Students 'must learn to think'

Prof Paitoon Sinlarat

Dhurakij Pundit University (DPU)'s vice president for Research and Academic Services, Prof Paitoon Sinlarat, said teachers in many countries set goals while teaching, screened learning materials, taught old subjects and even analysed received knowledge for student consumption, evaluating the final results.

"Being a purveyor of traditional knowledge and ideas is not enough. We should let students set the goals, let them seek knowledge by themselves, and suggest to them how to screen that knowledge so as to create new knowledge, letting knowledge fall into place till they can apply that knowledge and evaluate their own learning," Paitoon said.

"That will show them the way to new knowledge and ideas, which is what teachers as facilitators are for."

"We can't go through the educational field looking at our students as the media do, as a lot of 'lost cases' or as mere consumers. We have to look at them with hope, focussing on their possibilities, personal capacities, hopes and fears. We're teachers, not judges. We're called to walk with them and to discover truth together," said Prof Cristian G Desbouts, director of the Institute of Didactics at Italy's Salesian Pontifical University.

They were speaking at a discussion on July 10 at the International Conference on Higher Education Research and Development: Looking beyond Globalisation, held at DPU from July 911.

Paitoon called Thailand a consumer society in that students ate bought and shopped in imitation of foreigners.

He recommended teachers instil critical thinking.

"We should guide them to screen information, for which critical and analytical skills are needed," he said.

They also expressed concern about the "sins" of higher education.

Desbouts said the marketisation of knowledge and of access to knowledge that implied exclusion was a "social sin", for knowledge as goods could not be the core of a learning process with students at the centre. "In an open and complete interaction, teacher and student produce new knowledge or restructure their previous knowledge," he said.

Paitoon's five educational sins were emphasising academia not real life, content not process, memory not thinking, constancy not change and the past not the future.

He urged teachers to reverse them in the development of higher education.

An important challenge to teachers, Desbouts pointed out, is to be transmitters of values.

"Words are not enough. Our lives should be models for our young adults. We have to become milestones along the way of their lives. Living an ethical life doesn't mean being a superhero, it means being capable of doing our best in our daily work," he said.