Saya mengimpikan sebuah sekolah yang menjadi tempat untuk pelajar berseronok dan gembira. Bukanlah berseronok dan bergembira dengan cara ala Barat yang difahami seluruh ummat Malaysia kini.
Gembira datang ke sekolah untuk bertemu dengan guru yang mengambil berat. Bukan mengambil berat keputusan peperiksaan yang menurun atau menaik cuma. Tapi mengambil berat perkembangan minda, pengetahuan agama, kesihatan dan akhlak muridnya.
Gembira bertemu dengan rakan-rakan yang baik, dan turut seronok untuk ke sekolah. Sekolah menjadi tempat yang benar-benar bertujuan untuk mendidik para pelajar. Inteletual, spiritual dan emotional.
Bukan sekadar untuk melahirkan pelajar yang tahu mendapat no. 1 dalam peperiksaan atau CGPA 4.0..
Saya mengimpikan dan saya terlalu mengimpikannya,.
p/s Dibawah adalah speech saya dalam assesment Public Speaking di masa Tamhidi. I did research with my Soul. Credit to all, :)
EXCELLENCE WITHOUT A SOUL
A very good morning to our
respected lecturer; Madam Azlina bt Mohamed Nor and to all my wonderful members
of Tutorial 4 present here today. First of all, I would like to thank all of
you for giving me the opportunity to talk here today.
Today, I would like to talk about a
topic, which is really close to us. A crisis in our life, not just happening to
our country, but also all around the world. It is “Excellence Without A Soul”.
Let me explain to you the definition of our topic today. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defined
excellence as the quality of being extremely good and Wikipedia ; Excellence is
a talent or quality which is unusually good and so surpasses ordinary
standards. It is also an aimed for standard of performance. Without can be
described as not having or showing something. Soul in Oxford’s Dictionary
defined as the spiritual and moral qualities of humans in general. So, in
general Excellence without a Soul can be determined as a quality of being
extremely good but not having spiritual and moral qualities. In simple words we
can conclude that, you are smart but you are unkind. What problem with this..?
do you think, this is a problem..? or, it is okay to have a person who is smart
but not kind, as long as he is smart. He can get good grades, and will get good job and making much money..
My fellow friends,
When people asked you, what do you
want in your life. As a student, of course we want good grades in all
examinations. Furthermore, our materialistic mind will dream on being a boss in
a company with lots of money. I am sure our soul hope to get all of these.
That’s why we are working hard in every examination to get good grades. Then,
we will get good jobs and making money.
We
are so stuck in the myth that grades will lead to jobs — and so stuck in the
textbooks about yesteryear — that they’re oblivious to this. The evidence for
it pervades the classroom daily in the “I’ve done my work and I’ve got a high CGPA,
and that’s enough” attitude. I can just relax in my chair during class, give
sighs and sour looks, and refuse to put any imagination or energy into
improving the group experience, on and on. Again, my CGPA is enough. It will
get me into college, and college will get me into a job, because I have no
inkling how much more difficult my future may be due to the several gathering
clouds on the horizon.
If we kept to think that our education
is just only about making profits. We are absolutely wrong. Sadly, in lots of
places, we had lost the essence of education. Like how ‘3 Idiots‘ movie
described it perfectly, the education system in India had changed their focus
from knowledge to simply an ability to give the right answer on some tests;
from a comprehensive understanding to perfect grades; from creativity and
imagination to memorizing what the book said word by word.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t really
understand what you read. It doesn’t
matter if you forget almost everything afterwards. As long as you can remember them for the
tests and get some good score, then you will be all right. You will be
considered as an excellence student. But
are you?
World today deemed schools are as
factories geared only to examination results. Competition to achieve academic
excellence and obsession for the job market demand has resulted in loss of
vision in our education system, and stuck in the short termism that ignores the
fundamental mission of human construction. It is true that many academic
institutes have managed to give knowledge and skills but we fail to carry out the fundamental mission
in education.
In Harry R. Lewis’ book entitled
“Excellence Without A Soul”; schools today, have forgotten their fundamental
job. Their fundamental duty to the students to help them growing up, to learn who they are, to search for a
larger purpose for their lives, and to leave college as better human beings.
University leadership speech more
generally on the problems of the world, the importance of knowledge, hard work
and success; but little touched on the
questions of personal strength, integrity, compassion, cooperation and how to
live in a better world. They ignore the students’ development into people of
good character who will know that they owe something to society for the
privileged education they have received.
Education should concern not only with the instruction and training
of the mind and the transmission of knowledge but also with the education of the whole being
of men and women. The teacher is therefore not only a muallim, a 'transmitter
of knowledge' but also a murabbi, a 'trainer of souls and personalities'. We can
see this in Islamic educational system which never divorced the training of the
mind from that of the soul. Seyyed
Hossein Nasr explains, " Islamic
education ideally aims to provide a milieu for the total and balanced
development of every student in every sphere of learning - spiritual, moral,
imaginative, intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, emotional and physical -
directing all these aspects towards the attainment of a conscious relationship
with God, the ultimate purpose of man's life on earth”
My fellow friends,
In a nutshell, our education system
today is in danger. The system puts national economic development as goals
rather than individual human development, and regards the school as a factory
for producing human "products" and "resources" to drive up
the pace of economic growth and national "success". The best men are, who give benefits to
others. So, our education system should put this as the objective. We want to
produce better human being who can give benefit to others, know who they are
and determine in achieving their purposes of life. As a student, we should
start to concern on this. We are our country’s future leaders. We want to lead
our country as better world to live. Stop thinking on just our own importance,
but we should realize that we owed something to the society. Starting by now, let’s revalue our good
results..!
That’s all from me, thank you for
lending your ears. I stop my speech with this narration of Holy Quran.
“We did offer the
Trust to the Heavens and the Earth and the Mountains; but they refused to
undertake it, being afraid thereof; but Man undertook it; - He was indeed
unjust and foolish;-“ (Al-ahzab : 72)
SPEAKER : Ainun Sailah Binti
Nordin (Tutorial 4)