Between knowledge and ignorance

Where do you, for instance, place a Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) holder who cannot correctly write “Economics” (the subject he studied at NCE and for which he was employed to teach) on the blackboard? While universities keep complaining of half-baked graduates from secondary schools; principals of secondary schools equally grumble that pupils admitted from […]

Where do you, for instance, place a Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) holder who cannot correctly write “Economics” (the subject he studied at NCE and for which he was employed to teach) on the blackboard? While universities keep complaining of half-baked graduates from secondary schools; principals of secondary schools equally grumble that pupils admitted from the basic level in to their schools do not even qualify to be called half-baked because they are, to be more precise, “uncooked”.

Several factors could be identified to account for this ugly situation. These may include poor quality of teachers; non-availability of teaching and learning facilities; the state of learning environment; unstable academic calendar; etc. However, this piece intends to look at the issue from the perspective of the unwilling-to-learn disposition of today’s generation of youths and children, which has contributed though negatively to their shoddy grasp of “knowledge”, or rather, “pockets of learning experiences”. A young boy or girl in modern Nigeria, for reasons I find difficult to understand let alone explain, seems generally to have no time and patience to spare for learning; leading him or her from a lower stage of ignorance to a higher one. Yet, they foolishly pretend to know everything even though they understand next to nothing. This, perhaps, could explain to some extent the depleted level of knowledge among contemporary youths.

There is this story of a bride who did not know how to cook. Her mother-in-law wanted to teach her but the bride was too proud to learn. To everything the mother-in-law said in her attempt to teach the bride how to cook, the latter replied “I know”. When the mother-in-law said, “for this quantity of rice, you need this much water”; the bride said, “I know”. When the mother-in-law said, “You need this amount of salt”; the bride said, “I know”. The mother-in-law continued, “When the rice is cooked to such and such level, you need to drain it”; the bride got angry and said, “I know everything you are talking about, but you keep explaining”. The bride’s mother-in-law knew of the pride in the young lady. In order to break this pride, she said to the bride, “After draining the rice, you must steam it with a sundried brick over the pot”. The bride replied, “I told you I know that too”.

When the bride was ready to cook rice, she did everything her mother-in-law had told her, which she pretended or claimed to know. When the bride came to steam the rice, she put a sundried brick over the pot. But when she came a few minutes later, she found the brick had dissolved in the rice; turning the entire pot of rice in to a sludge of mud. People, who because of pride or exaggerated opinion of themselves lack the patience and discipline to learn, would always end up, like the bride, missing gracious learning opportunities. A pedagogical principle though frequently ignored but which permeates most learning theories is the reality that individuals who acknowledge their ignorance about what they actually do not know often learn better and faster than others who pretend to know what they really do not have even the faintest idea about. Lazy learners, such as this bride, deny themselves this benefit.

People do not just become scholars, learned or intellectuals, without being good learners from the onset. To be a good learner requires having some virtuous qualities. Well-disposed learners and indeed men of knowledge do accept that the knowledge they already possess about certain things (though limited) is insignificant when compared to the infinite extent of what they do not know. Only a good learner realizes the gap between what he knows and that which he does not; making him wiser. As his knowledge increases, so does the scope of his ignorance expands proportionately. Unless a learner recognizes the vastness his ignorance, his going through a learning process might not yield the expected learning outcomes.

An illiterate who fails to acknowledge his ignorance would consider the question about who a human being is as one of the simplest to answer. He would say, “A human being is a creature with two legs”. But defining a human being from anthropological, psychological, social, political or religious point of view is truly greater than imagined; a reality appreciated only by those who acknowledge the wide gap between ignorance and knowledge. In fact, well-disposed learners consider every atom in the universes as a complex creature. This is what probably led the French scientist Filisti De Lamenè to say: “If anyone can define a grain of sand, I will show him the Almighty”.

The more learning experiences a person acquires, the more complexities he discovers; the more complexities he come across, the greater number of question marks he encounters; and the greater the number of question marks there are for him to resolve, the more he realizes his own ignorance. While a person’s knowledge may be limited, his ignorance is comparatively ever infinite!

A good learner has an increasing thirst for knowledge. Allah (SWT) commands in Qur’an 21:7 “…Therefore, ask (from) those who possess the Message, if ye do not know”. A person committed to learning is never exhausted in his efforts to acquire knowledge. He is equally a person imbued with a high sense of humility. Genuine learners and learned are humbled by knowledge and the search for it. A person who cannot subdue pride, envy and anger; or cannot listen as much as he speaks; or cannot tolerate opinions contrary to his; or who cannot confess his weaknesses; is indeed classically ignorant. May Allah (SWT) guide us to the path of men of knowledge and wisdom; as we pray that He (SWT) protects us from treading the route of ignorance and the ignorant, amin.