Teaching About Faith

Maureen Trantham makes an excellent and salient point in today’s Daily: Too many educated people know absolutely nothing about the world’s major revealed religions, and this invites huge trouble. It’s simple:

And if — as we claim — we are attempting to educate the next generation of the world’s leaders, shouldn’t that education include the footnotes to some of the world’s greatest struggles?

I seem to have been lucky to have social studies teachers who felt the need to tell their student something about how human beings live. It was actually on September 11, 2001, that I learned in my high school world history class that Sunnis and Shiites split back in the seventh century over a struggle to succeed the Prophet Muhammad. I learned in sixth grade that Buddhists and Hindus tend to view time and history as cyclical rather than rectilinear. Reactionary religion and cultural chauvinism are the great anti-democratic and anti-internationalist forces of our time, and teaching the basics of world faiths – including, strangely enough, the majority religion in our own country – is crucial for training a tolerant and competent citizenry.