About 2 years ago I picked up one of these beautiful clothbound editions of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, and since then I’ve made it a point to buy another one of these clothbound novels every few months or so. In fact, one of the reasons why it took me so long to finish writing up my DPhil thesis was that I had to finish reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace first! Talk about procrastinating…
My latest purchase was the novel Hard Times, again by Charles Dickens. The story itself was interesting, but a few lines from the Introduction really caught my eye:
…it operates as a critique on certain forms of education, particularly those that set out to fill a child full of ‘useful facts’ rather than to introduce them in any way to the world of the imagination, to concepts of aesthetic pleasure removed from functionality, and to the idea that compassionate understanding of the lives and circumstances of others is of infinitely more use than the accumulation of knowledge.
I love the phrase ‘compassionate understanding of the lives and circumstances of others’ because it accurately sums up what is often missing from today’s classrooms. Even in Malaysia, I see a lot (too much?) emphasis being put on exam results, as if schools are factories for producing A grades. I hope this trend will not continue.
Imran Idris 