I am following Academician (Academy of Athens - Greece) Evanghelos
Moutsopoulos’ view in considering education as an eminent normative universal
value endowed with the «status of a reality in itself».
Education has been awarded a decisive situation in our world, due to the
socio-economical evolution, to the techno-scientific soaring, to the extention
of scholarization, to the mass-mediatization and to the pedagogization of
social life. Education is no more an appendage reserved to parents, to teachers
and to other educators. It is present within a whole more mobile and more
dynamic, thus becoming rather action of the global society upon the
individual’s behavior. It has been invested by the productions and the mentality
of the technological revolution. The expansion of the internet is a striking
example thereof. This constitutes a further reason for maintaining the study of
Humanities. If education is being practiced
to the advantage of society, the latter should shape itself in order to profit
from it. Society should aim towards everybody’s promotion through everybody’s
education. «The right to education
entails as a corollary the idea of respecting the rights of education».
Conformingly, to what precedes, the European
Council’s Resolution 1580 (Oct. 4, 2007) condemns «the dangers of the ideology of creationism in
education». Such a sentence is
by no means restricted to Europeans and should be globalized. Since the 1920’s,
creationism as a movement stigmatizing evolution has developed in several
states. Teaching Darwin’s
theory would be equivalent to crime. Books that mention the process of
evolution are prohibited. Instead, creationism is taught.
Being in touch with the American Research Institute of Creationistic Research,
the Turkish Foundation for Research and Science has eradicated in Turkey the idea
of evolution from teaching and society. It freely distributes millions of
copies of the Atlas of Creation not
only in Turkey
but, in translation, worldwide as well. Such a Turkish invasion is understood
as an «unpreceded attack» by a
famous professor at the Collège de France.
So the minister of Education has urged, in 2007, the rectors of academies to
manage so that this Turkish Arles be «removed
from the Documentation and Information
Center of the schools». The geological Society of France, the
French Paleontologic Association, the French Federation of Geology and the
General Inspectorship of National Education implement the aforementioned
Resolution of the European Council. This Resolution «invites the educational authorities in the Memer
States to promote the scientific knowledge and the teaching of evolution and
oppose every attempt to present creationism as a scientific discipline».
American and Turkish creationism disposes
of enormous financial means and is implanted here and there. It is, then,
important to save the value called education wherever it is threatened. To this
end one ought to make education fit into a global cultural framework and even
in the framework of our whole civilization. Education will be saved provided it
becomes subject to a strong amelioration together with all the parameters it is
solidary with. Hence, education has to get globalized, in order to promote in
every person not only knowledge, but also a more-being, a valorization, a
know-how-to-seek, a know-how-to-create, a know-how-to-become.
