UDK 377.3
Author
Shahab Yar Khan
Abstract
The article is an attempt to re-define the purpose of education in the lives of individuals and communities in the 21st century. The traditional academia, designed by establishments as forces of status quo, is exhausted like other institutions of patriarchal system. Education as well has become a ‘free-for-all tragi-comedy’. There is an unassailable gulf between the system of education which advocates status quo and the Socratic method of teaching of soul searching. Global increase in literacy rate paradoxically remains passive towards unprecedented increase in human trafficking, prostitution, state-level financial corruption, religious extremism and crimes gainst humanity. Despite long established tradition of ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ education the world has managed to ‘evolve’ in our age the most non-philosophical minds of human history. Our current models of education have failed to provide societies with decent models of citizenship.
Their objective to well-train the members of a community to have life of cooperation and therefore life of symmetry stands in historical retrospective as mockery of its own self. In our age even the financial security is not a guarantee after full-fledge university education. Purposelessness haunts over the entire system. To work within the existing system with ‘makeup’ alterations suits the forces of status quo as survival strategy. In the last decade as well we have seen the makeup shift from one kind of authors to another slightly altered list, one way of asking exam questions to another modified one, from one kind of lengthy paper work to another kind of creative means of wasting collective human hours and efforts throughout Europe, Asia and the US. The end result is production of even more dull and numbed states of minds. Education remains purposeless unless it is understood as the art of seeking alternative modes of thinking. Students must be ‘alienated’ from evaluation process, in other words the existing system of exams should be eliminated. The article introduces four essential qualities of the model teacher i.e. modesty, compassion, philosophical wisdom and quest for social justice. Means are suggested to induce these essetial elements among the youth as well at the end of the discourse.
Key words
mode of alternative thinking, alienation, forces of status quo, Socratic-prophetic tradition, alligning scales of mounting problems, citizenship, cooperation, competition
URL: https://www.ibn-sina.net/en/education-the-art-of-seeking-alternative-modes-of-thinking/