| Lacking a cure for AIDS, society must
offer education, not only by public pronouncement but in classrooms. Those with
AIDS or those at high risk of AIDS suffer prejudice; they are feared by some
people who find living itself unsafe, while others conduct themselves with a
"bravado" that could be fatal. AIDS has {{U}}afflicted{{/U}} a society already short
on humanism, open-handedness and optimism. Attempts to strike it out with the
offending microbe are not abetted by pre-existing social ills. Such concerns
impelled me to offer the first university level undergraduate AIDS course, with
its two important aims. To address the fact the AIDS is caused by a virus, not by moral failure of societal collapse. The proper response to AIDS is compassion coupled with an understanding of the disease itself. We wanted to foster (help the growth of) the idea of a humane society. To describe how {{U}}AIDS tests institutions upon which our society rests{{/U}}. The economy, the political sys- tem, science, the legal establishment, the media and our moral ethical-philosophical attitudes must respond to the disease. Those responses, whispered, or shrieked, easily accepted or highly controversial, must be put in order if the nation is to manage AIDS. Scholars have suggested that how a society deals with the threat of AIDS describes the extent to which that society has the right to call itself civilized. AIDS, then, is woven into the tapestry of modem society; in the course of explaining that tapestry, a teacher realizes that AIDS may bring about changes of historic proportions. Democracy obliges its educational system to prepare students to become informed citizens, to join their voices to the public debate inspired by AIDS. Who shall direct just what resources of manpower and money to the problem of AIDS? Even more basic, who shall formulate a national policy on AIDS? The educational challenge, then, is to enlighten the individual and the societal, or public responses to AIDS. |