Slavery through religious education

Slavery takes many different guises and yet is a difficult state to define. As such, it is sometimes concealed behind supposed norms of traditional societies. For religious educators, slavery remains an issue on a number of fundamental levels: a matter of the most basic freedom, an issue of economic exploitation, an historical phenomenon that religious traditions themselves justified and benefited from, and, where caste means deprivation of human dignity, an ingrained part of the present-day, social and cultural life experience of around 250 million people today through the caste system (Gearon 2002).