Education is the means and training is the object – the philosophy of education systems is to train people better, not to accumulate information. This is a trivial matter, but it has not been understood as it should have in Afghanistan, as the education systems have been unable to fulfill such a mission as effective as possible. Of course, human resource development is not only possible through education and family, but also community, groups and even circles of close friends can play impactful roles. Not to mention that the education system plays the most important role. In Afghanistan, the concept of education is mainly summarized in the transfer of information to students, and the subject of education has been forgotten.
Prioritizing education means that the development and formation of the student’s personality should be the main focus of the education system. The proper development of human personality is firstly linked to mental health as children and teenagers are in the most sensitive stages of their lives and the deficiencies in the educational environment will cause serious damage to their mental health, causing lifelong neurosis and psychosis. This problem is more obvious in religious schools or madrasas. First, due to being away from the family and being deprived of the necessary love and affection, secondly, due to age incompatibility, thirdly, due to the incompatibility of the curriculum with age factors, and fourthly, due to the deprivation of recreational areas, which are greatly needed at this age. Although schools slightly perform better than madrassas in this respect, they are not much different from religious schools compared to developed countries. In fact, the educational environment should give students a sense of personality and self-esteem, something that is reversed in Afghanistan and often instills a sense of inferiority and impersonality. Those who have the experience of living in other countries will easily realize the unbalanced behavior of many adults, and it shows an inability to understand and cooperate from the level of streets and markets to government offices and finally to the realm of politics and national issues in the form of endless tensions.
Mental health is reflected in social behavior and learning social manners is another part of the responsibilities of the education system to replace good habits with bad habits in the personality of students. Therefore, half of the educational programs should have a practical aspect to lead to the institutionalization of acceptable social behaviors in the student’s personality, and this is something that cannot be done with just linguistic reminders and moral advice. In the higher stages, there is a need to cultivate the abilities that make the student self-reliant, to be successful in human life, and this becomes possible if a student learns the skills of work and economic activity and can turn the wheel of his/her life. In addition to all this, it should be considered that we live in a global village and while we keep the roots of our identity alive with our cultural and civilizational past, we should be global citizens at the same time, both in vision and awareness. To find the ability to communicate and interact with other inhabitants of the earth. For this reason, international organizations specializing in this field have revised the definition of literacy and illiteracy and have considered the following items as literacy criteria in the 20th century: emotional literacy, communication literacy, financial literacy, media literacy, educational literacy, information technology literacy, health literacy, racial and ethnic literacy, environmental literacy, analytical literacy, energy literacy and scientific literacy. Nations that are considered illiterate in this sense, their fate is the same as we see in Afghanistan.
