Thursday, April 3, 2008!
HandWritten on; 11:38 AM
Assalamualaikum and hello to all Pesuma students,
This is my first posting on the Pesuma blog. The blog is a very useful tool for sharing our thoughts, ideas, opinions, current events and other matters relevant to our society. I encourage all Pesuma members to contribute to it....
As one of your advisors, I wanted to share my thoughts with you about a matter that I find very relevant to our current times and context. As budding HRD professionals and university students, it is important that we discuss the difference between knowledge and credentials.
Being a Lecturer in University, it is often difficult to determine people's motives for pursuing education. Do people seek knowledge to make themselves and the world better or are they merely chasing the credentials that go along with a university education so that they can appear to be an expert? The reason I raise this issue is because as Lecturers we come across all types of students. On the one hand, without a doubt we have many sincere students that try hard to acquire knowledge for noble reasons; yet, at the other extreme, we have those who openly tell us that they are pursuing a certain degree (e.g., PhD) so that they can put it on their namecard!
The issue here is image vs. substance. One of the worst injustices (in my opinion) that we as adults have done to our young people is that we feed you a steady diet of image, image, image. How often to you hear about University image, personal image, image of your college, image of your department, image of Pesuma, etc. etc. But what is image? Why are we so concerned about image? What does image even mean? Image, by definition, is illusion. Some define it as "a reproduction of the form of a person or object" or "a mental picture of something not real or present." There are other definitions but in general, image refers to a superficial likeness of something. If image is something that is not real and merely superficial, why do we adults keep telling you how important it is? Should we not, rather, be reminding you of the importance of substance and truth, i.e. knowledge? Why are we more concerned with how things appear than with how they really are? This is the dilemma I am talking about....
When you graduate from UPM, insha-Allah, and you go out into the "real world," you cannot fake it. When you are asked to perform a job where people are counting on you, where there is money, time, and people's lives on the line, you cannot rely on image. You must be real, you must have substance and you must be able to DO that which you are asked. Image will only go so far. It may even get you in the door and hired if you are really good at it. You can only 'look good' for so long though before people catch on that in truth, you don't know what you are talking about because underneath your wonderful image, there is no real knowledge. For example, when we lecturers stand before you in the classroom, that Dr. in front of our names is meaningless for at that moment we either know what we are talking about or we don't. And if we don't, you know it! For you can usually tell when someone is passing on knowledge and when they are pretending, faking it, and just getting by on their lecturer 'image'.
Striving to obtain credentials rather than knowledge means we are overly conscious about image. Credentials obtained in such a manner mean nothing, however, when the time comes to prove what you really know. In the words of the great Imam Shafie (Muslim scholar), "Knowledge is what benefits. Knowledge is not what one has memorized." Knowledge is what results in goodness, has value and what makes people's lives better.
So please, dear students, do not get caught up in the world of chasing credentials, titles, status and the like. All of these 'things' that we waste so much time chasing are only as good as the knowledge and wisdom that they are supposed to represent. Rather, let's focus on seeking knowledge with a pure heart and sincerity, for the purpose of being useful to others and striving to improve the world in some small way. For only then can we truly claim to be successful practitioners of human resource development...
Dr. Lateef
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