Promoting critical thinking skills

SAAD DOSARI

arabnews

In late October, the Ministry of Education organized the inaugural ceremony for a program that it had launched in collaboration with many ministries.
The program is called “Fatten,” which is an Arabic word that goes for clever or bright or shrewd.
Despite the huge launching ceremony and endless media coverage, I found myself reluctant to write about it.
I did not want to jump on the media bandwagon and wanted to judge all the pros and cons before offering my opinion on the program.

For starters, no one can argue with the message and goals of the program. On its official website, it is introduced as “a national program that is meant to protect the society from security, social, cultural, health and economical related threats.”
The program in question aims to do that through several training sessions provided to students and teachers, through reading and electronic materials, through competitions in different forms of arts, through exhibitions and consultations.
The goals of the program vary between fighting drugs, misbehavior and extremist tendencies.
I have to admit that these are beautifully tailored goals. They represent what we truly need in this age of craziness all around the world.
A lot of us need help, a magnifying glass to decipher the blurring lines so we could read and understand better and clearer. And of course, among those who need such programs the most are our students.
Having said that, what I do not get about this whole thing is; why do we need a separate program to accomplish all these goals?
After all, educational institutions in any country are basically supposed to be achieving these very goals.
Now, looking at it a bit closely, the program revolves around building critical and analytical skills needed for students to be able to think independently, evaluate, make judgments and take decisions. At the end of the day, this is exactly what the whole education system is all about.
Each and every aspect of the education system — the curriculum, teachers, facilities, and extracurricular activities — should be responsible for honing critical and analytical skills.
Therefore, I am bit worried about all the media hype about “Fatten,” which is being portrayed as a new and creative program to help resolve all our problems.
It would be interesting to mention that a similar program was presented more than 11 years ago, it was called “The Program of Intellectual Security in our Schools.”
The only difference between the two programs is the use of different tool. While the older version was classical and was presented in the form of written words and lectures, the new one is utilizing social media, videos and advertisements to send its messages across. This was a remarkable argument made by Fahad Areeshi in an interesting article published by Al-Watan about a month ago.
Areeshi referred to a survey he had conducted in which he asked students, both males and females from different parts of the Kingdom and on different public schools’ levels about how the program influenced them. The feedback was staggering, some of them were not even aware about the existence of such a program.
Finally, the point here is straightforward, let’s make sure that these wonderful plans and ideas are integrated with every aspect of the educational system. That is the only way to yield positive results.