Abstract:
With so much focus on illiteracy, we sometimes forget the dire state of affairs in our urban centers with regard to education. Education in the Muslim world has increasingly regressed into an exercise of rote learning, a mass of discrete knowledge, and a frenzied race to ward what we deem “useful” skills. By showing the ground reality in private education in Karachi, Pakistan, this article strives to high light the cyclical and future-oriented trends in schools that are in imical to the very spirit of education. In doing so, it emphasizes the need to adopt thinking as the primary skill taught to students in schools, with everything else encompassed within its fold. While Karachi is a case study here, the importance of creating thinking cultures within schools is a crucial and very relevant concept to schools everywhere in the world, including the United States.
Machine summary:
Her interest in cultivating thinking skills stems from her ex periences as teacher and mentor in the field of education in Karachi for nearly twelve years, focusing on literature, reading, writing, story-telling, and similar areas.
She is currently assisting IIIT’s Research Department administratively and completing her educational guidebook on creating thinking cultures within schools, with a special focus on effective teaching strategies for Eng lish literature.
In our own lackadaisical way, we are so content to watch our children go through the cycle of attending schools, achieving learning mark ers, and continuing on to higher education that we fail to critically assess the quality of education and, hence, any serious improvement remains out of reach.
Teachers acquaint students with different subjects in order to expose them to different branches of learning and assess their understanding by asking them to regurgitate the information.
In the rush to complete the syllabus, to continually assess the students, and to perpetually view the content as more important than its recipients, the teaching of thinking skills at schools repeatedly takes a back seat.
Otherwise, this exam-oriented system of education gets more and more entrenched both in the teacher’s approach and in the students’ minds, to the neglect of the present development of thinking skills – not to mention the utter lack of regard for those pupils who require greater attention, more time to grasp concepts, and extra help to keep up with the rest of the class.