Al-Ghazali’s and Ibn-Khaldoon’s Innovative Contributions in Education

Abstract

This study aims to explore Ibn Khaldoon’s and Al-Ghazali’s innovative perspectives on education and teaching methods. In addition, it is assumed that the seeds of some modern theories in education have their origins in the contributions of both. Using Qualitative Thematic Analysis to draw evidence from purposively chosen sample (selected extracts); the sixth part of Al-Muqademah for Ibn-Khaldoon revealing some gaps on his contemporary teaching methods and Alchemy of Happiness and the Balance of Work for Al-Ghazali concerning the ethical aspect of education. This study has identified four major themes: First, Al-Ghazali’s emphasis on learners’ everlasting happiness resulted from knowledge and worship going in parallel with each other. Second, teachers should wisely advise their students by giving them indirect advice for the sake of preserving their individual integrity. For Ibn-Khaldoon, however, two additional themes were concluded. First, rejection of the usage of strict methods with learners as it fosters their sense of being oppressed, inhibits their self-defending tendency, decreases their self-dependency as they rely on others to obtain security and precipitates fears of receiving penalty which, for example, may lead them to avoid telling the truth. Second, rejection of feeding children complicated concepts that are not within their zones of proximal development. Therefore, several instructional scaffolding strategies that aim to facilitate the learning process are provided by him with a much concern for fitting the curriculum with the learner’s preparedness and cognitive capabilities, these strategies include real examples, gradual teaching, repetitions, avoiding pithiness by conveying concepts with sufficient explanations, avoiding attention distractors such as teaching two different disciplines simultaneously. It is postulated that integrating such two pedagogies with each other provides a multidimensional approach to contemporary Arabic education as Al-Ghazali’s emphasis on the moral obligations of students and teachers and ibn-Khaldoon’s focus on teaching methods.