The Guideline of Education

Education is one of the most important aspect in all countries, in which the ability of sustaining and producing expertise or productive individuals within the “nation” in “state” is the main goal of education for the benefit of a nation-state. Thus, not to deny that the role of education is not only to help the development of nation-state but also to internally build such an individual with strong character, good manners and trustworthy. The state government restructure the educational system in order to follow the rhythm of global development from the first industrial revolution to the current of fourth industrial revolution. Despite those changes within the education system, how far actually does it impacts towards the current youth’s development in order to achieve both external and internal goals.

Human civilization is not a static object, but it is surely a dynamic human civilization. The civilization tend to change when it found; (1) new knowledge, and (2) new technology.^[1] In explaining the changes of human behaviour due to new knowledge, a person tend to do what he or she knows and avoid what he or she does not know. The more the knowledge that the person has, means more differences that the person can do. Technology also can affect the behaviour of human in terms of his or her actions. The changes of technology, for instance from written letters to Gmail, lessening the time taken to receive the mail and the cost needed to post. Despite this development, a person will have more time to do other duties.

The current human civilization which is based on digital technology in the fourth industrial revolution has allowed youth to see such a borderless figures of successful individuals. But how close the youths are, or how deep the youths actually see the enormous successful adults? Through social media where most successful and famous people are followed by the younger generation as their example, how do they consider the adults as their admired person? Do the youths only see such “successfulness” as their measurement whether to follow or not to follow?

In this writing, the adult’s successfulness and how the younger generation consider him or her as their role model is an analogy of teacher’s knowledge and his students. The previous paragraph explained how the students admired their teacher due to their teacher’s knowledge. Although they admire his knowledge, not many of them know his journey, his character, and his effort to achieve the level of knowledge that their teacher has. In returning to the analogy, often youths only see one’s “successfulness” but failed to see one’s effort, the failure, and the process before one became successful. In other words, the youths most likely only see joyful moments rather than difficult moments.

We have denied our young people the knowledge of the dark side of life. They see a picture of ease, play, and fun. That life includes hardships, illness, grief, even agony; that many hearts are sick with bitterness, resentfulness, envy – are facts of which young people have hardly an awareness. They do not feel morally challenged, they do not feel called upon.[2]

Plenty of discussion among decision makers on how to develop the education system to become easier, faster, and better than the previous in order to improve the younger generation as the world is changing rapidly. As a result, this might indirectly caused adults to focus only on promoting their intelligence to the younger generation and this might affect them as they currently do not see the example of such hardship, difficulty or the dark side of life. Due to this, they tend to consider that their life during quarter life period is a moment of joyfulness only and not knowing how to deal of react when they are in such a hardship situation.

It is undeniable that the technological development in the current human civilization era helps in developing better education that can give benefit for the individuals especially the youths, the community, and the nation-state. At the same time, in emancipating its negative consequence, therefore, emphasizing to learn on character development firstly before his teacher’s subject seems to be important as this opinion might offer explanation as such a person needs to understand, and know deeply about his teacher or role model rather than seeing them externally only. As the current phenomenon of health emergence brought a new way of education through online platform, this constraint one’s opportunity to learn about good manners.

Al-Qadi ‘Iyad reported: Malik, may Allah have mercy on him, said, “My mother would dress me up and say to me: Go to Shaykh Rabi’ah and learn from his manners before his knowledge.”[3]

References

• ^[1] The two points causing the changes of human civilization is an opinion of the author’s lecturer of Introduction to International Relations course, Dr. Zaini Bin Othman.
• ^[2] Heschel, A. J. (1960). Children and youth. In The insecurity of freedom: Essays on human existence, 43. New York: Noonday Press. Cited in Ibrahim, A. (2020). (Mis)understanding youth and living community. In Emancipated education: Essays on the nurturing of critical discourse, 89. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre.
• ^[3] Tartīb al-Madārik 1/130