I've seen so many ideologies slowly growing on educational curriculums that I want to be sure that in Asgardia we're going into the right direction.

I speak here about children's education, not adult.

I'm in favor of excluding from official teaching any moral, ideological or religious view, letting that to families to freely choose this part.

Only teaching positive sciences could be a good start. We can add history for example, even if here we'll begin to have different theories on some subjects

Thoughts?

It is very hard not to link some ideology towards education. The topics that one consideres as facts can be seen as full lie by others.

To pick an example, Evolution. Would evolution be a topic that we can educate? I know that in the western world a lot of people refuse to believe evolution is a thing. I am willing to assume that the majority of the world would say evolution to be made up.

Even while science says and proofs that evolution is a thing. Would it be possible to teach a controversial topic that if put on a vote might have the majorty of the world say it as fake.

I am now taking evolution as an example. But there are many topics that can be disagreed on. As soon as a topic collides with a persons world view it will quickly become controversial, and this applies to every field of education

Agree with you, and very good example. The fact is that "creationists"make themselves appear as scientist to give themselves more credits, but we know that they're charlatans (That's why in the first place some people create the pastafarism I think, to fight the idea of creationism taught at schools).

Of course I don't see evolution as Darwin did, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you can advance some arguments and theories.

In education I think we'll have to try to teach only demonstrated things at the beginning, letting the polemical one at a more advanced stage, when children are able to have their own critical opinion. The idea is more to avoid any ideology to brainwashed children with something that can harm in the future.

Obviously some idea may proved to be wrong after some time... It's unavoidable. We just have to try to avoid it the most possible.

Of course I don't see evolution as Darwin did, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you can advance some arguments and theories.

I have to ask. What do you see as different about evolution?

How about teaching students not what to think, but how to think? Essentially analyzing claims to determine validity; examining not just the answer and how we came up to it but also the question itself. The best teachers I had didn't just teach the answers, but they taught us how we came to them and why, so maybe classes regardless of topic should include this sort of reasoning and analysis instead of just what is "right" and wrong.

Maybe a political science class(es) would be a good addition alongside a general education regardless of what career a student would eventually take, and maybe a class that introduces students to the different ideological or religious views designed and taught by those views who want to teach, not proselytize or indoctrinate, students about their believes.

The reason I'd suggest a introduction course is that I think with excluding any official teaching on those ideals and leaving it to families who may not know or fully understand them, is that they might present a false representation based on biases. Asgardia will most likely be a nation of many different ideals, and allowing potentially biased and incorrect understanding of those ideals to permeate through the society, I think would be a bad idea. We only need to look now at the many situations around the world where certain groups are demonized, many because people have this misinformed idea about those groups that's been allowed to spread unchecked and unchallenged. We should be open to exploring them, regardless of how comfortable we might feel if only to prevent further stigmatization against them.

I'll take the idea of Evolution since it's already been dropped: it's hard to study several fields in biology without acknowledging the certain mechanics of evolution coming into play. So while its studied in science classes, we should also have class that examines the controversy surrounding the topic of evolution and examine why we have them.

This is a pretty interesting subject, thanks for bringing it up, I look forward to responses and continuing the discussion

My view on this is that basic education, even for kids should be a revised version of the Trivium and Quadrivum from the middle ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium

I am currently working on a proposal that includes this. Of course we need to teach students to be inquistive and to have an open broad reaching mind that is tolerant of widely different cultures and beliefs which is fundamentally inclusive and unifying.

+1 teaching how to think.

Question everything.