EDUCATION

Today I would like to talk about education. Most of us think that education is something to do with the process of acquiring living skills. The acquiring process is therefore intended for the personal development of an individual.

When we talk about education we cannot avoid of talking the process. The process of how people live in this world, interact with their environment, including the parents, other family members, neighbours, society, or in a bigger perspectives the country where they live. It shows that every element in this world contribute to the process of learning either directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally.

Parents for instance, have been considered as a major player for educating new generation. Through them, the individuals learn a lot of what so called living skills. This is the first chance for the individual to learn many things. As such, parents need to provide a 'high quality' example by sharing experiences, information, skills, attitude, personality and many more – learn through example just like Prophet Muhammad SAW . Without this the transferring process cannot be materialised. Even in Islam it is clearly stated the parents function in educating their children - it becomes compulsory, no excuses!!

As parents, it is very crucial to see our function as an 'information contributor'. In order to share a high quality and sufficient information with our children we really need to understand the role itself as well as the skills needed to functioning. Knowledge without skills may not be useful. But more to that, skills without understanding the importance of sharing and how that should be done is even worse. In other words, without competency and skills of sharing the knowledge and information, the transferring process will be problematic.

I will continue the discussion on the skills required by parents in our next meeting. Until then, reviewing our capability and willingness is crucially required form time to time.

Thank you very much.