09/21/01--- Cleveland Plain Dealer

Like everyone else in this coun try over the past week, my emo tions have run the gamut from shock and horror, to fear, depression and, ultimately, anger. Yet while I am angry, indeed furious that there are people in this world who are sufficiently deluded as to believe that killing more than 6,000 civilians is a good thing, I am not sufficiently angry to believe that a war of weapons and killing is a reasonable solution to this problem.

I have tried to read broadly over the last few days in order to make some sense of the current situation, but no article affected my thinking more than one by Jeffrey Goldberg, written for the New York Times Magazine and reprinted in Sunday's Plain Dealer ("Jihad spins out from a corner of Pakistan").

Goldberg speaks eloquently of having spent time in March enrolled in the Haqqania madrasa - a Muslim religious seminary - in Pakistan, in order to talk to students and teachers there. More than 10,000 madrasas exist in Pakistan, and at Haqqania, tuition, room and board are free. Students follow an eight-year course of study focusing on the interpretation of the Koran. No courses in world history or science or anything associated with the outside world are given. As Goldberg argues, this madrasa is a "jihad factory." Students are not encouraged to question freely, but rather are indoctrinated in a militant and ultimately highly political interpretation of the Koran. More leaders of the Taliban have graduated from the Haqqania madrasa than any other school in the world.

Goldberg's story illustrates the ultimate challenge facing President George W. Bush and his national security advisers: As long as millions of young and highly impressionable students in poor countries where there is little or no access to public education receive instead a free religious education that distorts their view of history, and of humanity, I cannot see that further killing of misguided zealots is likely to have a long-term impact in reducing terrorism. There is nothing as dangerous as someone who believes that God sanctions all of his actions, including murder.

Congress recently approved $40 billion to assist in reparations at home and in preparations for war.

I wonder how much it would cost instead to provide a program of assistance for places like Pakistan so that the million or so poor students in madrasas around the country would have another option for education, food and housing, one in which they are exposed to the knowledge of the world, instead of shielded from it.

In more peaceful times, President Bush wished to become known as the education president. I would argue that there is no better time than the present for him to remember this pledge. As a practical matter, we must make every attempt to find and arrest the specific individuals who were involved in this heinous crime against humanity, but if we are going to declare a large-scale war, we should declare a war on ignorance and intolerance both abroad and at home. Only by education can we rid the world of the kind of hatred and intolerance that killed more than 6,000 people last week.

Besides generous programs of technical aid to help lift up the prospects and spirits of young people in poor countries throughout the world, a renewed effort must be made to assist young minds in learning history, science, mathematics and literature in this country. We read that a greater number of young conservative Christian families are home schooling their children so that they will not be exposed to the "evils" of a secular educational system. Yet as long as the separation of church and state remains a fundamental doctrine of our democracy, it is our duty to ensure that as many students as possible are encouraged and advised to take advantage of those opportunities afforded by our public, secular educational system.

Too many Americans receive their only coherent view of the world from religious demagogues like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who have argued that the World Trade Center bombings are reprisals by God against pagans, homosexuals and abortionists at work in the United States. Impressionable young people who are exposed to vicious rhetoric such as this nonsense present an internal danger to free speech and democracy that is comparable in its own way to the external threat we now face from some religious zealots abroad.

As a scientist, I am convinced that the lessons of science can be of fundamental importance to society well beyond the specific knowledge of disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology.

More generally, the pursuit of knowledge is an international enterprise in which the individual language, culture, sex and even religious beliefs of the practitioners may play a secondary role. Ultimately, I believe that this pursuit helps teach us to celebrate our common humanity as a consequence of our common existence on this planet.

In a related vein, I am reminded of the words of physics Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, who stated that one of the great contributions of science to humankind is not that science has made it impossible to believe in God, but rather that science has made it possible to not believe in God.

By this he meant that science has made it possible to understand that there can be natural, not supernatural causes behind all physical events. The Earth orbits the sun because of gravity, not because angels are pushing it. A building collapses because the girders that support it are weakened by heat generated by a bomb ignited by a madman. The will of God need not be reflected directly in every event that happens in the world.

It may seem blasphemous to suggest it, but we owe every child a sound secular education to complement any religious training they may receive. In the best of all possible worlds, this can only further their wonder at what they may regard as the miracle of creation. In a world in which we appear to live, it may offer a far better hope of overcoming hatred and zealotry than all the weapons we can build, and all the soldiers we may send to use them.

Krauss is chairman of the physics department at Case Western Reserve University, and the author most recently of "Atom: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth . . . and Beyond."