As a student of this university, it is my moral and intellectual responsibility to give some sort of feedback by telling them what we have and have not learnt, and generally speaking of our experiences of being a student here. For a feedback to be worthwhile it has to be honest. How many of us can honestly say that the university has taught us something that has resulted in our becoming a different person? In a workshop conducted by INSTED this week, a speaker put forward the idea that we should view university as a factory, and that the faculty members need to serve the market needs! So the market defines what we learn, rather than our awareness of our social world defining what we need to learn. No doubt I have learnt something but that is a result of very few lecturers (who teach how to think and not what to think), and on my own by having access to the library. Many classes have been a waste of time and money. Im sure many of you have experienced this too many times already but are too shy to speak up, or want to turn a blind eye to this situation because you are in a hurry to finish the course. Since a number of courses rely on student presentations where the teacher casually and passively just listens and very rarely makes any constructive comments, our understanding in such classes is limited to whatever our flawed presentations offer. One of the several reasons for this is the fact that some lecturers are made to teach a course they know nothing about, it may also be that some lecturers genuinely believe this mode of instruction to be effective. You can create your own understanding and knowledge outside of these mind killing lecture halls where a lecturer drills you with what you should know and do to pass the course. Is that creating knowledge to help our Ummah or are we just stuck in the same mind-dead cycle? There has been much talk of the crisis of the Mulslim mind, and one reason why this university was established was to resolve that crisis, but the irony and tragedy is that this university is in fact contributing to this crisis by dulling our minds to total passivity. Talk about a university of virtue and knowledge, I havent in my two years seen any of that happening in the majority of classes(barring very few). It is as though we are in a kindergarten where they have to spoon feed us and reiterate their insignificant and narrow understanding of the world. I wish they spoon fed us something nourishing, if spoon feeding is inevitable in our Muslim society. Unfortunately they dont see their own faults in participating in the fall of Muslim minds. PhD students are graduating without being able to create any substantive knowledge, as if this is not bad enough, some dont even know how to write one single well reasoned argument(including myself). As the teachers have said, it is a factory and students just want to graduate for a degree to work. A lecturer once mentioned in the class, that the best research is not one which adds to the field of knowledge or any of that virtuous and good stuff, but a good research is one which is completed within the given time period; thats all, nothing else is necessary, whether you write anything that makes sense or not! The lecturer was just being honest and practical. But this is the exact definition of what producing students in a factory means. They dont care whether you write anything or are able to write, its just about making money in the end. Is this university a garden of knowledge and virtue? The incredible thing is that at the end of the road, after graduating, I look back to find that everything they have tried to blow our minds with doesnt have any grounding in reality, in other words, it doesnt make sense! They are selling an Idea of IOK (Islamization of knowledge) which is being emulated by the rest of the Islamic world, not only because it sounds good, but because it serves their political agenda and it allows them to be seen as doing something worth while in the field of Islamic knowledge. They are basing their entire educational system on this flawed idea( like our university). The reason they are committed to IOK, is because they believe it is a solution for the Muslims predicament, but no one actually thinks about what it is or goes beyond it. I will not go into detailed argument of why it is a flawed idea, it has already been argued and written by someone else. Lecturers preach the integration and measurement of values when they dont know how to practice these values themselves as the integral part of their teaching. If the teacher doesnt know something, just say you dont know instead of throwing rubbish at the students for 3 hours because they are told to teach something. Students accept what the lecturer teaches assuming he/she know better. But do they? Some lecturers preach values while they discriminate against students without any legitimacy or logical reasoning; is this justice? I may be generalizing, but Im only speaking of my experience in the last two years. So if you think Im wrong, show me where I am wrong. Yes, I agree that everyone in the department is nice, but being nice is not enough to teach us something about our world, something about history, something about education, something about philosophy. Have they enlightened us or broadened our horizon? Or has this institute/university exposed itself as a flawed foundation of education. This is a clear example of what harm and damage Muslims do to themselves while some wrongly assume it is the result of colonizations. As one prominent scholar said we were colonized because we were colonizable. Any comments, agree or disagree?
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 09:19:11 +0000
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