Universities must teach how to think

May 26, 2012
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
PACIFIC DAILY NEWS

It is no small accomplishment that the Territorial College of Guam -- since 1968 the University of Guam -- is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year as an American institution of higher learning. As Scottish novelist Robert L. Stevenson once wrote, "Everyone who got where he is, had to begin where he was." Guam invested in the Territorial College to bring the University of Guam to this significant moment.

Nearly 40 years after the founding of that proud Territorial College, I joined the University of Guam as a "raw recruit." Arriving on Guam in 1991 after a stint as a visiting associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, I was quite new to teaching. Most of my professional career had been spent in service to the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, a nationalist resistance movement at the Khmer-Thai border, fighting Vietnam's 1979-1989 military occupation of my birthplace, Cambodia.

I knew little of Guam, but was fascinated with Hollywood's depictions of island life and ever attached to the tropics when I applied for a three-year assistant professor position in political science at UOG.

Ironically, it was current UOG President Robert Underwood, who was academic vice president in 1991, who introduced me to the UOG community. But he soon left the university to serve as Guam's delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives. Guam became my academic home for the next 13 years. And as Underwood returned to Guam in 2003, eventually to assume the university presidency, I was arranging for my own retirement in June 2004, having come to love the island.

I heard from Underwood again on the occasion of my last regular column for Guam's Pacific Daily News. Though I am no longer on the campus, I have followed the growth and changes at the University in recent years. I am proud of what UOG has become physically and in terms of the depth of its program offerings. Clearly, UOG takes seriously its mission to educate the citizens of the Western Pacific. As a vibrant place of learning, the university must constantly reassess how it confronts the changing world in which it operates.

Henry Steele Commager, University of Chicago educated historian, wrote: "Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them."

In a perpetual cycle, the nature of formal education changes to adapt to the society it helps to modify. Sometimes, though, change does not occur in all areas at the same rate. Today, much of public education is caught in a web of mandated testing while the world demands a highly literate, technologically savvy workforce capable of operating in a world economy that knows no borders. Students must learn the skills that will equip them to find their own way forward -- fluency in written and oral communications through a variety of media, without losing the capacity for critical thinking that is at the heart of our humanity.

What we know is not more important than how we think and how we use and relate information to the society in which we live. It is the combination of specific knowledge and capacity for analytical thinking that determines the condition of our future and of everything we do.

Teaching the skills that develop the capacity for quality thinking is, in my view, the primary role of a university. Career-specific information changes almost daily; the ability to think critically, to analyze and adapt, allows one to navigate the rapidly changing landscape of the 21st century.

The word education derives from the Latin root "educo," which means to "educe," or to draw out; "educare," to train or to bring up, to nourish; "educere," to draw out from within, or to lead forth. Thus, education is a process that serves to shape and mold the knowledge, character, and behavior of the human person; to bring up, to develop, and to shape an individual's inner potential and talent. Education is a lifelong process.g

Greek philosopher Socrates developed a teaching method of "drawing from within" -- a dialectic method in which the teacher asks students leading questions and guides them to discovery through critical inquiry. Socrates' persistent questioning was not intended to humiliate, but to discover truth.

Socrates saw as the purpose of education to produce a good man and a good life through the use of reason, a human faculty that can be trained through the principles of logic. An "unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates teaches. The individuals must seek knowledge and wisdom before any private interest.

Socrates' lessons are timeless, as applicable today as they were more than 2,000 years ago. They form the heart of a classical education, which must be at the core of a university's mission. As UOG celebrates its 60th anniversary and contemplates each year how to accommodate within a finite curriculum the ever-growing body of knowledge, it must not lose sight of the Socratic center that must be the foundation of every good man and woman, of every good life.

I most sincerely wish President Underwood, the university faculty and staff, and the people of Guam hearty congratulations on the achievement of this milestone. A part of me will always be with that warm and beautiful place where I lived and learned.

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A. Gaffar Peang-Meth taught political science at the University of Guam from 1991 to 2004. He currently lives on the U.S. mainland. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.