COMMENTING ON THE cover story of our last issue, The Virtues of Home and the Curriculum of Belief, a reader told me he sensed a lot of pessimism about the future of our children's education in the article, along with a negative tone toward the Muslim leadership prevailing in it.
So I asked a few readers to review that article, and the follow-up feature by the same mother (which you can read for yourself in this issue). It continues the critique about how we Muslims are educating our children and suggests a few practical solutions to the teaching challenges it claims our community can either confront immediately or suffer the swerving of yet another generation from the path of divine knowledge.
Throughout, it keeps an eye on the spiritual and intellectual dimensions that form the basis of a good education according to the revealed wellsprings of Islam. The reviewers were not terribly confident that our author's ideas would effectively change the educational outlook in our communities. But to a person, they said that a thorough reading of the essays inspired in them a profound sense of refusal to submit to so grim a forecast for our children's learning horizon.
Let me be clear about this.We would trouble no one with these writings if we didn't think their discussion and ideas had both strength and usefulness. In fact, we published them precisely because we believe (1) that the education of our children has, potentially, a very hopeful future; (2) that, collectively, our community is moving forward and increasing its awareness about the sterling possibilities of a genuinely integrated, holistic education, as well as its pursuit of just that aim; and (3) that, more Muslim families are starting to take charge of the education of their children and significantly alter their priorities for that reason. Still, this should not be construed to mean that we are destined to meet the massive problems of our children's education successfully. Nor is it likely that our children will either soon or easily have the kind of education worth the name and heritage we call "Islamic"- instruction that will free their native sensibilities and God-given curiosities to learn, grow their minds, challenge, discover, glorify, believe, and in the process become the fully "human" beings that Allah has created all people to be.
No contradiction here. Many Muslim educators readily hold out an optimistic branch about the future of our education in the West.Then I ask them to scale that limb and predict a major communal realization of our educational objectives in the near future.
They balk. Strikingly, this is not a Muslim-only predicament. It is common knowledge that all other communities seriously suffer, to a largely similar degree, from the current dire educational environment virtually everywhere-private and public.
This is understandable, since ultimately, education is a-no, the, human problem. No doubt, you too have read comparable "hopeful-but-don't-hold-meto-it" comments by schooling experts from varied backgrounds. The reason for this seemingly paradoxical position is simple. Obviously, education represents one of the most complex human undertakings. On one level, it seeks to change and train humans for unique and countless sophisticated roles in life. But at a more essential depth, since their inception in the nineteenth century in the secular West, the modern public schools have increasingly come into the ruthless grip of those who control the capital in society.
Today's schools are directed to teach and train students to become professionals who can meet the demands of business, politicians, and power. And while our schooling systems seem to churn out these worldly cogs adequately, taking children en masse for an extended absence from family for up to 17 years in essentially non-functioning, non-serving roles does not help them get the education they need to meet the human
demands of the many other functions they ought to be performing in and for the societies of which they are a part. How self-defeating! How seriously diminishing is this fact when it comes to the transcendent purposes that are truly native to education.
More importantly, the current system of education is founded on two main assumptions: (1) That the concept of the common school can and will endure; and (2) that the notion of "childhood" will survive. Both of these suppositions have been seriously questioned and challenged in recent years. Considering the everincreasing cost of running schools (any school), the loss of a common vision or unifying values, the fast and highly advanced rate of technological innovation and the internet, the upsurge in violence and the sea-changes in the attitude and behavior of children at schools, and the rampant rise of school-based sexual activity and its diseases-it is not hard to see why many in the West are not presently prepared to continue to promote these two underlying ideals of public schooling.
Admittedly, there are many ways to interpret these facts. But we will simply point to one inexorable reality: Change in the very soul and structure of education has become inevitable. I have faith that this transformation will ultimately increase the authority of families in the schooling of their children. And this alone makes for a huge reservoir of optimism about the future of our children's learning.