People have lifted a visionary to the position of the highest authority in the country. While President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has a vision for the country, he has given the highest priority to education as that is precisely the area that can have a ripple effect on other areas.
Addressing intellectuals on his campaign trail, Rajapaksa explained vividly education and its essence: knowledge synthesis or knowledge unification - piecing together bits of knowledge into a coherent picture - giving an example from his life. He narrated how he used logical knowledge of military analysis to learn computer programming. The deftness of knowledge synthesis is key to have a good education.
Education can be referred to as the process in which one attempts to make a realistic sense of the phenomenology of the world. Human beings have attempted various processes or methods to acquire education for millennia with many ending in blind alleys.
Occidental and oriental scholars have attempted various methodologies in the course of education with varied degrees of success. For instance, Greek philosophers assumed that one could develop one’s education by engaging in debates and arguments; the more quasi-credibility the arguments possessed, the more credence was offered to them and the more authentic they were. Some eastern philosophers embraced mysticism as a form of knowledge acquisition, and some others observed the patterns of nature and drew systematic inferences, such as the concept of impermanence which dovetails perfectly with the second law of thermodynamics to explain the evolution of the whole cosmos.
As Mathematician and Philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.” Greek philosophers did not see the necessity of verification of ideas and opinions.
French philosopher Voltaire encapsulated the anti-intellectual character of argments, “Men argue. Nature acts.”
Gotabaya Rajapaksa being true to his understanding that crass arguments are meaningless, rather downright chicanery, aptly eschewed debates demanded by immature rookies.
From around the Renaissance period - the transition from the middle ages to modernity covering the 15th and 16th centuries - people tended to conduct experiments to see the results for themselves. For instance, the steam engine was developed in 1712 by converting energy from steam into mechanical energy by refining experimental results.
Gradually a method was developed in which they hypothesised what they wished and subjected their thinking to see if what they hypothesised was actually true. Thus emerged the scientific method and with it the credible knowledge system in which one can see whether one’s ideas, hypothesis or theories are true or in keep in with the workings of nature, or whether they are mere wishful thinking.
Richard P. Feynman who is considered to have been the greatest professor of all time said, “The test of all knowledge is experiment,” to underpin the proposition that if an opinion fails to withstand a reality check or experiment, it fails the validity of being true. As education constitutes having a realistic sense of phenomena, as it should be, to avoid living in a psychedelic fantasy world, it is imperative to subject opinions on a phenomenon to a reality check to verify their validity.
Philosopher Robert M. Pirsig expressed the importance of testing ideas and the validity of the scientific method, “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.”
Bits of knowledge stemming from experiment are required to be stringed together to turn them into a usable format and hence the knowledge synthesis.
Scientist Arthur R. Marshall said, “If you don’t synthesise knowledge, scientific journals become spare-part catalogues for machines that are never built”. Major works of great scientists involve knowledge synthesis, facilitating human beings to comprehend the world realistically and holistically.
For instance, James Clerk Maxwell formulated the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation bringing together electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. Charles Darwin synthesised the whole life on earth through the theory of evolution and Albert Einstein unified space and time and mass and energy.
The Sri Lankan education system almost entirely depends on book-learning, ignoring the research component. Competitive examinations held for measuring the degree of education and even for assessing aptitude for employment have aggravated rote-learning. The more a society is entangled in a book-learning curve, the more difficult for the people of that society to adjust to a research-based learning culture. Book-learning engenders a self-feeding spiral.
Philosopher David Hume summarised the entrapment of rote-learning, “Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.”
Many other countries, by contrast, have been moving to the other end of the spectrum – from the book-learned methodology to reaearch-based methodology - laying store by the understanding based on evidence percolated through the research component and the practical aspect of education.
President Rajapaksa’s campaign speeches amply demonstrated his understanding of the crisis in the country’s education system and his determination to evolve a course of correction. He lays emphasis on skills development in the labour force and research-based education. His latest move to convert the Colleges of Education into degree awarding universities is a harbinger towards an enlightened Sri Lanka.