Optimizing Academic Education: Philosophies for Creative Qaulity Lives

doi:10.4236/ce.2011.25066

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Creative Education

2011. Vol.2, No.5, 458-460

Optimizing Academic Education: Philosophies for

Creative Quality Lives

Meysam Nikkhah, Akbar Nikkhah

Department of Animal Sciences, University of Zanjan, Zanjan, Iran.

Email: [email protected]

Received August 18th, 2011; revised September 24th, 2011; accepted September 30th, 2011.

The objective is to delineate postmodern learning and mentoring interrelation, elite-thinker-generating skills de-

velopment, optimum mentor-staff-mentee interactions, mentors’ soci-economic security, and advanced mentor-

ship evaluation strategies. Education is a foremost cause to find merits in life. Advancements in science and

technology result from improved education. For creative science education to achieve optimums, it must be im-

proved globally. Science and technology mentors must be continually educated and updated with artistic and

creative mentorship skills. Effective education will optimize social interactions. Efforts should be made to opti-

mize mentor-staff-mentee interactions in academia to effectively facilitate education and improve science qual-

ity. Effective mentorship requires making policies for effective management of mentors’ time and socio-eco-

nomic life. Theoretical and applied aspects in different majors need to be educated in integrated manners to gen-

erate multiple perspectives. Focusing on a single science without appreciating the multiple nature of science will

no longer advance scientific accomplishments in the postmodern era. Mentees should be directed to gain exper-

tise in multiple sciences in ways an artist gains excellence in multiple arts. Har mony makes higher quality arts,

science and life. A devastating failure would be producing follower graduates who despite having high scores in

written tests are unable to mentor, design, direct, conduct, and conclude experiments that aim to sustain and ad-

vance science. Postmodern mentees are to be provided with opportunities to simultaneously act as mentor and

mentee to appreciate their unique responsibilities. Improved education will improve social economics and hu-

man life quality worldwide.

Keywords: Science, Educ a t ion, Mentorship, Aca d emia, Postmodern

Introduction

Effective education leads human life. Education systems

quality determines human life quality. From birth to death,

human is exposed to an environment whose education proper-

ties determine human’s lifespan accomplishment. As such,

advancements in the science of science education is under

greatly increasing research and policy-making focuses (Alberts,

2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c). Education for sustainable future

will not be less important than food for continuing life (Nik-

khah, 2011a). The primary objective of this perspective article

is to delineate postmodern learning and mentoring interrela-

tionships, elite-thinker-generating skills development, optimum

mentor-staff-mentee interactions, mentors’ soci-economic se-

curity, and advanced mentorship evaluation strategies. These

academic philosophies will all require deserving thought, time,

and financial investments to optimize creative life qualities in

societies worldwide.

Postmodern Learning-Mentoring Interrelations

Learning is a mental process with unique interacting ele-

ments. Among factors affecting learning is mentor and mentor-

ship quality. More important than transferring knowledge is to

directly and indirectly educate mentees how to effectively su-

pervise and manage the education phenomenon. These duties

equip mentees with skills to take initiatives in confronting real

life challenges and develop solutions instead of blindly follow-

ing others and staying apathetic. This systematic education

promotes originality, innovation, and creativeness, and dis-

courages transcription (Nikkhah, 2011b). Mentorship patterns

should match optimum learning patterns to prove most produc-

tive. Harmonic learning-mentoring tasks will optimize profess-

sional communication skills (i.e., spoken, written, aural) and

will generate elite speakers, listeners, and writers. These skills

must be acquired thoroughly before any advancement in sci-

ence and technology can make it to people’s lives to improve

life quality. The communication skills are means whereby sci-

ence and technology are created, expanded, disseminated, and

applied. While the interactive sophisticated mutual (mentor-

mentee) mentorship practices replace one-way teaching, the

above skills will develop in a timely manner. Such a communal

learning involves challenging mentorship principles to create

and expand capacities for excellence in communication. As a

result of creating new capacious talents, science education will

continue to glorify in many aspects that will contribute to im-

proving science and life qualities (Nikkhah, 2011c).

Discovering, Valuing, and Expanding Elite

Mentorship Skills

Motivation fuels progress in science and technology. The key

to create and maintain motivation is discovering and valuing

creative insights. Creativeness is a potential to realize and se-

cure. Mentees can be mentored to develop and expand creativ-

ity. Discovering and expanding creative talents is an obligation

for the third millennium’s science servants. The most fruitful

science is the one that discovers and creates talents who can

discover and create higher quality talents. Equipment, devices,

technologies, techniques, and publications are not considered

the foremost science products in the postmodern era. The

postmodern science requires minds and philosophies that will

M. NIKKHAH, A. NIKKHAH 459

progressively facilitate generating such science products (Nikkhah,

2011d). The postmodern science education focuses first and

foremost on the cause. The effect will result automatically. The

cause includes elite mentors who advance elite mentorship

skills. The cause includes elite distinguished thinkers who are

prepared to be challenged to generate elite thinkers of the com-

ing generations. Creative motivation facilitates the multi-nature

complex of science education. Mentors should get mentees

involved in education. Mentors must not let mentees to remain

only learners. Science will achieve the highest potentials should

mentees get involved with mentorship duties very early during

the learning process. The postmodern science will not look into

educators as simply knowledge transporters and will not con-

sider learners as followers or knowledge seekers and trancrip-

tors. Teachers and learners are in no ways mobile knowledge

careers. They must synthesize and expand skills to transform

knowledge into insights and educate others such skills

(Nikkhah, 2011a). Knowledge can improve life quality only

when it is transformed into insightful real life strategies

(Nikkhah, 2011b). Therefore, learning is only a trivial part of

the whole mentorship collection whose main component is

creating the capacity to educate others. Learning is not saving

intact information in mind. Learning is a beginning to lead a

mentee to become a mentor. Effective learning can be guaran-

teed only when effective mentorship skills are adequately de-

veloped.

Teacher Education for Optimum Mentorship

Strategies

The beginner educators are to be profoundly educated on

moral constituents of the delicate mentorship commitment. It

must be continually emphasized that the most significant entity

of any society is the quality of its educators. Superior education

enables constructing superior social, economic, and cultural

properties. Higher quality education, thus, leads to intellectual

and superior oral and aural communications. These benefits

will ease life affairs and improve life quality and satisfaction.

The effects of such systematic education will be beyond regions

and will involve global science education (Nikkhah, 2011c,

2011d). It is inferred that some of the current global challenges

in sustaining a quality life for the world citizens result from

education deficiencies in certain regions. Thus, an effective

approach for optimizing global life quality is to improve re-

gional science educations in harmonic manners.

Optimizing Mentor-Staff-Mentee Interactions

Three main professional tasks are necessary to optimizing the

academic science education. These include mentors’ advising

programs, mentees’ outspoken expression of challenges to-

wards mentorship, and staff’s management of academic docu-

mentation and paperwork. Globally, the latter does not seem to

receive deserving attention in many instances. Basically, staff

help bridge mentors’ and mentees’ minds. As such, they must

periodically receive systematic education to profoundly appre-

ciate their standing in academia and their critical role in facili-

tating effective science education. The unique role distinguishes

academic official staff from counterparts in non-academic en-

vironments. Optimizing the three-way communication among

mentors, mentees and staff has been a major challenge in aca-

demia. Education for improving communication among the

three groups is a foundation upon which mentees’ future socie-

tal communication skills will be built. Getting through an effec-

tive communication with mentors and staff in academia will

equip mentees with proficient skills to overcome management

challenges in science education in either academia, industry, or

any society they will work in. Another main challenge is to

establish professional communications between mentors and

mentees (Allen et al., 2011). Questions, suggestions, critiques,

and any thought exchange between mentors and mentess are to

be highly persuaded and frequently exercised. In the postmod-

ern systems of science education, mentors welcome mentees’

challenges of mentorship because this will simply grant men-

tees with pathways for gaining mentorship experience and will

enable them to practically appreciate the true art of mentorship

(Nikkhah, 2011b). Silence, one-way teaching, and challenge-

free thought expression are considered toxic to any dynamic

education system and must be discouraged. Realistically, al-

ways expected from mentess is not the optimally professional

communication, which is always expected from mentors. Men-

tors, thus, should acknowledge and grant the opportunity to

mentees to learn from scenarios they face during their learning

experience. The program will not repeat, and thus, should be

maximally utilized to enhance mentorship efficiency for men-

tors, mentees, education systems, founders, governments, and

ultimately people.

Socio-Economic Security of Postmodern Science

Educators

Science education is a delicate process that needs to be con-

ducted under mentally focused and socio-economically stable

conditions (Weinberg, 2011). External factors that weaken the

motivation induction process will dramatically reduce outcomes

quality in any education setting. Special economical and social

promotion policies need to be innovated to support, maintain

and enhance mentors’ abilities in inducing motivation in men-

tees towards science and technology. Such policies will str-

engthen mentees’ beliefs in the power of science for trans-

forming human lives. The major part of a promotion policy lies

in its social security. Very often, financial promotions are

highly insufficient in persuading mentors to induce motivation

in mentees for science. Social security is defined as social sig-

nificance. Mentors must feel their character socially significant

before they can be persuaded to make enormous efforts to en-

hance their mentorship skills. Such a social significance ought

to be properly recognized and appreciated by policy-makers

and governors (Nikkhah, 2011e). Such recognitions will make

mentors increasingly appreciative of their outstanding position

in the scientific and economical growth of the world nations.

As a result, mentor will make further efforts to ensure generat-

ing upcoming mentors with capabilities to keep the science ball

rolling.

Integration of Theoretical and Applied Sciences:

Revisited Policy-Making for Mentees Evaluation

In all science majors, theoretical and applied branches are

highly integrated. Basically, no science major can be solely

theoretical or applied. What makes a given science theoretical

or applied concerns with how, when, where, and within which

education system it is utilized. Also, a science can under no

circumstances be absolutely theoretical or applied. It can rather

M. NIKKHAH, A. NIKKHAH

460

be proportionally either one. Unifying theoretical and applied

aspects of science will strengthen the interactions of academia

and industry. The resulting graduates will be better prepared to

work through challenges of the industry. Also, the systematic

integration of theoretical and applied sciences will increase

mentors’ inspiration in supervising the learning process. The

enthusiasm will improve science perception and minimize am-

biguities. In addition, such a mentorship passion will better

mentor-mentee interactions and their task satisfaction. Integrat-

ing a multitude of sciences with theoretical and applied aspects

resemble playing a multitude of music instruments in an or-

chestra. The harmony among the instruments will create states-

of-art that are greatly superior to when each instrument is

played alone. Science would similarly benefit from such an

influential harmony because science is an art and scientists are

artists (Nikkhah, 2011b). Thus, pursuing multi-science perspec-

tives should be encouraged. Brain cells process information

more effectively when an increased enthusiasm results from an

amalgamation of different sciences (Berns & Moore, 2011;

Berns et al., 2011; Nikkhah, 2011c). As a result, global insights

into the ultimate goals of progress in science and technology for

improving human life quality will be optimally developed in

mentees’ minds. Optimal understanding of the global science

philosophy will be a commitment and will mature with men-

tees’ appreciation of such multi-science learning strategies.

Mentee evaluation programs should not be limited to only

written examination of theoretical sciences. This would only

test mentees’ memory and photocopying practices that are not

praiseworthy in the postmodern science education. Memorizing

and delivering the same information given by the teacher is not

an art. Receiving insights from the mentor, contemplating, dis-

cussing, and proposing innovative proposals that lead to new

experiments and discoveries are among the postmodern duties

of mentees. In testing mentees’ challenged learning and ana-

lytical skills for both theoretical and applied aspects, they are

expected to independently direct and conduct experimental or

thought designs. This will prove their capability in contemplat-

ing, tackling, and overcoming real-life problems as applied to

their major. Communication skills will expand and be tested

when mentees conclude the designs with public presentation

and data dissemination in both oral and written. A recent study

suggested that mentees who experience both teaching and re-

search perform superior in designing new experiments com-

pared to those who focus only on research (Feldon et al., 2011).

Thus, what are expected from an upcoming mentor must be

exercised in mentees’ graduate programs. Ultimately, any

postmodern scientist must become proficient in research design,

data collection, analysis, communication, and distribution to be

of utmost benefit to science and society. These are undoubtedly

the most determining duties of a scientific task. Science must

generate producers and not consumers. Such procedures would

ensure generating upcoming insightful mentors instead of lin-

gering students who do not initiate confronting and surmount-

ing life challenges. The most devastating failure of an education

system would be a collection of follower graduates who despite

having high scores in written tests are unable to mentor, design,

direct, conduct, and conclude experiments that aim to advance

science and improve life quality. Demonstrating such skills is

not suddenly expected at the termination of mentees’ studies,

but they are trained to gain those skills throughout their pro-

gram. This preparation will involve proficiencies in definitive-

decision-making, collaborative-working, and independent-men-

toring as graduates start their professional activities. Optimally,

students should thus be provided with opportunities to simulta-

neously act as mentor and mentee to experience and appreciate

their responsibilities. That will help optimize their communica-

tion skills in academia and industry in contributing to generat-

ing distinguished elite mentors.

Implications

This perspective article delineated postmodern learning-

mentoring interrelations, discovering and sustaining elite men-

torship capacities, teacher education for optimum mentorship,

and mentor-staff-mentee interactions. The socio-economic se-

curity for science educators, fundamental integration of theo-

retical and applied sciences, and revisited mentee evaluation

programs were described. With most deserving thought, time

and financial investments in the above philosophies, elite-

management projects and elite-manager development will pre-

vail as a creative commitment in academia. These education

philosophies will improve social economics and creative life

quality worldwide.

Acknowledgements

Nature for its inspiring life expressions deserves the highest

acknowledgments.

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