons about themselves, society, knowledge and the good.  So school reform is required.  But education must be provided in multiple ways, throughout life, through work places, cultural centres, and so on, as well as schools.  The media – news & current affairs, as well as fictional & factual story telling – inevitably plays a major role, for good or evil.

We mustn’t teach anything as dogma, as fixed, unchanging beliefs that cannot be questioned.  We must teach how we arrive at our conclusions, not just the conclusions themselves.  Despite our commitment to the truth we also value diversity and hence freedom of expression.

Education enables us to better conduct our daily lives in the market place, as producers and consumers, to support ourselves and our families, and to be better informed of local and global events, so we can participate more effectively as citizens, locally, nationally and globally. 

   more                                                                            Statement 41

We can especially teach about the joy and courage that we can gain when we realize that this Reasonable Global Way, REALigion, inspires Hope, which is often hard to keep hold of.