Some understand education can better their world

Such as these Muslim women:

The 5,000-odd women of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) work for the uplift of Indian Muslim women across the country and strongly believe that education is the one tool that will empower them. Around 350 of its members were in the capital last week for the first annual convention. Khatun Sheikh of Mumbai has been a part of BMMA since its inception in January this year. She said that being able to read and write is the greatest tool that a woman can have to fight all odds.

And some want to destroy it because it threatens their beliefs:

The Discovery Institute is spreading misinformation again. They have a document that implies that it would be OK for schools in at least some states to "teach the controversy", by which they mean that it is alright for teachers to promote Intelligent Design creationism in their classes. I wonder if the DI would also consider themselves liable if any teacher followed their advice, and discovered that they were costing their district an awful lot of money, as in Dover? Somehow, I doubt it.

But it truly is the great equalizer:

Education, as Horace Mann intelligently put it, "Beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, -- the balance-wheel of the social machinery." His argument is sound. According to Mann, educating the common man is the secret to success that progressive societies must understand to remain successful. In fact, almost every political, societal, or economic problem can be resolved by educating more people.

[snip]

Educating the masses can solve every dilemma currently facing our country, be it political, social, or economic. The higher the percentage of the general public receiving a general education, the better. By law, children under age 16 must attend public school, but is that enough? As a society we should encourage the attendance of schools of higher education, for the fate of the economy, social standards, and political values rest in the hands of the educated.

So pay attention to leaders who downplay and belittle education:

Freedom brings a clash of cultures

As Central Asia has discovered:

MOSCOW. (Igor Rotar, a freelance journalist, for RIA Novosti) "Russians colonized us. Now, we are free at last-but European and American missionaries flooded my country as soon as we won independence.

They are out to make my nation a Western puppet," a Turkmen secret service officer hotly said to a friend of mine, a local Protestant.

Though his reasoning surely did not hold water, he was correct on one point. Protestant missionaries are really among the most effective disseminators of globalization. They openly say they want to turn this world into one big community resting on Christian values, democracy and the free market. They see South Korea as one of their greatest victories-a former Buddhist country where Christian converts presently make up a majority. South Korean missionaries working in Central Asia emphasize that the Protestant faith alone has made their land an affluent and inalienable part of the civilized Western world.

Obstacles to globalization are nowhere so formidable as in former Soviet countries, especially in Central Asia-a region that serves as practical proof of Samuel Huntington's warning. As the American political expert once said, attempts to turn the world into a single community would meet harsh resistance in Muslim countries.

"Democracy clashes with the Islamic canon. It's a godless system that gives an alcoholic atheist the same rights as a pious Muslim! True Believers have no use for Western individualism. We Muslims have lived in a community since time immemorial. We do everything together. Our concept of freedom of speech is also quite different from the European one," a Central Asian of radical convictions told me.