| Any time you educate someone in technology you increase their potential to do harm. The high school kid with sharpshooter skills can do more harm than the one without, the professor with a good and solid understanding of chemistry will be able to do more damage than the one that studied English poetry in the 17th century. Technology is a two-edged sword (for want of a better analogy), you can do good with it or bad. Technology education is neutral as well. The people that have access to technology decide what they can do with it. And that means that if you educate people in a country where terrorism is high that you will proportionally educate more terrorists. But that's not a reason to deny the others of that education, in fact that's an excellent reason to educate all of them, which will to some extent level the advantage of technically inclined people bent on destruction. Check out the high schoolers that are technically inclined, I'll bet you that a good portion of those that studied chemistry got in to it because they liked to play with stuff, and in the process learned a thing or two about explosives, maybe even played with them. I know I did. And if I should turn 'terrorist' I'd probably make a half decent one, as would anybody else with some understanding of technology. What stops people from doing stupid stuff though is not just their technical education - or lack thereof - , but their overall education and worldview. And if you were a terrorist in the making, aged 15 or so and nicely brainwashed by your environment, told to go study engineering, you would do it to and you'd possibly excel at it. So, that might even be the spot where you might find out who these people are and deflect them before they can do real harm. You'll stop losing by creating economic parity and making sure that those in the world that would turn to terrorism have too much to lose themselves. You'll never achieve that goal by denying them an education, that makes the disparity even greater. |
This is (if you'll excuse the aside) one of my favourite hypothetical exercises.
The conclusion I usually draw is mostly that technical knowledge is a lot less important than technical competence. And also that the main "failure" of terrorist attacks (or planned attacks) are due to a lack of this competence higher up the chain.
Whereas the actual bombers or bomb makers (to take a primitive example) might be highly educated they are usually recruited (or as you say sent after recruitment to receive training) to achieve a plan. The planners are almost certainly a lot less technically skilled - they make crazy mistakes or bad choices and it all goes bad for them.
When you consider how GOOD a terrorist you yourself could be (in a coldly logical way) and then think that the vast majority of visitors here are as good or better then I think it puts things in a lot of perspective compared to the fear these people are supposed to instil. The people that do turn to it are, really, no match to our collective might.