Episode 14 - Schools..Education or Packaging?

Peace be upon you and the mercy of Allah, dear guests. We continue in our series on women and have reached the topic of women and education.

Let us go back to the history of modern school education, which is an introduction to university education. But why the transition to another topic other than women? It is not a transition, but rather a foundation to see if contemporary education meets the needs of the girl who will be the woman of the future. Does it help her perform her roles and what she was created for? Is it beneficial to her? Does it achieve her tranquility, happiness, and the good of this world and the hereafter?

Today's discussion is general about the education of boys and girls, young men and women. We will review the features of learning and education in Islam, starting from the revelation of the Quran, to keep it in our minds. Then, we will review the emergence of contemporary school education prevalent in the world, including our Islamic world. For it is our right to know what brought us to these classrooms where we spend 12 to 14 years of our lives, the most important stage where our personalities are shaped.

And it is our right to ask: What has been the contribution of schools to the existence of the corrupt doctor, the oppressive engineer, the thief seller, the embezzling official, the doubting physicist, the atheist biologist, the feminist doctor, and others?

Education in Islam: Vision and Method

The first verse revealed by Allah to His servant Muhammad (peace be upon him) was: "Read in the name of your Lord who created." O mankind, read and learn about the universe and life, and understand them in the name of your Lord, starting with faith in Him as your Lord who nurtures you, who created you from a clot and guided you to the transmission of knowledge and the building of knowledge with the pen, and with what He has given you of innate disposition and intellect capable of recognizing truths, because it is from the creation of a God of absolute perfection, not a mind that came by chance in a random line, but a mind prepared by the most generous Creator who wants man to learn what he did not know.

Read so that you may benefit from your knowledge and benefit others, and so that you may infer from your knowledge the greatness of Allah, thank Him, and achieve what you were created for, which is worshiping Him in its comprehensive sense, so that you may be happy in this world and the hereafter. A cosmic vision that makes man harmonious in spirit and soul, emotion and intellect, so that all his powers are engaged in achieving the highest goal. A vision that starts from the oneness of Allah, so that it produces a soul united with its Creator, united in its view, not a scattered, fragmented soul.

The Muslims set out with this vision and produced a great output in the sciences in their various forms. We have mentioned in the Journey of Certainty some of the sources indicating the Islamic origins of many sciences and inventions, indeed the experimental method itself, which is acknowledged by fair-minded Westerners.

Factors of Immunity in Islamic Education

The educational system in Islam has factors of immunity and resistance against corruption:

1. Education as Worship: First, education is worship, whether in the sciences of Sharia or the sciences of nature. Therefore, the culture of "Read in the name of your Lord" was widespread in society at the level of the family, from the teachers in the katatib, in the mosques, in the circles of knowledge, in the schools that emerged in the Islamic eras.
2. Shared Responsibility: This leads us to the second factor of immunity, which is shared responsibility. Everyone participates in bearing the responsibility of education and does not place it on the shoulders of the state. Carrying the responsibility gives immunity against the spread of corruption even if the institution of rule is afflicted with corruption, because the components of society have been strengthened on "Each of you is a shepherd and each of you is responsible for his flock." So every pious shepherd will strive to reduce the damage to those he sees if the head of the pyramid is corrupted, and the parents and educators will continue to practice education as worship to Allah, which preserves the integrity of the roots of the Muslim society even if corruption affects the branches, so the roots will grow new healthy branches again.
3. Soundness and Stability of Reference: Third, the soundness and stability of the reference. "Read in the name of your Lord," the revelation is the reference. The values and standards governing knowledge are fixed and do not change based on revelation. The state provides the necessary environment for the dissemination of correct knowledge, issues the qualified, and protects people from the players and the spreaders of ignorance and misguidance, because preserving the intellect is one of the necessities of the five necessities of the Sharia. The state sets the frameworks, and then there is flexibility regulated by revelation. In contrast, people hold the ruler accountable based on revelation as well. There is a reference, the reference of revelation that the ruler cannot tamper with or change, but he is entrusted with the interests of the people according to this reference, and if he contradicts it and orders the teaching of what contradicts the interests of the people, there is no obedience to a creature in disobedience to the Creator, but he is taken to task and held to comply with the revelation, so his authority is not absolute, but "If you disagree about anything, refer it to Allah and the Messenger."
4. Financial Centers of Gravity in Society: Fourth, the financial centers of gravity in the correct Islamic position are in society, not looted or controlled by a ruling class, nor by capitalist classes. Islam fights the concentration of wealth in the hands of a group "lest it be a state among the rich of you." In this free atmosphere, Islamic endowments played a great role in learning. A Muslim who possesses money allocates part of his money and keeps it as ongoing endowments after his death for the purpose of educating people. This was one of the factors that preserved the strength and role of popular educational institutions in producing scholars in various fields even during periods of decline in the institution of rule. Al-Azhar, for example, before it was corrupted by British colonialism, was funded by endowments. The distribution of money among people prevents learning from being exploited for the benefit of a group of capital owners, but the worshipful meaning in learning is present and strong, its goal is to achieve the nation's worship of Allah in its comprehensive sense as we have explained.
5. Outputs of Education: This brings us to the fifth feature in the Islamic learning system. The outputs of education are not measured by qualifying individuals to serve the owners of capital and global companies in a convincing slavery, but are measured by achieving the goals of revelation, the goodness of people's worldly and hereafter lives, and the goodness of their souls, spirits, and morals. Thus, the jurist has his value and the nurturing mother has her value, even though these have no value in the capitalist system because they do not serve the material system. All of this prepares the atmosphere for the sultan to be in the hands of Muslims and the presence of the people of decision-making from Muslims, and for the emergence of generations of free people who received their education from centers of community educational gravity, and their economic security is linked to centers of community economic gravity, so their measure in accepting or rejecting what is asked of them is whether it is right or wrong? Only, for they have not known slavery to anyone other than Allah and their sustenance is not threatened.

Therefore, education in the name of Allah is worship practiced by everyone and they bear its responsibility. Revelation contains the source of great truths, the driver of exploration of sciences, and a fixed reference that does not change. Education in which the components of man are in harmony and its goal is to achieve vicegerency and worship of Allah in its comprehensive sense, linked to a just economy that is not monopolized by a class, and in which there are factors of immunity so that it does not deviate and so that the whims of a group of humans are not imposed on the generations.

The Emergence of Contemporary School Education in Europe

What was happening in Europe during that period? It is important for us to know because a completely different form of education was taking shape there at that time. Then, when our hold on divine revelation weakened and the Europeans occupied our lands, they were able to dismantle the educational system that we have explained, eradicating its strengths and resilience, and replacing it with their own system, but with a systematic distortion that ensures our subservience to them and our lagging behind them.

Europe was living through the beginning of the feudal class system: lords and workers. Education was restricted to the aristocratic class, and if the workers learned anything, it was only to the extent necessary to increase productivity for the lords.

Then came the Renaissance, which began in Italy between 1400 and 1600 CE. During this period, there was a revolution against the old authorities, and nations were formed with citizens, not lords and workers. People breathed a sigh of relief before a second class, the capitalist class, gradually emerged.

After education was restricted to a particular class, it became apparent that the most economically viable solution for educating the European peoples for free was the establishment of regular schools. The aim of these schools was to instill the ideology of the state in the generations and increase the productive capacity of the workforce to strengthen the state, operate the factories, and control and plunder the resources of the countries they occupied.

To this end, what are known as industrial schools were established to produce a compliant, molded human being to work in the factory. The first of these schools appeared in the Kingdom of Prussia in Germany in 1717, and you can read about this model of schools under the title "The Prussian Education System."

Then, in the second half of the 18th century, the first industrial revolution occurred, and women left their homes. Birth control pills were distributed to women to free up more of their time to work in factories.

In 1807, a decree was issued in Prussia mandating that schools submit to the Ministry of the Interior to teach what the system desires.

The Philosophy of Colby Education: Fichte, Macaulay, and Harris

The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte says in the book "The General Character of Modern Education": "Schools should mold the person, mold him so that he sees only what you want." This is because Germany was in conflicts with France in which it lost a lot. Fichte considered the greatest mistake causing the weakness of the upbringing of Germans to be the free will of the students, because the person remains indecisive between good and evil. On the contrary, good upbringing should be based on the abolition of free will, for the goal for which students should be molded is to strengthen the state.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born in 1800 and died in 1859. The reason for his creation was that his mother died and his father remarried, so he lived neglected by both, by his father and his stepmother, in a miserable childhood. During this period, in 1835, while Britain was occupying India, which was previously under Muslim rule, the British historian and politician directed a report to the British governor in India entitled "Report on Education in India." Among what was stated in it: "We must at the present time exert our utmost efforts to create a class that forms a bridge between us and the millions of people under our rule, a class of Indians who remain Indians in their color and blood but are English in their morals, opinions, intellectual possessions, and tastes. We may leave this class the task of refining the common dialects of the country so that these dialects are enriched with scientific terms borrowed from Western nomenclature, thus this class in its various degrees becomes a suitable carrier to spread knowledge among the larger mass of the population."

Therefore, this is the goal of establishing schools in the colonies: to maintain the cultural occupation of the country even after the military occupier has left. Keep this precise description that Thomas Macaulay uttered to recall it when we talk about international schools today in Muslim countries.

During all these developments, many sciences were transferred from the Muslims to Europe but severed from their doctrinal roots, cut off from the roots of "Read in the name of your Lord." And the slogan became "Read in the name of the state and its power," which in reality became reading in the name of man, his desires, and his tyranny.

In 1843, the idea of the factory school was transferred from Prussia to America and Europe. Then, between the years 1852 and 1917, compulsory education and government schools were enacted in the American states, the first being Massachusetts and the last being Mississippi.

In 1892 in America, ten people known as the "Committee of Ten" made school education in its known form until now twelve years, including a curriculum of Greece modified with modern English, science, and history. This twelve-year system has remained until today in most countries of the world.

We may ask: When this system, which was set up by these ten people, was copied to the Islamic countries today, was the question asked by them and their references? And why do we adopt what they adopted? What were the goals they were seeking to achieve when they enacted this educational system?

In answering these questions, we return to the biography of one of the most important of these ten, William Torrey Harris, the Commissioner of the United States for Education, who presented a message entitled "Education of the Indians," meaning the Red Indians who lived in America. We read the original document of the message as a historical background. The original inhabitants of American lands were the Red Indians, who were invaded by Europeans who carried out campaigns of genocide against the original inhabitants, killing millions of Red Indians in a painful history we spoke about in the word "Models of Human Happiness." After the matter was relatively settled for the Europeans, skirmishes continued to occur between them and the remaining tribes of the original inhabitants, the Red Indians.

In this message, Education Commissioner Harris and the military man General Thomas Morgan presented a solution for the cultural melting of the Red Indian children into the new American civilization so that they would no longer pose a danger to the invaders who are now the legal inhabitants of America. The optimal solution proposed by the two writers is to impose a radical system of education by isolating the children of the Red Indians at the earliest possible age from their tribal environment and subjecting them collectively to compulsory education.

Harris says that one or two or three years do not provide the Americans with sufficient expenses for the conflict with the Indians like five or ten years of school education, because the short duration of education does not greatly affect the tribal life of the Indians nor turn them into an industrially productive society, which forces the state to protect itself from the danger of the Indians by constantly spending huge sums to support the military force necessary to confront them, or the state is forced to choose the policy of harsh extermination. Harris proposes dealing with the Indians in a missionary spirit of conversion and imposing compulsory education on them and distancing them from their families for a period of up to ten years as a form of cultural integration.

This is William Harris, one of the most important of the ten who set up the educational system still in use worldwide today. Introducing children into schools early and keeping them there for long periods is one of his main goals to weaken tribal powers and weaken the influence of their parents on them and impose the state's policy on them.

Harris acknowledged the molding of people through the school educational system, where he said in his book "The Philosophy of Education": "Ninety-nine percent of people in every civilized nation are mechanical creatures, automata eager to follow the predetermined paths, and eager to follow the habits imposed on them, and this is not a coincidence, but the result of intensive education system which if we want to define it scientifically, it is the restriction of the individual, his melting, and the removal of his individuality." Then he mentioned proposals to treat this molding.

Someone may say: What do we have to do with Harris and Fichte? This is old talk, now the West emphasizes the value of free thinking, this molding and the removal of free will was a long time ago. What do you say then about the molding and brainwashing that students in the world today are subjected to regarding the file of sexual deviance, for example? After the will was removed and brains were washed by turning adultery into a personal freedom. If it becomes justified to remove the will of students, as Fichte wants, and to integrate them culturally and impose values on them, as Harris wants, and all this under the title of strengthening the state, and there was no fixed and correct reference from revelation to control the values, then the values will change from time to time. Accepting deviance, for example, is now a cultural value for which students must be molded and their brains washed, after deviance was rejected outright.

Compare this with the correct Islamic position where revelation is the reference and the standard that does not change or alter with the passage of time, and where "Read in the name of your Lord" is the slogan of everyone in a society immune from imposing on its children the desires or opinions of a group of humans.

Until 1954, it was not permitted for Black children in America to study in the same classrooms as white children. Then, the Supreme Court decided to integrate them with the whites, which angered many people who took to the streets in protests, raising signs that read "Stop the mixing of races, racial integration is communism." The young girl Ruby Bridges, when she entered the classroom, the parents would object and take their white children out of it, leaving her alone. And Ruby is still alive. So imagine if we were to emulate this system, and take its educational system without much filtering, when it was, not long ago, blatantly discriminating based on skin color, while we are a nation that "the most honorable of you with Allah are the most righteous of you," as stated by the Commander of the Faithful, the Qurayshi Umar bin Al-Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him: "Abu Bakr is our master and the one who freed our master," referring to Bilal the Ethiopian, as narrated by Bukhari.

Criticisms of the Contemporary Western Educational System

Someone might say: You mention the negatives of this educational system and do not mention its positives, and this is bias. We say: Our goal here, esteemed guests, is not an academic historical presentation that mentions all the details of the subject, but our goal is to focus on the points where this educational system differs greatly from the concept of education and learning in Islam and the ominous fruits that the world suffers from it.

We are not alone in criticizing this system and its output, but voices are raised from among them who do so.

Report "A Nation at Risk"

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education in America issued a report to the American nation and the Ministry of Education titled "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform." Among what James Harvey, the report's writer, said: "The educational foundations of our society are currently eroding due to the rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our future as a nation and a people. If a foreign and hostile force tried to impose this poor and failing educational performance that we see today on America, we would consider this act as a warlike aggression against us."

So, was the educational system actually reformed after that? Perhaps the answer is in John Gatto's book, which was published eight years later in 1991.

John Gatto and the Book "Dumbing Us Down"

John Gatto had worked long in teaching and published his book "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling." In it, he criticizes the academic curriculum in American schools, and the book spread widely, and a second edition was issued in 2002. I would like to translate for you excerpts from this book so that you understand the magnitude of the crisis.

Gatto says: "Schools and schooling are increasingly not serving the great projects on this planet" meaning the earth. "No one believes that natural scientists receive the necessary training in science class. Nor politicians in civic education. Nor poets in English language classes." Meaning that the successful people in those countries were not the reason for their success.

John Gatto says: "The truth is that schools teach nothing but how to obey orders." Meaning the "Shaping" molding that we talked about. He continues: "The school institution is psychopathic, mentally ill, it has no awareness or perception, the bell rings and the boy must stop writing a poem and close his notebook to move to another cell, where he must memorize that man and the ape descend from a common ancestor." That is, the student learns contradictory information, sees himself in the literature or language class his human abilities that distinguish him from animals, then in the science class he must memorize that he is a sister to these animals for a common father. Of course, because there is no unified vision emanating from the true revelation, but a dismantling of the components of man and his consciousness. This schism between the materials is the hallmark now in most school curricula around the world. Especially curricula that tickle people's emotions with religious materials, and at the same time impose on students what the state wants or what false science dictates about the universe and life.

John Gatto also says in his book: "There will be no widespread reform for our destroyed students nor for our destroyed society except by expanding our concept of school to include the family as a basic engine for education," which we have talked about in terms of each shepherd assuming his responsibility in education. And he says about education in general: "It should make you spiritually rich, it should teach you two important things: how to live and how to die," which the educational system that is more concerned with matter than with man does not teach.

Even from a material productive point of view, is this educational system successful? No, voices are still raised about its inadequacy even from this point of view.

Sir Ken Robinson and the Killing of Creativity

In 2006, the international advisor Sir Ken Robinson, who was granted the title of knight for his services in education, delivered a lecture on TED which is the most viewed in the history of the program, around 66 million views so far, titled "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" In it, he criticized the educational system of schools in that there is a fear of error that kills in students the daring and the ability to be creative, and that it does not take into account the children's need for movement and play, and in terms of the rigidity of the hierarchical sequence of subjects, it does not explore talents but buries them. And Robinson says: "Education is like a mining tool that searches and mines only specific things from the mind of the mine and what is below that may be labeled as sick."

In 2013, in another lecture of his titled "How to Escape the Educational Death Valley?" Someone might say: How do these people describe the educational system as killing talents while we witness this huge progress in inventions and discoveries? We say to you: The abilities that God has given to man are immense, and today's discoveries are the result of centuries of accumulated knowledge in which Muslims had a great share as we mentioned. So, progress in discoveries does not mean that the educational system in schools is successful.

But in the book "Pillars of Excellence" published in 1962, the childhood of more than 400 influential figures in the twentieth century was reviewed, and it was found that three out of every five of them, meaning 60%, were dissatisfied with schools and school teachers. And to inform you, Thomas Edison's teachers described him as unfit for school education, he did not complete his school education and stopped at the primary stage, then became this discoverer one of the greatest inventors of the modern era, and he has one thousand three hundred and ninety-nine American patents bearing his name. Albert Einstein's Greek language teacher told him that he would not succeed in anything, that he was wasting everyone's time and that he should leave school immediately. And God knows how many intelligent and talented people in the East and West have buried their talents because the educational system was unable to discover and develop their talents.

Contemporary Alternatives and Their Challenges

There are attempts to deviate from this known school pattern, such as Waldorf schools that avoid using technology and raise the banner of focusing on talent development. A number of employees of what is known as Silicon Valley in America enroll their children in these schools. The founder of this school idea is Rudolf Steiner, who is influenced by Eastern philosophy. Therefore, do not be surprised when you see that the program distributed to the parents of children in nurseries includes, during the "snack time," a song in which students thank the sun. It is sufficient for you that the corruption of the origin must affect the branch, and whoever pays attention to this may learn some of the wisdom that Allah has revealed. Indeed, whoever has a disease in his heart may doubt the matter with the same contradiction due to his inability to see its benefit. And the truth of the matter is that all the deeds of the disbeliever and his affairs must contain a flaw that prevents them from benefiting him. Even if something of his affairs is assumed to be perfect, he would deserve the reward of the Hereafter with it. But all his affairs are either corrupt or incomplete.

This means that a Muslim may wonder why Allah and His Messenger (peace be upon him) command to oppose the polytheists and not to imitate them. For example, imitating them in cultural curricula—we are not talking about benefiting from discoveries—but imitating them in curricula related to the conception of the universe and life. Imitating them in this regard contains corruption that you may or may not notice. Their deeds are either corrupt or incomplete. It is befitting for Muslims to justify their method of education based on the reference of revelation.

Among the attempts to deviate from the common teaching pattern are the efforts of Salman Khan, an American of Bangladeshi origin, who holds various degrees and has a simplified style of explanation. He criticized the education system in a speech he gave at TED and in an interview titled "A History of Education." Some of the information in our episode is mentioned in this interview. Salman Khan founded a free global educational platform that teaches many sciences, taking into account individual differences in comprehension. It allows the student to watch the topic he wants to study and revisit the part he did not understand in a simplified explanatory style.

However, as soon as this platform became famous, capitalist whales like Google and Bill Gates swallowed it with millions of dollars in grants. With financial grants come intellectual and moral agendas as usual. Last year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the perverts, which Google and Microsoft celebrated, Khan Academy danced to their tune with tweets on Instagram symbolizing perverted personalities. It was noted how the platform pushes this agenda into children's lessons, a form of brainwashing children and imposing what the capitalist whales want. The academy returned and celebrated this year as well by changing its Twitter logo to the colors of the perverts' flag during their day.

As long as the change is only in the method and form and not in the motivations, goals, and reference, the desired reform will not be achieved. As long as the concern of many countries is not the greater education of students in what benefits them in their religion and worldly life, but rather molding and consolidating what is intended for children to be convinced of and teaching obedience, as Ayman Abdul Rahim explained in his lecture "A Society Without Schools," the desired change will not be achieved.

International programs such as "IB" and "IGCSE" have also emerged. However, there are common elements between all these forms:

• Disconnecting knowledge from the reference of revelation.
• Cutting off the significance of knowledge about the Creator and faith in Him.
• The absence of the worshipful meaning in seeking knowledge.
• Molding and instilling the beliefs intended for students to believe in, with changing references dictated by those in power or capital.
• The ability to change values continuously.
• Measuring the outputs of education by the grade and qualification for the job market, not by building the comprehensive human being qualified to achieve servitude to Allah in its comprehensive sense.
• In many curricula, the separation of subjects from each other and their contradiction with each other, so that students study in a biology class what contradicts what they learn in a religion class about the origin of the universe and life, for example.

Conclusion

So, what is the alternative? What education do we want? What are its pillars, and what is the place of women in all of this, whether influenced or influential? This is what we will answer in the next episode, God willing.

It is worth mentioning that I obtained much of the information in this episode from material compiled by my brother Dr. Abdul Rahman Dhaker, the doctor, psychologist, and educational specialist interested in the file of the soul and education. I also benefited from a discussion with my brother Professor Ans Sheikh Karim, an expert in Sharia and educational psychology, and from the efforts of some brothers and sisters who helped me in investigating and extracting information for today's episode. May Allah reward them all with goodness.

Peace be upon you and the mercy of Allah.