Developing Students with Minds for the Future

Nik Roskiman bin Abdul Samad

Fellow

29/09/2009 | The Star

It was with great relief that we heard the announcement made by our government to
revamp our educational system for the better. We have discussed this issue before that
our national education system should now start focusing more on producing ‘thinking'
students rather than ‘memorizers of data'. The move to reduce the number of subjects
taken at the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia level is commendable and one of forward steps
towards it. But still, that does not have much significant impact on the student population
as a whole if the primary school level is not undergoing a serious revamp as well. In my
humble opinion, to develop students' minds should begin as early as possible during their
educational process.

I remember during our stay at Edinburgh a few years back, when my 6 year-old son came
back home from school one day with a perplexing question in his mind after attending a
nativity programme organized by his school. He asked me "can God has 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, but not
God". Then he replied, "yes, I thought of the same, because God is not human like us, he
is an alien!". Aah!, I was amusingly shocked on hearing his answer. The premises that I
laid down to him in order to develop his thinking mind, had led him into wrong
conclusion, unfortunately. His logic was correct but the conclusion was erroneous. This is
what is known in the science of logics as ‘correct premises, but wrong conclusion'. The
‘inference' he had made to reach to the conclusion that ‘God was an alien' was invalid in
spite of correct premises.

I brought up this anecdote is in order to share with our readers on the importance of
developing the student minds at an early age. The children's ability to reason out and
using their logical tools should be nurtured and polished, though at times they might end
up in wrong conclusions. It is the responsibilities of the parents and teachers to guide the
children on the correct usage of logics and reason in order to arrive at right conclusion.
Some argue whether the teachers themselves have the ability to guide the students
properly. Obviously if they are not, then proper trainings and short courses should be
conducted. It has been more than fifty years we have been conditioning to rote-base
approach, and it is high time now we move forward to developing students' minds
approach.

Developing minds is a very important subject in most developed countries nowadays and
more so to developing country like Malaysia. Because the developed minds will lead to
producing great thoughts and ideas that will eventually be put into practice. This mind
might also give rise to the emergence of great personalities and character builders, while
the benefit to the society will be multifold. One of them is ultimately in the form of
civilizational and technological advancement. As such we find that, logics (or dialectic as
it was called at times) is one the important ‘tools' taught by the Greek at early age at the
trivium level to develop minds. Logic is not a ‘subject' but rather an art of understanding
things and arguing correctly. Unfortunately, today it has been neglected and the neglect
in proper training of arguing correctly has resulted in many statements uttered by leaders,
politicians and academics are full of fallacies and illogical, if not absurd. We have not
taught the ‘tools of learning' when they were small, as Dorothy Sayers suggested, but
rather go straight to teaching the ‘subjects' to our children whose minds have not yet
ready to handle the subjects.

What has been practised during the Greek ages in the form of trivium and quadrivium
could be emulated and improved to suit the modern age. This has been done by many
scholars trying to bring the classical spirit but in the flavour of modern scent. A Havard
Professor, Howard Gardner, for example mentions in his work Five Minds for the Future
that there are five minds need to be cultivated in an individual for him to excel. They are
the Disciplined Mind, Synthesizing Mind, Creating Mind, Respectful Mind and Ethical
Mind. While I am no fan of Gardner nor I intend to elaborate on his five minds just
mentioned, but his emphasis on ‘Minds' and ‘Intelligences' have lot of great thoughts and
ideas that could be implemented into our educational system. The similar stress on
developing mind in fact has been espoused by classical Muslim scholars of the past who
have ‘islamised' the Greek logics. This is reflected in the introduction of ilm al-mantiq
(logics) in the classical curriculum of madrasahs all over the Muslim world during those
period.

The Disciplined Mind of Howard Gardner is in reality the Socratic method of teaching
logic to the students. In those days, there were no textbooks used as we often see today.
Precisely because students were not that many and uniformity of the curriculum was not a
necessity then, nor was there any structured exams, as they are today. The teacher raises
questions and the student discusses them in class. By controlling the pace, the teacher can
keep the class very lively at the same time stimulate the students thinking, yet disciplined.
Furthermore, the discussion is not bounded by any textbook or syllabus that needs to be
completed.

In other words, during the Classical period, at early age students were taught the ‘tools of
learning', such as logic, and only later at quadrivium level that they were taught
‘subjects', such as arithmetic, astronomy geometry and music. At early stage is the
foundational stage to develop the mind, create the framework and logical foundation of
the children's mind, so that the real ‘subjects' could be fit in the minds without any
difficulties or incoherencies.

I envisage this to a computer where it needs to be formatted first, and installed with a
certain operating system (OS), be it Windows, Linux, Apple or others and only then other
application softwares could be installed, once the operating system is working perfectly
fine. Our minds work in the same manner. What we have been doing for the past fifty
years is ‘installing' various subjects into our minds but forgetting to install the operating
system of the minds. At the end of the day, we have huge data and information but our
‘non-formatted minds' are incapable of converting them into knowledge which is
beneficial to us and society. These ‘non-formatted minds' also at times come up will
illogical and nonsensical ideas and arguments out of the ignorance and inability of the
minds to synchronize and patch up all scattered information coherently and logically.
Imagine an application software is installed into a computer that has no operating system.
Obviously the software does not work. And this is what we have been doing thus far. We
added new subjects to be studied without developing students minds. For that reasons, we
find certain people are now talking about ‘unlearning' process, realizing that what we
have been practicing or advocating or believing all this while appears not right, because
when we first came across the ideas, our minds were not developed, as it were.

This is also what Gardner has lamented in the work: the inability of the ‘teachers,
students, policymakers and ordinary citizens sufficiently appreciate the differences
between subject matter and discipline'. Most individuals in most schools are studying
subject matter: memorizing facts and formulae, 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 this modern
education system of today.

While as Islam does not view any dichotomy between the world and the afterworld (al-
Akhirah), a disciplined mind of a Muslim then constitutes the ability to distinctively view
not just the physical world but also the existence (al-wujud) and the reality (al-haqiqah)
in its totality, which encapsulates in the word ‘Worldvied of Islam' (ru'yat al-islam lil-
wujud), the concept famously propagated by Professor Dr Syed Muhammad Naquib al-
Attas.

It is therefore imperative for our education policymakers now to come up with an

education system which concentrates more on developing and nurturing various aspects
of students' minds rather than ‘bombarding' them with studying various subjects after
subjects. And it should begin not only at the secondary level or SPM, but also at the
primary and pre-school stages. We are looking forward for the emergence of a new
generation with the best quality of minds for the future. It all depends on how we educate
them!