The holy Quran for Educating the Child
Quranet interweaves the Quran, in unprecedented fashion, with modern educational approaches, thereby helping the Islamic world and the West to better understand each other.
How Quranet began?
Bushra Mazarib – the student who set the project in motion
In 2007 a group of fifteen Bedouin students studying for graduate degrees in educational counseling attended a course on Developmental Psychology given by our lecturer Dr. Ofer Grosbard. One day I went up to him and said: “May I tell you the truth. What you are teaching us is not going to be of help to us.”
I said that when I become an educational counselor, a parent may come to me one day and say, "A demon has entered into my child" or some similar statement from the same cultural background. "Do you think that what you have taught us here will be of any use to me then?"
"Then what would be helpful to you?" Ofer asked.
I replied with one word: "The Quran."
I said that, in the appropriate context, quotation of a verse from the Quran has enormous impact on Muslims.
Ofer brought a copy of the Quran to our next lesson. He divided the chapters among us and asked us to locate the educational-therapeutic verses. It transpired that there are many of these in the Quran. The verses exhort individuals to take responsibility, learn the truth, respect others etc. Ofer asked us to compose a brief story taken from everyday life for each verse to illustrate how a parent or teacher can utilize the verse to convey a message to the child. Together we collected more than three hundred stories, and Ofer added to each a simple and brief educational-psychological explanation.
I must admit that as a student of the Qur'an for the past twenty years, I was fascinated by Ofer's work. For me it is a demonstration of the authenticity of the Qur'an's claim to be a guide for all humanity. The book is exceptionally clear in the manner in which a wide range of difficulties that people experience can be solved by means of the Qur'an.
Sheikh Musa AdmaniImam of London Metropolitan University
Head of the Luqman Institute of Education and Development
Dr. Ofer Grosbard, a clinical psychologist by profession, has labored with his students to implement this impressive project. The students, all Muslims, who are studying for graduate degrees in educational counseling, are keenly aware of the importance of the link between psychology and the Quran in the effort to help schoolchildren and their families.
Sheikh Muhammed OmariLecturer, al-Qasami College,
Deputy Chief Inspector of Islamic Religious Teaching, Ministry of Education and Culture.
It is a very impressive work as is the Quranet project - the bidirectional social network: between Islam and the West.
Prof. Yuli TamirMinister of Education
Book Chapters
About the author
Dr. Ofer Grosbard is a clinical psychologist with an additional degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. An expert in multi-cultural education and psychology; a lecturer at Haifa and Tel-Aviv Universities; at the Arab Academic College for Education in Haifa and a research fellow at the Israel National Defense College. He published articles and nine books that have been translated into different languages and received awards.
Publication Information
Edition: Second Edition
Publisher: Ben Gurion University
Published: 2008
Available in: Hebrew, English, Arabic
ISBN: 978-965-342-953-6
Paperback: 617 Pages