Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope Explorer who encouraged the humankind to take another step forward toward exploring the universe.
The research that will be carried out from now on with the help of the James Webb probe, by finding clues from the beginning of creation, will take us to the proximity of the big bang, will image the spaces between galaxies better than before and will help us to know billions of black holes. It will probably reveal the existence of new elements in the composition of the universe and new species of life, travel to other galactic worlds will be closer to reality than imagination and will open our wings to fly in the vastness of existence.
Such achievements are first of all the product of scientific wisdom, which itself is rooted with efficient educational systems in the modern era. The history of education, of course, roots back to several thousand years before today, and every civilization has contributed to instituting this glorious and honorable building. In the Islamic civilization, in the era when medieval scholasticism had not yet prevailed and the freedom of belief and pluralism had not disappeared, scholars such as Khwarazmi, Biruni, Razi, Ibn Nafis, Ibn Sina, Khayyam, Ibn Rushd and others appeared and their names have been recorded next to great men such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates and others, and today their name and contribution to the development of today’s modern science constitute all the Muslim pride.
Since the time when religious fanaticism was combined with political tyranny, the star of science in these lands began to decline. Real knowledge gave way to superstition and pseudo-science, and the work of scholars changed from discovering new horizons to ruminating the words of the past generation after generation. Since then, no famous scientist has appeared in these lands. In our image, the Western world has freed itself from the thousand-year ruins of the Middle Ages, ushered in the era of renaissance, and have set foot on the path of science with firm determination. Despite the inadequacies of the power apparatus and its colonial consequences, the Western world has been able to give new life to academic institutions and has paved a new way for researchers. Knowledge is freed from the monopoly of the church and its allied nobles, it is made available to the public through universal education systems, and in its lap, the environment is enabled for brilliant human talents to emerge and flourish.
In our countries, despite the efforts made for modernization, the educational systems have not yet freed themselves from their medieval paradigm and have not been able to help the formation of self-founded wisdom, free research and critical thinking. In the meantime, religious education suffers from deeper damages, because accepting the worship of the heritage of the past and the feeling of inferiority towards the predecessors has restricted the power of thoughts and has turned the best talents into robots for storing information that lack the ability to think critically, especially those schools that train suicide bombers. The launch of James Webb Explorer is one of the thousands of achievements of the dynamic educational system that the modern age has brought into practice. This great scientific step has once again embarrassed us along with the claim of our five-thousand-year-old civilization and has exposed the ineffectiveness of our worn-out educational systems. The time has come to fundamentally transform the educational system, to put it on the path of dynamic knowledge and wisdom and not to boast about what we don’t have anymore.