The goals of the dialogue among churches cannot be achieved without a system of education that ensures that church communities come to the knowledge of what the dialogue is all about. It also means a system of reception in which what dialogue experts have done among themselves are broken down into practical elements. This is important because knowledge remains abstract and inaccessible until it is made concrete and practical. The author of the famous book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire, in his other book, The Pedagogy of Freedom, argues for an educational system that integrates theory and praxis. According to him,

“Intellectuals who memorize everything, reading for hours on end, slaves to the text, fearful of taking a risk, speaking as if they were reciting from memory, fail to make any concrete connections between what they have read and what is happening in the world, the country or the local community. They repeat what has been read with precision but rarely teach anything of personal value. They speak correctly about dialectical thought but thin mechanistically.”

Freire thus calls for another form of teaching and learning in which the various components of knowledge are taken into consideration. These components show how complex reality is, because they involve both conceptual and practical knowledge. But more than that, they involve the element of experiences, of both the teach and the learner. In that sense, learning becomes a superior action since both the teacher and the taught become learning in that circle of knowledge sharing.

Ecumenical education becomes then a space for knowledge sharing – in which we are no longer contented with giving out what we think ecumenism is, but also, we involve all participants in the process of learning and sharing of experiences. You cannot teach me about dialogue with another Christian community without creating a space where the other community expresses itself and offers its experiences as materials for my learning, and where also in offering my own experiences, the other Christian learns also.

In that sense ecumenical education becomes a space for cooperative learningrather than competitive learning. It is not a ground for debate on who is better than the other. It is a place of encounter and mutual enrichment. In cooperative learning some ideals of community are reflected. In this community, “we benefit from and celebrate the success of each other; we create a common future with our fate lying in each other’s hands; we cannot do it without one another,” Simon Oxley argues. There is no pretense of self-sufficiency, because everyone understands that humility is a prerequisite for great learning. On the contrary, a competitive learning only aims at outwitting the other; it aims are proving that it is better than the other; it is essentially a debate that is only designed to oppose the other. And it that case the identities of the communities involved are thus constructed in negatives.

An example of a negative identity construction is an experiment that was conducted recently in Germany among two group of kids. One group is made up of Catholics and the other, Lutherans. When asked about what makes them Catholics or Lutherans. On the one hand, the Catholic kids responded: We are Catholics because we have the big cross at the center of our church, we have holy water, we have statue of Blessed Virgin Mary, we have the tabernacle. On the other hand, the Lutheran kids responded: We are Lutherans because we don’t have big cross in our church, we have no holy water, we don’t have any statue, we have no tabernacle. Ecumenical education offers an opportunity for churches to move away from such negative, contrast identity construction. In fact, through dialogue and cooperative learning, we come to know our traditions better and better. We also come to know others better. More so, it helps us to appreciate both our commonalities and our differences, and in that way, we can witness to the world around us in a more united manner.