Education and Religion Essay

1. Education and Religion were the two major foundations on which Charlemagne fortified his empire. The emperor had a profound love for the knowledge passed down by older civilizations. Specifically, he studied the culture and language of Ancient Greece and Rome, was able to speak Latin as fluently as his native tongue and could understand Greek very well and speak it a little. Under Alcuin he studied theoretics, dialectics and astronomy. He also tried to collect ancient manuscripts wherever they could be acquired which kept the knowledge of the ancients alive. Charlemagne employed religion as a unifying factor in his empire. He sought to convert to Christianity all the countries he had conquered. The Carolingian Empire was mainly agriculture based. He built roads to facilitate travel from one point of his empire to another. He relocated people from densely populated areas of the empire to the sparsely populated areas to even out the rate of production as well as he could and minimize the transport of necessities.. Lending with interest was forbidden. In general, our modern nations are still following Charlemagne’s strategy for agriculture with the focus on infrastructure development in poor countries, especially in Africa. The arbitrary relocation of people is somewhat of a problem. In the Philippines, squatters in the city who had been relocated to the provinces would not stay there since since communal agricultural labor is no longer in practice due to great possibility of land disputes arising from that arrangement. The squatters would have no job in the province and would return to the big city. the conduct of commerce and trade however, Charlemagne made no considerable contribution. Today, religious freedom is advocated globally. However, although not subscribing to the religion of the country you work in is not prohibited, subscribing to it provides a definite advantage. Many Overseas Contract Workers have converted to the religion of their host country to curry favor to its authorities. 2. In 1076, muslims captured Jerusalem on the pretext that the holy stone on which Muhammad prayed was there. But since Jerusalem was also the place where Jesus Christ died, Christian Europe organized campaigns to recapture it from the muslims. There were crusaders however who joined the campaigns for personal gain and riches to be found in the middle east. The crusades had both negative and positive effects. Many lives were killed, treasures were stolen, hatred was born between the Muslim and Christian peoples. On the other hand, Europe gained much by their introduction to the exotic treasures from the middle east like spices, brassware,rugs and silks which helped it boost its trade. Today we still see repercussions of the Crusades in the prolonged conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a conflict which has largely implicated their allies in the modern world. 3. Research reveals 83% of learning is acquired visually and only11% through hearing. divided among the other sense organs. The retention of learning is lowes with purely audio learning, higher with visual learning and highest with audio-visual learning. In other words, learning by sound is really second in rank to learning by vision it did not become so because of the use of audio-visual techniques in education. The reverse is true. Advertisers have resorted to audio-visual devices because learning and retention of information is optimum in that mode.