The Great Many Brief Handbooks On Scholarly Subjects Is Detrimental To Instruction

Many recent scholars have turned to brief presentations of the methods and contents of the sciences.

• They want to know the methods and contents.
• They present them systematically in the form of brief programs for each science.

These brief handbooks express all the problems of a given discipline and the evidence for them in a few brief words that are full of meaning.

This procedure is detrimental to good style and makes difficulties for the understanding.

Scholars often approach the main scholarly works on the various disciplines, which are very lengthy, intending to interpret and explain them.

They abridge them, in order to make it easier (for students) to acquire expert knowledge of them.

This was done by:

• Ibn al-Hajib in jurisprudence and the principles of jurisprudence,
• Ibn Malik in Arabic philology,
• al-Khunaji in logic,
• and so on.

This procedure has a corrupting influence on the process of instruction and is detrimental to the attainment of scholarship because it confuses the beginner by presenting the final results of a discipline to him before he is prepared for them.

The procedure also involves a lot of work for the student.

He must study carefully the words of the abridgment. These words are complicated to understand because they:

• are crowded with ideas
• try to find out from them what the problems of the given discipline are.

Thus, the texts of such brief handbooks are difficult to understand.

Moreover, learning from brief handbooks is inferior to learning more extensive and lengthy works.

• The latter contains a great amount of repetition and lengthiness
• But both are useful for the acquisition of a perfect habit.

Little repetition leads to inferior habit.

• This is the case with the abridgments.

The intention was to make it easy for students to acquire expert knowledge (of scholarly subjects), but the result is that it has become (more) difficult for them, because they are prevented from acquiring useful and firmly established habits.

Those whom God guides, no one can lead astray, and “those whom God leads astray have no one to guide them.”

The right attitude in scientific instruction and toward the method of giving such instruction.