There were two boys walking in their desert country and they were completely different. The teachers of the first boy and his parents think that he is smart and as a result, the boy thinks that he is. His marks on the tests are good and his ranking in school is advanced, and he has other certificates of distinction that will enable him to advance in his academic life. As for the second boy, few people consider him intelligent, as his marks on the tests are not good, and his ranking is also not satisfactory, and he possesses only a few academic certificates, and at best people may say that he is shrewd or resourceful. While the boys were walking on the desert road back from school, they encountered a problem, when a hungry wolf appeared in front of them and quickly went to pounce on them. The first boy was terrified, but using his mental skill he estimated the time it would take the wolf to reach them by 17 seconds, and then he looked at the second boy who was quietly taking off his sole and putting on his school sneakers. The first said to his friend, Are you crazy? There is no way to escape from this wolf, and the second boy replied to him, saying, “It is true, but all I have to do is to get ahead of you.”
This allegory points to something we intuitively know, which is that a person can be slow to think in school but think well outside of school and vice versa, and here the important question arises: How can one be so smart and so stupid? This in turn leads us to the most important question, which is how can someone be a good or bad thinker regardless of their performance in school?
The answer is simply that the educational systems in our surroundings establish a special pattern in their schools that depends on memorization and memorization, which unintentionally caused an inhibition of the mind and reduced its capabilities for which it was created as a basis, namely learning and thinking about what has been learned, and finally making a specific decision, which is what is now termed universally as “learning poverty” meaning The learner’s lack of the minimum levels of ability to employ science in the various fields of life properly, and their group of course (i.e. the educated) constitute the labor force of the state, which in turn will become poor in education and by extension in the economy, which causes the social threat that the Corona pandemic revealed to us its ugly face.
In order to be able to reform this system, if we want to do so, we must start from the most important element, which is the teacher, and help him to improve the effective thinking of the learners. Learners learn best when they think effectively about the material they learn. Learning and thinking are not two different or independent units. In fact, if learners think about learning, they learn to think and learn what they need to know more effectively than memorization.
The problem with the current educational situation in Kuwait is that telling the learner at school what to do is often unrealistic compared to what he will be asked to do later, and educators should stop always formulating problems for learners and instead encourage learners to formulate problems for themselves. Here it can be said that most of the educated will not become scientists, writers, or painters, and the situation is no different in other jobs such as business administration. The important point, of course, is that there are large gaps between the type of performance required for success in the fields of work and the type of performance required for success in schools, and therefore we often end up with adults who are not They are able to do what is expected of them.
Published in Al-Qabas newspaper
