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Dr. Gholamali Afrouz is a prominent professor in psychology and expert on special-needs children at the University of Tehran. He is also dean of University of Tehran’s Faculty of Psychology and Behavioral Science. He has great executive as well as educational and research achievements on his track record. He has also published numerous books and papers. The following is text of an interview conducted with Dr. Afrouz.
How do you see the current situation of humanities in Iran?
There is no doubt that cultural attitude towards humanities plays a crucial role in social status of such sciences in the society of Islamic Iran. An analytical study of the history of the Iranian and Islamic culture and civilization show that dynamic thoughts and processing them has been done by intelligent scholars of humanities. Most families encouraged their smart children to understand and learn the Persian language and literature, philosophical concepts and Quranic sciences. Basically, thinker, scholar and erudite were adjectives used to describe those who were most skilled in humanities, speech, writing, and explanation of theoretical concepts as well as processing of modern theories.
In past years, a physician who in addition to biological and medical science was well versed in Islamic philosophy was called skillful. Therefore, statesmen always tied to make the most of scholars in humanities to administer the state affairs. Scholars in humanities played the highest role in providing grounds for scientific and research work and encouraging interested and talented persons to learn modern sciences and technologies.
A comparative study will reveal that most cultural dignitaries of different countries are among scholars in humanities. Of course, some of them like Avicenna and Khayyam have been also masters of biological sciences.
Undoubtedly, growth of culture and values, veneration of human dignity, strengthening families, as well as invigorating self-esteem and national identity hinge on “humans” and humanities and depend on thinking about human values, dignity, esteem and happiness and attempting to produce more thought in the area of humanities.
When intelligent people in every society as well as knowledgeable youth think about human and humanities, the frequency of personal and social delinquencies fall and national identity will come to no harm. Imposition of materialistic and, at times, colonial thoughts in encouraging all creative youth to study in engineering or health-related fields would make the society vulnerable.
Today, the least attention is paid to humanities and the root causes should be sought in our education system. Our teachers at primary schools are not educated in humanities and our educational system is not engineered in such a way as to encourage intelligent persons to get involved in humanities. We have one million classrooms and need one million teachers who should be well versed about psychology of education, psychology of creativity as well as management and be satisfied with their job and serve as good role models for our children. This is not the case with the existing educational system. When students enter that system, they have to choose out of curricula that have been designed about 70 years ago. Our curricula were good for a time when not over 400 persons held high school diplomas. At present, even our housewives hold bachelor’s degrees. The current curricula offered at high schools are characteristic of an undeveloped cultural system and due to propaganda, all intelligent students opt for curricula related to mathematics or experimental sciences and those who are not intelligent enough choose humanities. This is one of the most serious problems plaguing humanities.
And more importantly, there are special classes to prepare students for university admission examinations which turn our students into persons who are skillful in answering tests. This method has become common even among secondary school students and the state television is airing their ads to increase its revenues. This is a catastrophe and means that people do not trust official education. In the meantime, all questions in university admission examinations come from textbooks and our teachers are capable of preparing students for those exams. Therefore, such classes work to discredit the official education because they reduce students’ trust in their teachers.
I believe that a general applied diploma should be given to everybody who would then enter the university carrying that degree in order to choose specialized courses. This has been institutionalized in advanced countries. The situation of humanities before entering the university is in total disarray, but the situation at universities is relatively better. Our approach to humanities should be indigenous and cultural. Out approach should be specially a cultural and indigenous one in such fields as psychology, behavioral sciences, sociology, political sciences and international relations.
At present, production of knowledge is very weak in our universities. Most texts are either translations or insignificant writings. We must pursue creative production of knowledge in the field of humanities, especially psychology, social sciences, political sciences and behavioral sciences because these are very important fields. As for arts, we must make a basic revision in high school courses in order to offer similar curricula in high school and leave professional selection of courses for universities. We must employ knowledgeable teachers who would serve as role models for students.
We must also take two points into consideration for the promotion of humanities in universities. Firstly, we must increase the number of religious and cultural scholars in humanities through a cultural approach. Just having a diploma from Iran and a sociology degree from Europe is not enough to become a university teacher because in many instances our academics have problems with the main cultural components and religious values of our society. We must exercise a lot of care when employing teachers. Secondly, we must strengthen our products and content in humanities. Fortunately, Farabi International Award has been playing a crucial role in this regard during the past few years.
What role can Farabi International Award play in promoting humanities in Iran?
Since Farabi International Award focuses on humanities, it is an essential step to create competition in scientific and research fields related to humanities. It allows us to assess new achievements in the field, value them and praise them. Farabi International Award can be greatly effective provided that those who judge the works are chosen out of prominent scholars in humanities.
The second condition for effectiveness of this festival is to pay true attention to research findings in humanities and not just what is sent to the secretariat. I mean, what is sent to the secretariat may consist of medium or low-quality works and we should try to find the best persons and give the awards to them. In fact, the secretariat of Farabi International Award should look for top works and this is the main philosophy of the Award. They should explore the vast expanse of humanities in Iran and choose works through a critical and powerful insight without political and social affiliations even if those works are just an editorial, a paper in a few pages, a book, or a research work. They should assess them and look for innovations in them. Perhaps, a two-page note can do a lot to solve problems. When someone has written an article and has caused a change, they should be awarded. However, repetitive works, adopted ones and those with medium quality cannot be chosen for awards because others will say that we have had nothing better to offer and this will kill motives for further research. Farabi International Award should create new motives for more research in humanities. There is no reason why the Award should be held every year. It can be held every two or three years and there is no need to give awards to all fields of humanities. You can select three or four works every year, instead of 20 works. For example, you can look for top works which cover Iran and the world, contain new components, and activate new thoughts in the country; works which can be effective and give rise to future engineers and doctors, revolutionize management in the country and provide it with basic strategic findings even if their volume is not more than a few pages. We must not give priority to quantity. This is why the selection is a tough task.
It seems that other Awards, including Kharazmi, have paid attention to this point because they look for creative students and this is evident from their products.
Farabi International Award should also look for creativity and innovation in order to promote humanities. Award is not limited to giving prizes, but we must look for new ideas and creative ones. We must look for intelligent and creative people and introduce them as new assets to enthusiasts of humanities, so that, everybody would understand the true meaning of invention in humanities.
An inventor who has made a useful machine in the field of experimental sciences is given an award in Kharazmi and other international events because their invention is new and not imitation. We must look for this in humanities, even if it takes two years and then we can hold Farabi International Award every two years.
We must look for innovation. Perhaps a high school student could write an essay which is so innovative as to deserve an award. It is a fact that Farabi International Award and its secretariat do great things, but they must try and improve their work. We must see what can be done in order to pave the way for attraction of new works and creative minds.
Do you think that Farabi International Award has been able to achieve its deserved position among scholars of humanities?
Yes. Farabi International Award has found its deserved position because it is powerful and rich. But there are many creative students and university teachers in humanities who are not familiar with criteria of the Award. For example, such interviews are very effective and can be circulated to all universities and even high schools in high numbers. If Dr. (Ali Akbar) Alikhani (secretary of FIA) and his colleagues carried out an effective publicity drive on what criteria are used by Farabi International Award and stick to them, we will have a number of new works every year. We must ask scholars about what new grounds they have broken in arts or psychology and search for their new works. Sometimes, a scholar in humanities has expressed an important viewpoint just in a single speech or during a televised program where he has elaborated his opinion about marriage, education or any other issue related to humanities. We must explore all these fronts. Everybody should know that Farabi International Award is a think tank which intends to review oral, written and other works.
On the other hand, Farabi International Award should change its bylaw and stop looking for quantity. For example, they should not reject a research which is less than 200 pages. Perhaps a paper in five pages has more to say. The statute and management system should be reviewed and they should look for top works. The jury members should be experienced and trained and fixed. They should know the true meaning of creativity, should be able to differentiate between a creative work and a cliché one, should be able to discover creativity, should differentiate between a work and personality of its creator, and should take a non-personal approach when judging works.
How is the situation of research in your field of specialty, that is, psychology of education?
On the whole, it is satisfactory. Of course, in some majors, the high number of doctorate students and paucity of insightful teachers has caused the latter group to act passively. Teaching groups at universities should delineate their outlooks for the coming 50 years and should know what they are going to need for, at least, the next 30 years. Without focusing on the status quo, they should try to realize the desirable situation and delineate future research horizons through a creative look. They should elaborate research topics for creative students, so that every student would act as a link in the chain of researches which is controlled by teachers and prominent research groups. In this way, research findings can address basic problems of the country. This has been already started and, gradually, they are achieving goals. Some of our colleagues had no insight about this in the beginning, but now they are unanimous about the outlooks. At present, forty research subjects have been put forth and resourceful students are expected to extract hundreds of more detailed subjects out of them in the next few years. We must be in control of this research work in order to stay away from scattered works which are not related to each other and do not lead to new findings. The field of interest to every research group should be clearly defined and we must try to make them specialized. Therefore, specialists of educational and research groups should define the outlooks for them. Every research topic should be supported by a theoretical background, so that we could know where we are and where we should end up. We are regressing in many fields because our teachers are acting passively.
Research leadership has been in decline in our education. We rely on theses and theses are based on topics. Research departments of universities, unfortunately, have not been very successful in this regard because project management and steering is not done in a proper manner in universities.
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Problems in Humanities Are Rooted in Pre-University Education
