Soulless Education

"I fear most the new highly educated class of this country. They have high IQs, are very intelligent, very skilled and professional. They're eloquent as well. But. They lack basic human elements and qualities & courtesies such as humbleness, sacrifice, humility, etc. etc. They have become soulless."

This thought reminds me of the conversion story of former British PM's relative, who went to Palestine on a visit. During a cold night, she was trembling in cold because she didn't have blanket or stuff to sleep in. Then a Muslim lady, her destitute host, shared her own blanket, so that her guest could sleep well. This display of generosity changed her perceptions about Muslims, where she previously considered Muslims to be sort of demons of terror, and now she encountered angelic behavior from same people.

The lady might be very poor and be ill-educated (by educated i strictly mean getting modern school/college education), she might have least of IQ, or awareness about social sciences and what not. But, the quality of character, which impressed an educated lady, is also unmatched and operates at a different plane, of which modern education has no sense of.

In fact this moral education is no more a part of modern university education (at the least). "Julie Reuben, a professor at Harvard has written a book about how morality and character development were explicit goals of university education in the early twentieth century, but these goals were abandoned in favor of a purely technical education later on," writes Dr Asad Zaman who became a victim of the social sciences of West during his education at MIT. In the same article, he narrates how imitation of Western professionals and philosophies of life turned him into a soulless human:

At a personal level, I saw my fellow students attitudes towards others to be selfish andexploitative, instead of caring and compassionate. Having absorbed the implicit message that professional accomplishment was the goal of life, I was shocked to learn of the really pathetic personal lives of many of the professionals I had thought to emulate. The general philosophy that individual goals are valued above social ones leads to betrayal of wives and families, violation of commitments of all types, and pursuit of personal and career goals even at expense of society. The purely technical education offered by the West does not teach us anything about the crucial parameters which govern how meaningful our lives are. In several crucial dimensions, the lessons of Tableegh were diametrically opposed to those which I had absorbed in the course of my Western education. These lessons showed me that the teachings of Islam are as fresh and as revolutionary today as they were fourteen centuries ago; they do not stand in need of updates for modern times. It is impossible to convey these experience-based lessons in writing, so I will just describe one of them.