Digital Delights

"Ask what education is for, though, and the warm bath of consensus soon evaporates. The Greek philosopher Plato said that the aim of education is to teach our children to desire the right things—a mix, like a lot of Plato’s ideas, of ethics and esthetics.  He didn’t neglect the practical, though, believing that those destined by birth to wield power in his ideal Republic should learn “enough to fight a war and run a house and administer a state.”  His own student Aristotle took a more skeptical line, writing that “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Arab societies have also placed a high value on education, beginning with the Prophet himself, who held that “the ink of the learned would be weighed against the blood of the martyrs.” The medieval Persian philosopher, Al Ghazali, had an idea of education as self-realization that would not be out of place on a modern campus: “Knowledge,” he wrote, exists “in the soul like a seed in the soil.” The Andalusian scholar Ibn Abd al-Barr, known as Al-Namari, writing during the same epoch, argued that education was needed to encourage religion, awaken the intelligence, furnish a companion during periods of solitude and enable social contacts. In a reflection of contemporary concerns, he also said education is important because it “brings money.”

Compare his language with the mission statement of Harvard College, perhaps the most celebrated university in the world, which pledged that the institution “strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities.” But, of course, whatever else it accomplishes, a Harvard degree also “brings money.”

It might seem that such elite concerns have no connection to the experience of students at overcrowded public universities in the Arab world. It  also might seem irrelevant to their parents who worry about whether, in today’s uncertain economic climate, the time required to obtain a university education will simply leave their children further behind in the search for employment. "