Negotiating the challenges of education at a crossroad
There is no doubt that education at every level is seeing unprecedented levels of challenges. They are facing us in many forms: challenges in technology, changing employment opportunities, shifts in learning styles and resulting shifts in motivation levels among learners. How we cope with these challenges will determine how we think of education in the future.
This may sound like an exaggeration, but consider this: almost 49 per cent of respondents in the United States said that a university degree was not important for a good career, according to a PEW research. The typical attention span of an adult student in a college is proved to be 10 minutes, and more worryingly, the attention span of Generation Alpha, those between 10-15 years, on mobile devices has reduced from two and a half minutes to 47 seconds, according to research by Dr Gloria Mark of University of California, Irvine.
Of course, this is not the only time that such challenges have faced society. References to the invention of the printing press, television and the Internet are often made as historically important moments when traditional forms of learning hit a boulder and had to re-invent itself.
The uniqueness of today's challenge is that too many factors are coming together at an unprecedented speed. Schools and colleges are having to confront learner motivation and the challenges of AI together, along with a rapidly globalising and then, a de-globalising world.
All of this required taking a long and deep look at the role of education today, its purpose and methods. Of course, we can no longer depend on traditional methods of teaching that separate teachers and students. Learning is a cooperative and collaborative process that needs continuity of purpose and method across all levels and disciplines.
If there is one reality in education today, it is constant innovation. Teachers need to be constantly on the look out for new techniques, methodologies as well as strategies that will keep students engaged and motivated. Of course, that does not take away responsibility from all other stakeholders like parents, the administration or even students themselves.
Placing the onus of innovative teaching on teachers alone could be daunting but there is no minimising their role in the education process. Whether it is to inculcate values and habits to a young child, or motivate learning and encourage curiosity in an adult learner, teachers are front and centre in education.
But none of this is possible without a clear outlook on what the future of education could be. If the goal of education is shifting from knowledge seeking to critical and creative thinking, these changes need to be implemented from early stages. For example, integrating AI in education is a good idea but the implementation requires continuous professional development.
It is clear that the future of education is not in actually knowing facts and figures that are easily accessible in the palm of one's hand. It is more important for learners to know what to do with these facts. This requires a kind of classroom experience which is still at a nascent stage.
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Observer
18-05-2025
- Observer
Negotiating the challenges of education at a crossroad
There is no doubt that education at every level is seeing unprecedented levels of challenges. They are facing us in many forms: challenges in technology, changing employment opportunities, shifts in learning styles and resulting shifts in motivation levels among learners. How we cope with these challenges will determine how we think of education in the future. This may sound like an exaggeration, but consider this: almost 49 per cent of respondents in the United States said that a university degree was not important for a good career, according to a PEW research. The typical attention span of an adult student in a college is proved to be 10 minutes, and more worryingly, the attention span of Generation Alpha, those between 10-15 years, on mobile devices has reduced from two and a half minutes to 47 seconds, according to research by Dr Gloria Mark of University of California, Irvine. Of course, this is not the only time that such challenges have faced society. References to the invention of the printing press, television and the Internet are often made as historically important moments when traditional forms of learning hit a boulder and had to re-invent itself. The uniqueness of today's challenge is that too many factors are coming together at an unprecedented speed. Schools and colleges are having to confront learner motivation and the challenges of AI together, along with a rapidly globalising and then, a de-globalising world. All of this required taking a long and deep look at the role of education today, its purpose and methods. Of course, we can no longer depend on traditional methods of teaching that separate teachers and students. Learning is a cooperative and collaborative process that needs continuity of purpose and method across all levels and disciplines. If there is one reality in education today, it is constant innovation. Teachers need to be constantly on the look out for new techniques, methodologies as well as strategies that will keep students engaged and motivated. Of course, that does not take away responsibility from all other stakeholders like parents, the administration or even students themselves. Placing the onus of innovative teaching on teachers alone could be daunting but there is no minimising their role in the education process. Whether it is to inculcate values and habits to a young child, or motivate learning and encourage curiosity in an adult learner, teachers are front and centre in education. But none of this is possible without a clear outlook on what the future of education could be. If the goal of education is shifting from knowledge seeking to critical and creative thinking, these changes need to be implemented from early stages. For example, integrating AI in education is a good idea but the implementation requires continuous professional development. It is clear that the future of education is not in actually knowing facts and figures that are easily accessible in the palm of one's hand. It is more important for learners to know what to do with these facts. This requires a kind of classroom experience which is still at a nascent stage.
Observer
14-05-2025
- Observer
How has the Internet changed our minds?
History teaches us that the advent of the printing press sparked Europe's Enlightenment, while the Ottoman Empire hesitated to embrace it for fear of the upheaval it might bring to established patterns of knowledge and thought. That reluctance contributed to Western ascendancy, laying the groundwork for the intellectual and then industrial revolutions, and it marked the beginning of Ottoman, and by extension Islamic-civilisational stagnation. A similar inflection point occurred at the close of the twentieth century when the Internet emerged from its military and private confines into the wider human sphere. It has since effected an unprecedented shift in global consciousness, quietly penetrating our minds before its influence became undeniable in every aspect of our cognition, memory, reading habits and sense of time. In the 1960s, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan presciently declared that 'the medium is the message,' suggesting that each new technology not only reflects civilisational progress, but also actively reshapes our perception of the world. At the time, few imagined that the Internet, perhaps the most pervasive medium in history, would impose upon us a new, rapid, yet often superficial mode of knowing, dominated by images and deprived of complex meaning and sustained engagement. It has converted our brains into biological systems that forsake many traditional mental skills, such as deep memorisation, logical reasoning and analytical thought, in favour of instantaneous gratification. Neuroscience reveals that our brains possess 'neuroplasticity', the capacity to reconfigure neural networks in response to experience. Constant interaction with the Internet - its speed, interactivity and continual stimulus - becomes a repeated neural experience that slowly but inexorably reprogrammes our minds. Over time, we find ourselves unable to tolerate complexity or lengthy texts, craving fragmentation, summaries and immediate satisfaction. This marks a perilous transformation: we lose the depth of understanding, reflection, emotional engagement and intellectual stamina that once sustained us. Reading, no longer a profound cognitive practice, has become a shallow browsing, our eyes flitting from headline to hyperlink without lingering over meaning. We develop what might be called a 'screen mind", incapable of the abstraction and slow accumulation of knowledge afforded by the printed page. Online reading resembles fast food: momentarily filling but offering no real nourishment. Our memory suffers as well. As the American thinker Nicholas Carr argues in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, we have replaced internal recall with external retrieval. Search engines such as Google serve as extensions of our memory: we no longer retain information, only its location. This fundamental shift, from an inwardly housed knowledge to one reliant on external mediators, erodes deep memory and reduces intelligence to a precarious immediacy based on access rather than understanding. The Internet's acceleration of temporal experience is equally profound. Where once we measured time by its unfolding, the gradual sediment of lived experience, we now quantify it in notifications, updates and fleeting interactions. Emotions - joy, sorrow - have become transient states, compressed into emoticons and quickly superseded by the next digital wave. This relentless pace weakens our experiential memory, leaving us momentary beings adrift from authentic existential belonging, with neither a genuine past nor a reflective horizon of the future. Thirty years after the Internet's dawn, as we enter an even more expansive digital era shaped by artificial intelligence, we must ask: is this 'liberation from time' or a detachment from meaning? Does the proliferation of knowledge sources truly make us wiser, or have we lost the equilibrium between intellectual accumulation and digital dispersion? The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han speaks of 'digital burnout', whereby information overload and the absence of patience yield a fragmented self in perpetual pursuit of gratification rather than comprehension. Yet we cannot deny the Internet's immense promise: access to digital libraries, online courses and global lectures have forged new pathways of knowledge. The challenge does not lie in the tool itself but in our undisciplined digital habits and our inclination towards the easiest, quickest stimuli. What we need is a reclamation of cognitive sovereignty: training ourselves in intellectual patience, slow contemplation, extended reading and rigorous analysis instead of perfunctory scrolling. Our brains, built as they are from neurons, are equally shaped by habits of mind. If algorithms have transformed our thinking, we possess the will, awareness and deliberate choice to remould those algorithms ourselves. The true battle of our age is not against the Internet, but against the mental distortions born of its hasty use. The Internet remains one of humanity's most powerful technical achievements, capable of reshaping human consciousness for the better, so long as we remain vigilant against the lure of speed and superficiality. Dr Muamar bin Ali Al Tobi The writer is an academic and researcher
Observer
29-03-2025
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Is teaching a lost profession today?
Once upon a time... teaching was a much-revered profession. Teachers were seen as community leaders, shining examples of modesty, knowledge, understanding, enthusiasm and resilience. The perfect role models for our children to aspire to, and to aspire to be. Sadly, today, teaching has changed, and while teachers are still appreciated in our societies and communities, teaching, as a profession, is just a shadow of what it once was. Once a profession, a vocation, a job for life, teachers are deserting the classroom in droves as disillusion overtakes dedication, as pupil and student misbehaviour becomes much more of an issue, as parental discussions become much more about what schools and teachers are 'not' doing, and as teachers find themselves unable to be inspirational due to the inability of educational authorities to recognise the extent of change within the teaching and learning dynamic. So, let's look at those three elements of education in isolation, and see just what has changed. Behaviour in the classroom has changed, as I believe, students are frustrated with being unable to utilise all the technological benefits that are pushing societies along at amazing speed. Today, we have the Internet, and Google, and Artificial Intelligence, and all the kids know how to access and use it all, many better than their teachers, but they are not allowed! So, a generation now goes to school with a 'chip on their shoulders,' a reason to be uncooperative, and to seek fault in their teachers, rather than embracing the teacher's mission, to inspire them. This creates what researchers are calling educational delinquency among learners. It's little more than a natural response, to be naughty, disruptive, and mischievous, disrupting the norms of the classroom with tardiness, talking out of turn, giggling, throwing things, idleness, and attention-seeking. Now, none of these, alone, are significant issues for an experienced and confident teacher, but with multiplicity, come problems. The classroom can change very quickly, as misbehaviour, unchecked, disrupts the learning process, not only for the teacher but for the 80 per cent of the class that is there to learn. The other 20 per cent have just become an anarchist presence, and 'getting the class back,' from there is never simple. Parent/teacher conferences and discussions have always been an opportunity for parents to learn what has been going well, and not so well at school, and how they can help the teachers. Simple stuff really. However, since the pandemic, teachers have become the target of significant aggression by parents who seem to believe that their angelic children at home, can be less than perfect in school. Really? No. They are just in denial! They learned during the online home schooling phase just how their children really were for their teachers, but they will never admit they could have done more, preferring to 'double-down' and put teachers under even more pressure. The reality is that kids were finding ways to be there, yet not there online. They were able to split screen and find what they needed through Google. They were miles in front of their teachers, and their parents turned a 'blind eye,' because it made their lives easier during a time of turmoil and uncertainty. So, 'everything' is the teacher's fault. Teachers, poorly rewarded for what they do achieve, under the most trying of circumstances, must cope with delinquent learners, bullying parents, and educational authorities who have either forgotten, or never knew in the first place that teaching is more than imparting knowledge, but about inspiring change, and much more than facts and information, but very much more about acquiring knowledge and understanding. And yet, all over the world, students must hand write answers to impossible questions... In terms of teaching and learning, we are falling back into the dark ages, when we should be shooting for the stars. So, teachers are leaving the profession. But at least they are protecting their health and wellbeing, because who needs the twin spectres of bullying and harassment in their lives every day? Many more are me.
