Avicenna
980 AD - 1037 AD
In
the medieval Islamic world, an elementary school was known as a maktab, which
dates back to at least the 10th century. Like madrasahs (which referred to
higher education), a maktab was often attached to a mosque. In the 11th
century, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the West), wrote a chapter dealing with
the maktab entitled "The Role of the Teacher in the Training and
Up bringing of Children", as a guide to teachers working at maktab schools.
He wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of
individual tuition from private tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why
this is the case, citing the value of competition andemulation among pupils as
well as the usefulness of group discussions and debates. Ibn Sina described the
curriculum of a maktab school in some detail, describing the curricula for two
stages of education in a maktab school.
Ibn
Sina wrote that children should be sent to a maktab school from the age of 6
and be taught primary education until they reach the age of 14. During which
time, he wrote that they should be taught the Qur'an, Islamic metaphysics,
language, literature, Islamic ethics, and manual skills (which could refer to a
variety of practical skills).
Ibn
Sina refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as the period
of specialization, when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills,
regardless of their social status. He writes that children after the age of 14
should be given a choice to choose and specialize in subjects they have an
interest in, whether it was reading, manual skills, literature, preaching,
medicine, geometry, trade and commerce, craftsmanship, or any other subject or
profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career. He wrote
that this was a transitional stage and that there needs to be flexibility
regarding the age in which pupils graduate, as the student's emotional
development and chosen subjects need to be taken into account.
The empiricist
theory of 'tabula rasa' was also developed by Ibn Sina. He argued that the
"human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa, a pure
potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know" and
that knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in
this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" which is developed
through a "syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead to
prepositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts."
He further argued that the intellect itself "possesses levels of
development from the material intellect (al-‘aql al-hayulani), that
potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-‘aql
al-fa‘il), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect
source of knowledge.
I think that the author is trying to emphasize the importance of social influences in learning. I think that he agrees that nurture plus nature equal to a well developed individual.
TumugonBurahin