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With 70 per cent of the world’s population – or 4.8 billion people – identifying with a particular faith, education about the “other” must not be a choice, but rather a requirement in the pursuit of both safeguarding American ideals and building bridges of international tolerance. Such instruction is part and parcel of building respectful and stable societies – domestically and abroad. And if the United States wishes to continue to set an example in the arena of religious pluralism, it must enact a radical change to its education system.
“What is the definition of an educated person today? Does that definition include some basic knowledge about the [Muslim] world or not? If it doesn’t, perhaps that needs to be corrected,” stated His Highness the Aga Khan, spiritual leader of the world’s Shia Ismaili Muslims, on National Public Radio. In our forever-globalising world, the content of our education system must reflect the local, regional, national and international societies in which we will ultimately find ourselves.
The system must also prepare us with the knowledge and background to avert crises of understanding each other’s history, culture and religion, cementing our social structures as one grounded in intelligent discourse and voluntary engagement, rather than superficial knowledge and willful ignorance. The latter, we cannot deny, has proven disastrous.
Ismailimail 