The Madinah Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (MILE) hosted the fourth International Conference on Education and Employment (ICHE 2013) on Tuesday in Makkah.
MILE, an affiliate of Knowledge Economic City in Madinah, hosted the ICHE for the first time in the Kingdom. The two-day event, which has been organized under the patronage of Madinah Gov. Prince Faisal bin Salman, will progress on the educational front in relation to labor market demands in Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries.
An official from the institute told Arab News recently: “MILE launched the fourth ICHE in Madinah with the theme ‘harmonizing employability and cultural literacy needs’.”
He said the choice of the theme was dictated by two major trends in Muslim higher education, namely rising unemployment and the declining rate of cultural literacy among university graduates.
“Both trends, if left unchecked, could have negative implications on the future health of Muslim societies. Paradoxically, the more university education is designed to be specifically tailored to meet the needs of the job market, the higher will be the rate of unemployment among graduates,” the official said.
Moreover, the heavily market-oriented university curriculum has undermined the place and role of the humanities and social sciences, which are traditionally the main intellectual agents of cultural literacy in university education, he said.
Pointing out that without cultural literacy and adequate supply of social scientists imbued with Islamic values, he said Muslim communities will become vulnerable to the spread of social ills among them.
Thus, there is an urgent need to address the issues of employability of graduates and cultural literacy together from a wider societal perspective than is currently envisaged, the official said.
The past three conferences in the ICHE series were each devoted to one of these contemporary issues in Muslim higher education as a general theme for its deliberation.
The fourth conference, which will be held in collaboration with the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies (Malaysia), Bahang Foundation (Malaysia), University Brunei Darussalam and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), aims to help promote a better understanding of the meaning of quality university graduates in Islamic terms and to rethink the meaning and significance of cultural literacy as a major goal of higher education in Muslim countries.
MILE hosts 4th conference
