Training methods of Lady Zahra (PBUH)- Part 1
A comparative review of the training methods of Lady Zahra (PBUH) and the training methods of the Modern Age
Preface
Humans, as the chief creatures in the universe, and the most amazing creation of God, enjoy such a precious nature and divine reality that in case of materializing it, will have the ability to reach perfection, happiness, actualization of the talents, and in one word, becoming a real human, and achieving this goal is not feasible except by a true training which includes different methods.
Parenting or child rearing is an important and complicated topic that has been the subject of several research activities over the centuries. The results of these scientific efforts are several theories with divers and sometimes contradictory features in different areas of child rearing, including different stages of physical, mental, cognitive, moral, intellectual, academic along with other developments. Modern psychology deals with issues related to child rearing mainly through two different trends namely, “educational psychology” and “developmental psychology”. Educational psychology means the use of psychology in the process of educating humans, but education in this domain has a narrow extent and merely is used in the activities related to the training of individuals at schools and classroom contexts. Educational psychology nowadays, is known as an empirical education or as a branch of applied psychology, and deals with the essence and quality of learning, training methods, and assessment and evaluation of the learner’s knowledge (Karimi, 2002, p.4). We can say: This science, by applying the knowledge resulted from the other sciences’ topics and the other studied domains, creates some new knowledge that is used in teaching and training issues.
On the other hand, developmental psychology is the science that studies the physical, mental, and emotional developments and changes, and the social performance of the individuals from the time of the formation of an embryo to the time of death (a group of authors, 2010, p.3) and despite making efforts to design some educational methods, it pursues the aim of recording natural developments of human life rather than trying to provide some methods and techniques for a comprehensive education and training of children.
Education in Islamic view, as the basis of educational method for child rearing used by Lady Zahra (PBUH), who is a role model of a Muslim mother and is educated by the messenger of Allah (PBUH), is an all-encompassing plan for developing and strengthening the human character. One of the educational methods in the Holy Quran that is used in the present study, is the method of presenting role models so that people emulate the perfect and complete humans; the modern psychology in the issues related to the perfection and success, discusses this method as “Modeling righteous personality”. Therefore, by studying the training methods of Lady Zahra (PBUH) in child rearing, we can achieve the features of the complete model in this regard.
The importance and the necessity of the comparative study of the training methods of Lady Zahra (PBUH) and the training methods of the modern age is to understand the differences between these methods and employ them both in improving and upgrading the child rearing methods so that they could be presented to the worried Muslim mothers. The present study, by employing the previous studies about the topic of educational methods, and by adopting a comparative and analytical approach, views the issue of “Efficacious educational methods in child rearing” from a new perspective (which is related to our cultural and religious background); this is due to the fact that although several studies in the domain of modern educational psychology and on the other hand, the life of Lady Zahra (PBUH) have been conducted, and many of them are present in the reference list of the present study, no effort has been made to specifically analyze and scrutinize the comparative approach toward the Islamic and the modern views of the particular issue of educational methods, despite the great importance of the issue.
The primary and the secondary questions of this study are as follows:
- How the concept of training is different in the Islamic view and in the psychological theories?
- What are the most important training methods of childrearing in the modern age?
- What are the main training methods of Lady Zahra (PBUH) in child rearing?
- What are the fundamental differences between these two types of training methods?
The Concepts
- Education
- Word definition: The process through which a person is taught better ways of doing something or a better way of living. This word is derived from two roots; “educar” meaning “to nourish, to feed” and “educere” meaning “to bring up, to guide, and to nurture” (Myalarh, 1997, p.1).
- Idiomatic definition: In the educational psychology, which its origin is mainly the western and European countries, education consists of the styles of formal teaching and training and the teaching of academic subjects.
One of the contemporary and the most popular theories of education is by John Dewey. He believes that education is “a noble process between the teacher and the learner that results from the necessity of the social life, and is based upon the learner’s actual and inner interests in order to reconstruct experience for the development of the democracy” (Kardan et al, 2002, p. 261).
Education in terms of the modern psychology is called to an ordered and continuous process whose aim is to guide the physical and mental, or generally the comprehensive development of the learners’ personality to realize and gain the human knowledge and the accepted norms of the society, and to help to flourish their talents (Seyf, 2009, p 462).
to be continued…..