The purpose of education
How to produce good human beings
HIGHER learning institutions need to revamp their curriculums to make graduates job makers, not jobseekers, former higher education director-general and City University Vice-Chancellor Professor Datuk Seri Dr Mohamed Mustafa Ishak tells Utusan Malaysia. Vicechancellors and education experts disagree. Both may be missing the point of education. From the word go, we have got the purpose wrong. From schools, through college to universities, we have been educating the intellect, missing a very important other: the soul. Granted, learners at school get their hours of religious classes and moral education. But these are mere side dishes, not the main course. The primary purpose of education is to produce a good human being. Everything else is secondary. While skills training institutes are fast becoming know-how factories, higher learning institutions are merely concentrating on educating the intellect. The soul escapes the syllabus. A good human being is a product of both.
“Either or” education is just that. It produces a half-educated person, not a complete human being. All-skills training, too, does half the job. Good carpenters can turn out to be really bad in another way. The most gifted man (in talent and intellect), warned Dr Martin Luther King Jr, can be the most dangerous criminal. He was right. Examples of education gone wrong are not hard to come by. Consider the case of a few gifted intellects, the “smartest guys in the room” as the C-suite dwellers of the American energy company, Enron Corporation, were known. They had CVs that would have made Harvard and Yale proud. But they did something no university would want to be associated with — accounting and corporate fraud. As Enron went into bankruptcy, shareholders lost US$74 billion and its employees, thousands in number, lost billions in pension benefits. A darling one day and a demon on another. Not all baddies are from elsewhere. We have many within our borders we won’t be proud of. All education for the intellect and none for the soul has the potential to turn dangerous, the kind of danger that King warned of.
The V-Cs and educationists shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the call for revamp of the higher learning curriculum, though not in the manner Mustafa is suggesting. All they need to do is to hit the right intellect-soul balance. Every university course can’t be turned into a market-ready curriculum. Universities are not workshops; they are academies. Though this is no licence to be far-removed from the real world. There is no place for the ivory towers of the idiom today. Learners go in search of learning centres that can turn them into good human beings. Academies that remain mere ivory towers will miss the point of education by a mile. This is no argument for churning out bespoke philosophers. Besides, how do you tailor a philosophy curriculum to the market? Philosopher entrepreneurs made ready to man kiosks at shopping malls to dish out philosophical pronouncements to passing customers? Or is this another way of saying that such courses should be dropped? It will be a pity because in many areas of human endeavour, philosophy comes before practice. It is a good food for thought. All it needs is a soul provider. True, more philosophers are “doing” philosophy today than they used to, but job-making philosophers? A little out of this world, we think.
‘Either or’ education is just that. It produces a halfeducated person, not a complete human being.