This is my own writings about the education in Lebanon.
By analyzing and comparing the Eastern and Western education philosophies and study the way they bring up an individual, both Eastern and Western education have distinct contrast between them.
Lebanon can be considered in the middle between east and west, but as education, Lebanon is more attractive toward eastern education, teachers in Eastern education are seen as “knowledge providers” and students act as “knowledge receiver”, students have limited opportunity to voice their thoughts, as most teachers handle the teaching and learning process by their own without listen to students’ idea.
The education in Lebanon lacks on the practice of student-centered learning, where most of students gain knowledge through spoon-feeding, instead of self-discovery. As a result, they become dependent to the teachers. Therefore, nowadays the teachers are being trained to guide the students by giving them guidelines in managing their learning process and discover their abilities and potentials by allowing them to do what they want and encourage them to try their best.
The study technique that is more towards memorizing among the student most probably because of exam-oriented and too depend on teachers and these approaches limit the space for creative and critical thinking. The learning process based on book learning and memorization. They focus on classics and exams. Teachers often have to rush through the textbooks to meet the deadline of every monthly examination. Hence, students learn from memorizing facts, which are often forgotten after a short period of time, rather than understanding.
After asking some students in Lebanon, we noticed that recently teachers tried to train them in the ability to analyze and organize information they receive, but exams put pressure on students to ignore this, since memorizing information is the key to winning points. This is parallel with the education system from Eastern philosophy that emphasizes on memorizing, while Western education emphasizes on understanding. This makes students to memorize the facts in the textbooks rather than understanding it as they are lacking of time.
In Lebanon, teachers are meant to be respected. However, teachers also need to build good interpersonal relationship with the students because it will influence students learning outcomes and enhance the quality of learning. Thus, teachers should treat students as friends and show their love and concern.
Considering the Lebanese curriculum, “it was used since 1997, this curriculum didn’t get any assessment and evaluation since that date” as teacher Ali Dalal (Physics teacher at Al-Qastal Sec. School) said after asking him some question about the education in Lebanon. He also added that the schools suffer from lack of resources, since there is no material in most of schools laboratories to do experiments “since students to understand the concept lessons they need to see how it works” he said.
In addition, teacher Dalal commented on the amount of information founded in the curriculum, since if any teacher want to use technology in his classroom it will need a lot of time since the studied material is huge and the teacher cannot do experiments with it due to the lack of time.
Concerning the role of the teacher, He said that most of class work is done by the teacher, the students are listener and they take notes form the board after the teacher. For the way of studying, the students memorize the notes and practice some exercises to be prepared for the monthly examination. The students don’t have the time to be creative, they have ideas but they can’t apply it or think about more creative ideas.
Lebanon also contain some religious schools that have their own way of teaching and curriculum, where they teach some subject that are related to religion. Also there is public and private schools and they have different styles of learning and different teaching methods.
As a conclusion, the education in Lebanon is in between the western and eastern education but more attracted toward eastern, in Lebanon they are working on following the technology in learning process by preparing the future teachers and by doing some changes to the curriculum but slowly.
