Results 1 to 4 of 4

Thread: Secular Education as a New System of Exploitation

  1. #1
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Aug 2009
    Posts
    18

    Secular Education as a New System of Exploitation

    Within the context of modern secular civilization and on the ground and background of its political, cultural, and ideological directions, a kind of education has been set up, giving birth to a new generation out of extremist and petrified livers. Education in the new sense is no more than a system of exploitation within which young people are to be made as robots and assigned to fulfil some specific limited tasks. This raises the question: what sort of education humanity is really in need of? And for what sake schools as social fabrics should be directed to ensure that humanity will witness a happy new future?

    During the dark ages, the prevailing education in Europe was religious. It was the starting point of a people wishes to get saved and purified from sins. Their teachers were a group of popes, priests, and preachers, who pretend to play the role of mediation for they know God and understand his knowledge as embedded in the scriptures. Such education is extremist and exclusive in the sense that it restrains peoples' productivity and imposes a total control over their minds and intellectual drives. Yet the claim of mediation and salvation which the church and those behind the screen spent most of their time living on, turned, by the time, into a very sophisticated system of religious, political, and economic exploitation.

    It is from this turning point that most of westerners lost their trust in religion and religious beliefs. The change was so extreme and has resulted in some fallacy in the western mind structure and methods of thinking, learning, and living. For instance, the unsuccessful and tragic experience of western man with religious persecution led him to revolt against religious beliefs in general. This involves two unconscious mistakes: First, western man failed to make a clear cut distinction between beliefs and practices; he thought that beliefs and practices should be identical, and hereby the problems he faced with religious practices drove him to revolt them and against religious beliefs in general. This false projection involves ignorance of the fact that practices are no more than approximate images of beliefs and they may even operate as an exploitation of beliefs to hypocritically attain some political, ideological, or economic interests. Second, the mistaken conception of the relationship between, perhaps, theory and practice generated a negative value judgment toward religion in total. This over-generalization, in turn, paved the way to the spreading of new-old fallacies including atheism, secularism, rationalism…etc.

    One wonders: what is the additional value of the modern ideological content to the educational record? None denies it purely technical. We admit the west has taken a very wide step as far as technology is concerned; it has made up, thanks to technology, new ways of learning and therefore opened new horizons for lifelong learning and continuing education. Yet I cannot personally see any equilibrium in the personality of a learner brought up at the bosom of wild capitalism and globalism. The only education that must take place there in such atmosphere is that which satisfies one's bodily needs at the expense of human spiritual demands.

    How Man, therefore, can get saved if grown up at the palm of a non-moderate education, and education that idolizes the pair ($ & S)/ (Dollar & Sex) and spends the highest premium, labour, and time to glorify them? It's high time now to confess by concrete argument that education will never save unless it responds physically and morally, to the law of ethics and global moderation.

    There are, after all, two broad systems of education: (traditional) and (modern). The traditional system of education often refers to the ancient perspective and set of practices carried out in the name of education: it is usually known of putting stress upon knowledge and ethics. It therefore seeks to answer tow basic questions: what is education? And what is it for?
    The first tends to identify, specify and determine what to know to learn it by heart, and the second pertains to justifying and relating the aims of education to the moral and utmost end of human existence. Knowledge and values are, hence, two basic standards of the traditional system of education.
    Last edited by OULGOUT; 08-20-2009 at 07:50 AM. Reason: url

  2. #2
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Aug 2009
    Posts
    18

    Education and the Secularization of Knowledge

    In a lecture I delivered in Moulay Ismail University, Méknes, for the students of English department, on the topic "the Philosophy of Knowledge between Science and Religion", one of the students intervened during the discussion and argued that secularism doesn't exert any sort of dictatorship over people, and that it grants the latter all the freedom they need to practice their religion without persecution. That young man's intervention was a criticism to what I said during the core lecture, that secularism constitutes one of the aspects of dictatorship, for it excludes religion out of the scene of power without any rational justification. It was clear that the young man didn't grasp well my arguement; or rather he was overwhelmed in the secular Marxist thought as told me latter on by one of my friends who knows him well.

    Needless to say, secularism implies the separation between religion and state. That is, excluding religion out of all the sensitive spheres of power, including politics, education, economy, media, and judicature. Religion in the secular point of view is meant for the socio-cultural arena, and therefore it hasn't and shouldn't have any say as far as politics is concerned. This fact is plainly embodied in the constitutions of secular states, lived and experienced in the daily life of people in secular societies. Therefore my target here is not to recapitulate what is actually agreed upon, but to show the infrastructure of the concept education and values in the new secular perspective.

    In the history of educational systems, one can broadly distinguish between two systems with much discretion to the conventional adjectives I may use to describe each one of them: (traditional) and (modern). The traditional system of education often refers to the ancient perspective and set of practices carried out in the name of education: it is usually known of putting stress upon knowledge and ethics. It therefore seeks to answer tow basic questions: what is education? And what is it for?

    The first tends to identify, specify and determine what to know to learn it by heart, and the second pertains to justifying and relating the aims of education to the moral and utmost end of human existence. Knowledge and values are hence two basic standards and components of the traditional system of education. Consequently, the branches of knowledge pertaining to religion, ethics, philosophy, and theology are classified in the highest peak of the scale of the educational program.

    The modern system, however, is a revolt against the traditional one, and it refers to the modern approaches, theories, methods, techniques and principles of teaching and learning. It always tends to base the educational operation on modern science and technology, imparting a set of central concepts closed to the scientific field like computing, management and communication technology.

    This system came to make a sort of epistemological shift from religious education in the sense that knowledge and ethics, which were once the utmost aims of the traditional system, are downgraded from their standing as aims and ideals and positioned in the bottom among any positivistic technique which one may or may not resort to. As result the branches of knowledge pertaining to the empirical sciences, technology, economy and marketing are upgraded into the top of the educational scale and given much more value, concessions, and prestige.

    It is here where the secularization of education, religion, values and knowledge begun. Religion from this secular perspective does no longer define itself by itself, but it is Man who does so in accordance with his material and instinctive desires, the elections campaigns, the market needs, and the trends of the USD…

    The crime secularists did commit in the question of education is not merely the total suppression of values, religion, and ethics, but it is the secularization of all that by depriving the educational values of their divinely superior criterion and attribute them to human relative mind and grubby ideologies. They have realized at last that Islam is a great religion and can never be defeated by simple deceit. And when they failed to intrigue upon it, all that they could do is to pretend its values legacy.


    [COLOR="Blue"]Abdelouahed OULGOUT
    Last edited by Scheherazade; 08-20-2009 at 07:33 AM. Reason: url

  3. #3
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Aug 2009
    Posts
    18

    Scientific Dogma and the Negation of Religion

    Truth is what we look for. We may differ in the way we think of it, but it is still that existential concern which will bring us together one day. However what stifles the project of such a civilizational dialogue and abort any attempt to get near the other and share concerns with him is that scientific tendency, which often imprisons our mind and slams the door of knowledge and enlightenment against it. Religious beliefs are without doubt, the major shapers of our wills and conceptions. Owing to the central position it holds, religion should be rethought to find out its points of intersection with the current scientific knowledge. By this, one does not intend to say that the fault is in religion, but it is rather in people’s thinking and understanding.

    Many atheists, who gossip in the name of science and rational thinking never stop excluding the unseen off the scientific dispute. The unseen, being the second half of the whole existence, is always judged by the materialists to be a world of ghosts and superstitions rather than a world that deserves respect and consideration. One asks: till when those intellectuals will continue to negate religion as a rational source of scientific knowledge? Are religion and science contradictory or rather complementary?

    Such questions really provokes any believer’s feelings and thought and push him to argue against such a scientific dogma, which puts science and religion in two opposite extremes and deceives the weak believers to apply for a science-religion dialogue as if there is actually a real controversy among them.

    “Seeing” is not always “believing”. “Seeing” is “perhaps” and “maybe” and many other phrases that express the very relativity of human recognition; however, “believing” is the highest degree at which human recognition changes into faith. By this one means that it is not reasonable for me to dogmatically deny a truth simply because my power of recognition is not enough to perceive it or because the device used for that recognition does not go with the nature of that truth. The Unseen is Unknown for the eye, but it may be known by the ear or by any other system of recognition. Being unseen, the sound waves (S.W.), for example require an auditory system to be perceived. Regardless of whether that system is natural or artificial, each truth or knowledge has its own nature as well as its appropriate system of recognition.

    In looking at the forgoing evidences, scientists in terms of physicists and naturalists have no right to disprove the Unseen because their studies and researches are concerned with the field of physics rather than with that of metaphysics. Hence if the materialistic tendency in thinking and judging makes one’s point of view superficial and incapable to recognize the spiritual dimension of knowledge, then what one cannot prove at once, he should not disprove it at all.

    To sum up, science and religion remain two wings of the same bird. Such a conclusion does not only correct human conception about the world and truth, but it also bridges the gap between the “I” and “the other” and makes the horizons of Civilizational Dialogue more and more spacious.


    [COLOR="Blue"]Abdelouahed OULGOUT
    Last edited by Scheherazade; 08-20-2009 at 07:36 AM. Reason: url

  4. #4
    Cat Person DickZ's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    Arlington, Virginia, United States
    Posts
    694
    Comment deleted.
    Last edited by DickZ; 08-20-2009 at 12:40 PM.

Similar Threads

  1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau on education
    By Tariq Hayat Las in forum Rousseau, Jean Jacques
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 11-11-2008, 11:25 AM
  2. American education system
    By JaneB in forum General Chat
    Replies: 34
    Last Post: 05-06-2007, 01:22 PM
  3. A Room of 12 Moons
    By Dreadnought in forum General Writing
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 04-24-2007, 08:39 PM
  4. By socialist market economy definition
    By Goethe in forum Who Said That?
    Replies: 3
    Last Post: 07-27-2006, 01:09 PM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •