Since we\u2019re currently preparing for midterms here and trying our best to cover the syllabus, I thought of expressing my views on this topic. Education, in general, let alone school education is a topic on which my views have varied greatly over the years. Let me express some of those very frankly and randomly here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Coming from an Egyptian family, we\u2019ve grown up with big ideas about Education\u2026 Institutionalized Education. From Grade 1 to 12 (or 11 depending on the system), we were expected to consider studying our primary role in life. It was our fulltime job at times. We were supposed to give our studies out first priority over any other fruitful hobby, sport or even Qur\u2019an sometimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fast forward to university and my mindset totally shifted to a more holistic and all-encompassing view of education. I came to see \u201cEducation\u201d in its broader sense, thanks in part to the self-study course I took in the first year. It was then that I also started seeing Islamic education as THE priority, not school. If you come to think about it, almost everything our kids do can be perceived as Education: soccer practice, free play, Lego building, cake baking, learning a new craft, going to a museum, going to school, a trip to the grocery store with parents, talking to elderlies and grandparents, searching the internet, going to the masjid (=Mosque \u2013 Muslim place of worship) and so on. Looking at it this way shifts the focus from only \u2018school\u2019 being at the center of the concept of Education to rather focusing more on \u2018life learning\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Talking about school, though, I have to confess having been an A student my whole life. I\u2019ve always been the nerdy nerd in school, high school and even university (being married and giving birth to my daughter in the beginning of the second year!). Before any of my kids entered school, I used to have very great expectations about their performance at school. Why would they not ace all subjects? I never thought of them not having exceptional abilities at school. Yes, they may have favorite subjects and not-so-favorite ones, but they must be top students. That\u2019s what I thought. It took me two kids \u2013 and a global pandemic \u2013 to start to accept that my children can be mediocre students. Yes, right now, I want them to be mediocre; I don\u2019t want any top students in my household!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Life has taught me to set my priorities right. I found out that it takes so much unnecessary pressure to raise kids who will always excel at school. My priority in this life is Islam, my religion, and I want to raise my kids upon it. They can be average at school and ordinary at their Qur\u2019an memorization but at the end they\u2019re doing both. I want them to learn from Life in general, not just from outdated textbooks. I want them to be good Muslims, good citizens and sociable human beings, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This, in brief, has been my story, or if you may call it, my journey with the idea of Education, the shift in mindset I kind of forced myself to accept. I hope sharing this has been of use to someone today. I may write a second part to this as I still have more to say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since we\u2019re currently preparing for midterms here and trying our best to cover the syllabus, I thought of expressing my views on this topic. Education, in general, let alone school education is a topic on which my views have varied greatly over the years. Let me express some of those very frankly and randomly here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-random-thoughts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/tim-mossholder-WE_Kv_ZB1l0-unsplash.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319,"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/319"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/khadiga.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}