STEM Education: Integrating Acquired Revealed Knowledge to Improve Learning Outcome

摘要

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education plays a crucial role in economic development. STEM fields promising wide career opportunities, career flexibility and lucrative salaries. Efforts of various parties including education's policy leaders and educators have been made to make improvements to strengthen STEM education. For most of us, the contemporary Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is based on purely objective knowledge which also known as acquired knowledge. However, this one sided source of knowledge, neglecting subjective knowledge, produces people with 'Excellence without a soul' as mentioned by Harry Lewis (2006). Steven Muller, former President of John Hopkins University, USA stated that (Ulin 1980) 'The failures to rally around a set of values means those universities are turning out potentially highly skilled barbarians'. Buncker Roy (1992) had remarked that 'Having literates do more harm than good'. Based on these observations, there are a need and idea to integrate objective and subjective knowledge, so that the learning outcome of STEM education will produce people with wholly rounded skills, potential and abilities, competencies, together with emotional and spiritual quotients. In Islam, subjective knowledge refers to the 'revealed knowledge' which is a knowledge based on believing in revelation from God as described in al-Qur'an. This paper describes an attempt to integrate STEM education with revealed knowledge which has been deployed by Muslim scholars in the mediaeval era.