June 24, 1999 Edward Graham Macfarlane   The Aim of Education   To Readers’ Page, The Dundee Evening Telegraph
 

I read with due care and attention the article 24-96-99 in which we were told that Councillor De Gernier plans to operate “more of a listening culture” than has formerly been the case in Dundee and as a lifelong teacher -- mostly in Rockwell School -- for 38 years: without promotion, because I condemned sectarian control of schools, I hope he reads the letters in THE EVENING TELEGRAPH which often publishes what I want to say.
Although I was reared to be a member of the Kirk of Scotland and was pleased that Kirk operated a constitution very similar to British democracy I found contact with philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Agnostics like the Huxleys more to my liking than the ideas of St Andrews trained Bachelors of Divinity like the Rev John Gilmour who preached and prayed in the Old Kirk of  Auchtermuchty in Fife .
I began to be ever more sceptical of British Protestant Christianity and it came to a climax when I was expected to repeat the Nicene Creed which revulsed my growing acceptance of agnosticism and introduction to humanism which eventually led me to abandon God, and Monarchy and Aristocracy in favour of Global Democratic Nationalism and a World Parliamentary Agenda which is now here.
Events like the recent attempts, in Scotland, by MSPs to avoid a monarchist oath and replace it with a democratic oath were events which pleased me greatly and seemed to me to be straws showing a growth of human inspiration for a basically philosophic approach to life as the new agenda for human unionism .
If the new convenor of education in Dundee will not merely “listen” but also “apply” these new basic principles of social planning it will make me very happy.
Education for a multi-cultural world is mistaken because when there are hundreds of armed nations without a common central goal it is a world for warlords and armies rather than free- thinkers and world citizens.
For example all terrorists would sit up and take notice if the EU arranged an EU referendum to reintroduce capital punishment for convicted killers like the one who has just been freed after killing five people in the great Hotel blast.
World educationists should treat matters of this kind very rigorously!
But, in general, the aim of education is to prepare all minds for life in a NEW DEMOCRATIC CLASSLESS COSMIC SOCIETY destined to take control  of the entire Universe -- which is quite different from the thinking underlying the action of Blair and Clinton and other foolish internationalists like Cook and Dewar and Salmond and Robertson! , Yeltsin, Milosevic and Shea -- all wrongly motived for a bonnier world.
Yours sincerely

       

Edward Graham Macfarlane  108 Forthill Road  Broughty Ferry  Dundee  Scotland  DD5 3DR  tel & fax: +44 (0)1382 730971  Email: globdem@sol.co.uk

 

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