7.0.7 Education Obligations - Overview

Version 1.3 December 2016                                                        (Previous Version)

Education is the long term solution to addressing many of the world’s ills.  This 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 know and fear the impact of education and unfairly restrict access to learning.  Oppressed peoples under tyrannies are prevented from learning about life under democratic rule.  White apartheid regimes kept blacks poor, ignorant and powerless by restricting their school education.  Nazi education promoted racism and excessive nationalism, suppressing individuality and difference.  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, even in liberal, affluent societies, distort the teaching of science and history, or don't teach it at all, and independent thought is discouraged, in favour of rote learning.

On the other hand, humanity as a whole has learned a lot, about philosophy, science, history, religion and the arts, but most individuals, even at the highest levels, are ignorant of most of these “known knowns�.  Greater awareness and understanding of reasonable global beliefs and values, will enable us to make appropriate choices in our personal lives and political spheres.

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.  Our commitment to the truth cannot be separated from our acceptance of uncertainty and thus a commitment to diversity.  We must explain how we come to our beliefs and the techniques we use to seek the truth, including reason and evidence, mathematics and statistics, and common sense!

Education is in a large part directed to enabling us to participate in society, to conduct our daily lives in the market place, as producers and consumers, to support ourselves and our families.  It is also directed to enabling us to be informed of local and global events, so that we can participate effectively as citizens in our communities, locally, nationally and globally. 

Our emphasis on 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 reasonableness.  Our value judgments depend on our understanding of the facts and the likely outcomes of our choices.  Reasonable global beliefs about the nature of the world and ourselves provide us with the necessary background understanding so that we can make better informed moral choices. 

   more                                                                            Statement 41

Promoting education reflects our core values of truth, diversity and reality.  We can't force people to be good, but we can teach about the consequences of our life changing decisions, especially if we choose, and value, life, love, beauty, responsibility and equality.  We can especially teach about the joy and courage that we can gain when we see that this Reasonable Global Way inspires hope.