As calls for reform of our educational system become louder and more frequent by days, the recently released Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013-2025: Preliminary Report, itself a serious undertaking, is laudable.
Recognising that “thinking skills” is among the six key attributes needed by every Malaysian student to be globally competitive, the Education Ministry spells out therein, particularly in the first of its eleven shifts, its emphasis on the inculcation of higher-order thinking skills (aka HOTS), especially as defined by Bloom’s taxonomy.
National examinations and school-based assessments shall thereafter be revamped to gradually increase percentage of questions that test HOT.
By 2016, HOT questions shall make up 80% of questions for UPSR, 80% of the Form 3 central assessment, 75% of the questions for SPM core subjects and 50% of the questions for SPM elective subjects.
Nevertheless, the Blueprint does reiterate the importance of balance and holism as envisioned by and embedded in the National Education Philosophy.
In that respect, and in accordance with Islam’s emphasis on both tawhid and adab, the former term representing its “unity-in-diversity” dimension while the latter one, its “diversity-in-unity” dimension, any Muslim involved in conceptualising and implementing such a Blueprint has to be rather careful in balancing what is normally considered to be lower-order thinking skills, which surely involve memorization and rote learning, and what is regarded as HOTS.
Mistakes of contrasting the importance of thinking with that of memorization should in this regard be avoided or, at least, minimised.
Whereas the relation between these two mental faculties could have been less antipathetic, such mistakes, unfortunately, have been pervasive, further exacerbating the existing misperception that the two are somewhat mutually exclusive.
As a result, it is an increasingly common phenomenon that Muslims of today have been demanded to choose with an either/or frame of mind and urged to opt for one pole in the stead of the other.
As far as Islam is concerned, the foregoing penchant for bipolarization as well as its ensuing antagonism is surely not preferable, let alone necessary.
As such, it is important that contemporary Muslims pay due attention to an important lesson pertaining to a balanced and harmonious relation between memorization and thinking which can be derived from the major works of a great scholar of Islam, Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali (d. 505A.H./1111C.E.)
In al-Ghazzali’s view, thinking or reasoning is an extremely significant channel of knowledge acquisition for man.
It is the mind’s movement in the realm of ideas, assisted in most cases by one’s faculty of imagination, in search of the enabling, connecting idea which is technically called “the middle term,” the completion of which process brings the mind nearer to knowing the item yet unknown.
At times the mind succeeds, and in still some other cases, it fails to attain its objective.
As a process, thinking basically consists of one’s intentionally obtaining new (or the third) knowledge from the combination of previously two isolatory cognitions.
Such a combination must be both formally valid and materially true.
Thinking, however, has been variantly termed.
Fikr, tafakkur, ta’ammul, tadabbur, nazar, i?tibar, istidlal, and istibsar are among terms used to refer to thinking in the religious, intellectual and scientific tradition of Islam.
Al-Ghazzali once explained thinking qua i?tibar as “the presenting of two cognitions (or units of knowledge) to the mind such that from the two, the mind is able to cross over to the third or new cognition.”
However, when such a crossing or leap (?ubur) does not happen and one’s mind remains at those two cognitions, this case is known as recollection (tadhakkur), which is simply one’s bringing of the two cognitions to be present in one’s soul.
As such, fikr already includes dhikr (remembrance), though the reverse is not the case.
Later, in the religious, intellectual and scientific tradition of Islam, the aforementioned al-Ghazzali’s understanding of thinking as well as similar conceptions by other scholars became encapsulated in a more precise formulation.
Al-Sayyid al-Sharif ?Ali al-Jurjani, a Muslim polymath who died in the early 15th century C.E., for instance, related in his famous work on definitions that thinking is “the mental act of putting what one has already known into meaningful order in order to attain what one is still ignorant of.”
As is clear from the foregoing understanding and formulation, memorization can be conceived of as being supportive of thinking; the latter indeed requires some element of the former in order to materialise.
Man can only think according to what he has already known.
If, for some reasons, he has lost what he knew before, he has to regain it through some means before he can make use of it to obtain new knowledge.
If he has forgotten it, he needs to recall it first—by whatever means at his disposal—before he can proceed to think.
Mentally retaining intact what one has already known requires a certain ability to memorise.
One may minimise this arduous task of retaining every bit of what one has epistemically possessed by storing it in some device—in fact, this is what the ICT age has empowered us to do, among others—but one cannot totally do without it without incurring some risks.
Insofar as the past religious, intellectual and scientific tradition of Islam is concerned, one will surely come across true accounts of how great scholars were able to excel in both, in memorizing as well as thinking.
This simply shows that the two can grow together.
What we need to do today, among others, is to adopt a balanced approach to dealing with the bipolar relation as well as relearn and revive the manner in which both faculties were successfully nurtured in the past.
