Question

How to prevent terrorism through education?

Answer 1

Explanation:

Education is the key that unlocks human potential. For children living in the most disadvantaged and marginalized communities, it provides hope for a better future. But today, in hotspots across the world, education is under threat, with potentially serious consequences for all of us.

Answer 2

Explanation:

Many students, their parents, and schools see education as a process of training to do well in tests and examinations, in order to acquire appropriate qualifications for lucrative employment and to make a comfortable living. Governments and industries see education as the process of creating manpower to contribute to the nation’s GDP. The goal of education from both perspectives thus appears to be money-oriented.

There is, however, an alternative conception, which views the ultimate goal of education as helping the young to develop their capacity to work for their own well-being —as well as that of the planet and its residents. ‘Well-being’ in this sense refers to health and fitness along with other dimensions such as physical, emotional, intellectual, societal, pragmatic, aesthetic, and ethical.

Accepting this alternative view commits us to designing curricula (syllabi, textbooks, lesson plans, assessment) that nurture the capacity to work towards minimizing the ills that humanity faces along each of the above dimensions including the likes of cancer, diabetes, clinical depression, and Alzheimer’s; hatred, intolerance, injustice, ignorance, gullibility, irrationality, and blind faith; racism, casteism, fundamentalism; poverty, violence, and environmental destruction.

As such, violent extremism (VE) is one of these ills that we would expect education to prevent.

How do we design an educational system that:

reduces the contagion of violent extremism; and

empowers youth to act, especially when they are in positions of power, to prevent the spread of extremism.

To address this, we have to begin with another question: What do we mean by violent extremism and what exactly is this illness that we wish to heal? Next, we have to identify the causes of the illness and then explore how education can serve to counter these causal factors.