Moulding students to think

Tuesday September 29, 2009
Moulding students to think
IKIM VIEWSBy NIK ROSKIMAN ABDUL SAMAD, Fellow of Centre for Consultancy and Training,IKIM
The rote-based education system only churns out students with data and information but without the means to convert them into knowledge. We need to move on to producing thinking students
IT WAS with great relief that we heard the Government’s announcement to revamp our educational system for the better.
We have discussed this issue before, that our national education system should start focusing on producing thinking students rather than memorisers of data.
The move to reduce the number of subjects taken at the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia level is commendable. But that will not have much significant impact on the student population as a whole if the primary school level is not put through a serious revamp as well.
Developing students’ minds should begin as early as possible.
During my stay at Edinburgh a few years back, my six-year-old son came home from school one day with a question following a nativity programme organised by his school.
He asked me: “Can God have a son?”. I replied: “No, in Islam we do not believe that God can have children. Since He is God and not a human being like us, he cannot have a child. Only a human being begets, not God”.
Then he replied: “Yes, my thoughts too, because God is not human like us. He is an alien!”
I was amused, yet shocked. The premises that I laid down for him in order to develop his thinking mind, had led him to a wrong conclusion, unfortunately. His logic was correct but the conclusion was erroneous.
I bring up this anecdote to share with readers the importance of developing students’ minds at an early age. It is the responsibility of parents and teachers to guide the children on the correct use of logic and reason to arrive at the right conclusion.
Logic (or dialectic as it also called) is one important tool taught by the Greek at an early age at the trivium level to develop minds. Logic is not a subject but rather the art of understanding things and arguing correctly.
That practise during the Greek ages in the form of trivium and quadrivium can be emulated and improved on to suit the modern age. This has been done by many scholars trying to bring back the classical spirit, but with a modern scent.
Havard Professor Howard Gardner, for example, mentions in his work Five Minds for the Future that there are five minds to be cultivated for an individual to excel – the Disciplined Mind, Synthesizing Mind, Creating Mind, Respectful Mind and Ethical Mind.
His emphasis on “minds” and “intelligence” has great thoughts and ideas that can be incorporated into our educational system.
A similar stress on developing the mind has in fact been espoused by classical Muslim scholars of the past who Islamised the Greek logics, in the introduction of ilm al-mantiq (logic) in the classical curriculum of madrasahs all over the Muslim world during that period.
The Disciplined Mind of Gardner is in reality the Socratic method of teaching logic to students.
The teacher raises questions and the students discuss them in class. By controlling the pace, the teacher can keep the class lively and at the same time stimulate the students’ thinking in a disciplined manner. Furthermore, the discussion is not bound by any textbook or syllabus that needs to be completed.
In other words, during the Classical period, students were taught the tools of learning at an early age. And, only later, at quadrivium level, were they taught such subjects as arithmetic, astronomy geometry and music.
The early stage is the foundational stage to develop the mind, to create the framework and logical foundation of the children’s mind, so that the real subjects could be fitted into the mind without any difficulty or incoherency.
I liken this to a computer that needs to be formatted and installed with an operating system – be it Windows, Linux, Apple or others – before software applications can be installed.
Our minds work in the same manner. What we have been doing in the past 50 years was “installing” various “software applications” (subjects) in our minds, but not the operating system for the mind.
At the end of the day, our students have huge data and information but their “non-formatted minds” are incapable of converting them into knowledge beneficial to them and society.
These “non-formatted minds” also, at times, come up will illogical and nonsensical ideas and arguments out of ignorance and the inability of the minds to synchronise and link scattered information coherently and logically.
In other words, we added new subjects to be studied without developing students’ minds. For that reason, we find certain people are now talking about an unlearning process, realising that what we have been practising or advocating or believing all this while appears not right.
This is also what Gardner lamented: The inability of “teachers, students, policymakers and ordinary citizens to sufficiently appreciate the differences between subject matter and discipline”.
Most individuals in most schools study subject matter - memorising facts and formulas, figures, dates etc, according to him. But discipline is rather a different phenomenon. Gardner says “it constitutes a distinctive way of thinking of the world”.
This disciplined mind is what is lacking in today’s modern education system.
While Islam does not view any dichotomy between the world and the afterworld (al-akhirah), the disciplined mind of a Muslim constitutes the ability to distinctively view not just the physical world but also existence (al-wujud) and reality (al-haqiqah) in its totality, which is encapsulated in the Worldview of Islam (ru’yat al-islam lil-wujud), the concept propagated by Professor Dr Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas.
It is therefore imperative for our policymakers to now come up with an education system which concentrates more on developing and nurturing students’ minds rather than bombarding them with subject after subject.
And, it should begin not only at the secondary level or SPM, but at the primary and pre-school stages.