Having two school-age children (ages 12 and 10), education is of the utmost importance to me. I have sent both of them to school since KG and after years of persistent frustration, I have come to the conclusion that modern-day schooling is one of the greatest wastes of time.
I am convinced that schools are in the business of training, not educating, our children - in the same manner that animals are trained. Schools are factories of mass human training. They replicate the industrial model found in automated factories, churning out graduates in the same way factories churn out cars or laptops.
Schools produce graduates, not human beings. Schools excel at preparing their end-product for a capitalistic life in modern society. Schools provide a hierarchical education for a hierarchical society, embodied by the cubicle corporate lifestyle. Schools are perfect at producing docile, obedient citizens content with the status quo. Schools fill the role of creating cogs necessary for the machinery of society.
Schools do not engender a strong family or culture or religion. In fact, they undermine all of the above, replacing them instead with loyalty to the self, nation, and institutions.
The potential of most every child is stunted by this schooling system. I refer not to the ‘educational’ potential – that potential measured by report cards and SAT scores. Rather, I refer to the human potential – that potential to be a complete Adamic human being, who understands the true nature of the universe in ways the angels cannot even comprehend.
Our humanity is measured by more than grades and report cards. Life is more than homework and tests. Knowledge is more than some concocted curriculum taught at school.
Children and young adults need to understand man’s place in the universe. They need to actualize the higher purposes of life. They need to learn about the spiritual even more than the physical. They need to embody higher morals and ethics.
And this is not material that can be covered a few hours a week at Sunday schools. These subjects are the crux of our very being and yet, we have all accepted a model of education where these fundamentals are given lip service at our local Masjid. We have silently fallen in line with the rest of society, choosing to focus our children’s intellectual efforts on worldly studies.
And it’s not as if the schools excel in the worldly studies. In addition to the incredible absence of spiritual guidance, the schooling system fails to prepare children for the real world. Schools leave them disconnected, existing in a created space dedicated purely to children.
We fail to engage our children in mature topics, viewing them as mere receptacles for useless information such as Social Studies, Health, and Language Arts. When will they learn the affairs of the adult world? We coddle them in a manner that stunts their maturation process, leaving us with 23-year old adults playing video games and watching UFC.
Manufactured concepts, such as teens and tweens, thrive and take over the mind of young adults, robbing them of their productive place in greater society. Instead they are relegated to the periphery, in classrooms and study halls, playing nary a role in society at large.
After years of schooling my own children in this failed system, I have cast aside the artificial importance placed on my child’s ability to memorize data and regurgitate it for testing purposes. I have rejected all the counterproductive efforts required for homework, school projects, and exams. While the schooling system may prepare my child for the next grade or a good college or a good job, it fails miserably at producing a complete human being.
So I’m choosing to focus on educating my children instead of training them. Maybe they won’t become ‘successful’ engineers or lawyers or doctors (only a small percentage of all schooled children actually do), but my definition of success is not dictated by mainstream society.
WAW
4 days ago
11 comments:
Hamza Yusuf has this good talk, from quite a while ago, called "Lambs to the slaughter" - which addressed this topic.
It does seem like education, in its modern sense, is designed to create workers.
So, if I may ask, have you withdrawn your kids from the 'conventional' schooling system?
What are you doing now to focus them on education rather than 'training'?
Assalaamu alaikum :)
*watching for more posts on this*
I'd love to see what you choose to do with your kids....this is a topic near and dear to my heart. After working at an Islamic school and experiencing various other schools myself...I couldn't really imagine sending my kids to either at this point.
Slms.
I've told many people this, that schools mess us up. It's a waste. The only thing good that came from school was learning how to adapt in social life- and that also was not centred on Islamic values, with intermingling involved
It's better that children don't become lawyers and accountants(we do need doctors however) because most people in these profeesons(that I know anyway) hate work.
Rather learn business, it's more practical and it's sunnah.
Also maybe farming, or learning how to fight and join the army. Things that don't require slavery training
you mean to say that the brainwashing done at KSA isn't any less than the brainwashing done at USA?
I refuse to believe it!
AA-
@DL, took my kids out around 2 years ago. That was the easy part. :-)
I've since been working with them on memorizing Quran and the three R's. The beautiful thing about homeschooling is that you choose every subject they learn and how they learn it. It also builds the parent-child bond. Obviously much more as well, but these are two quick benefits that I've noticed.
@CC, are you currently homeschooling your kids? Also, what kind of experience did you have at the Islamic school?
@SS, I too believe that business is the key in the modern world. It offers the greater amount of freedom.
@Sr Kal, :-) I actually wouldn't consider schooling as brainwashing as much as it simply is a deficient model. And this faulty model for education exists everywhere, not just KSA or USA.
The same people you mentioned that the system you so despise produced wrote the books that is being used for home-schools and the same parents produced by the same system are home schooling their kids. If you have the discipline, the knowledge and proper guidance you are welcome to home school your kids. But if you are 99% of today's parents do not gamble your kids future. It is their future and not yours. Whether you like it or not, life is a huge FORD factory added few breaks here and there .
My experience,
homescholled my 3 and 4th kid and my first 2 went thru the system.. end result no difference...
they all rebelled ,they all setteled down by mid-20s and they all are loving caring an religious good human beings.
they all would give their lives and fortune up for us and each other and they all raise lovely kids.. they all value family first adn foremost
the first 2 had an easier time in college than the homeschooled ones..
looking back i wish i had the sense to send the younger 2 to school and save myself a lot of angst. homeschooling never increased any bond - in our case..
diff stokes for diff folks, maybe you have a diff experience, for me it was just a waste of time and energy wheni could have used the available schooling resources and had the same end product.
Anon,
Wow, what an extremely telling experience with homeschooling two and schooling two. I have always felt that the role of a strong family can outweigh the negatives of society (generally speaking; of course there are always exceptions) and your case furthers my belief.
Out of curiosity, when you homeschooled, did you adhere to a 'standard' curriculum with all the various subjects and regular testing or did you go the path of the 'unschooling' approach (less subjects/tests, more life-lessons)?
I'm very interested to learn some more details about your experiences.
hi ,
With my 2 homeschooled ones, i mixed both types. I did have regular testing and subjects, followed a curricul that was standard ,but also explored a bit, like for instance we would do the regular curriculam in math and explore a bit on our own and let them experiment and then do the tests, sometimes i did the tests twice, once after the curriculam and once after the experimentation :-) but i made sure they took the regular tests, to me it was a matter of making sure i was not misleading them from the mainstream.
It made for longer schedules but we never stuck to the 9month school days, we did all days in a yr and staggered it to end in sync with the school year.
Trust me it is a big effort on the parents part and a lot of sacrifice. that's why i was a bit dissapointed when i didn't see a difference.
In truth my 4th one was a bit delayed and we had some tense moments in college, he cam thru fine and went into med school but i always worried that it was my homeschooling that made it hard, there is no way to tell could be he would have fared worse inthe system.
The biggest plus is to see them learn at their pace and find out their distinct interests and the biggest minus is time management. i felt somehow the school system gets them to manage time better ( by force or otherwise)
again please keep in mind every situation is diff. ours was this way yours may be diff. in fact to tell thruthfully my older 2 are much closer to us ( maybe because they got less time form us eh) ..and are a bit more marginally only successful...againt hey all choose uniformly to NOt homeschool their kids, rather one of the spouses work parttime and sort of balace the education out after school.. which if i had the sense many eons ago i would have done too :-)
sorry for the long comment.
Assalaamualaikum. In my experience Brother Naeem, as someone who has taught Grades 1 to 5 for a period of time, I have to say that the situation is quite complex.
Firstly, I agree with you whole heartedly, 100% that schools that failed to educate children on what real life is about. However, in my time in the classroom - and I saw this particularly with Grade 1's, many parents have also failed in their parental duties towards their children. The result is that in my case specifically, I was stuck with 40 children who don't even know what it means to have *basic* manners i.e. saying please and thank you, respecting their elders, greeting one another, and basic etiquette when using the toilet etc. etc. Modern day parents have found it apt to expect teachers to teach their young children how to have the very BASIC of morals and values... things that parents themselves should be teaching their kids, not expecting a stranger to do their parental jobs for them.
That said, I also have to agree that I find school "curriculums" to be utter nonsense... a total waste of time. I've never needed nor utilised 80% of what I had learned at school. And we were still the lucky ones because some of our teachers also agreed to your sentiments and they formed a committee where they introduced free "Enrichment Classes" after school. Although I never had the chance to attend, students were allowed to attend classes where knowledge transcended the structured approached visited during class-time in adherence to the school's "curriculum". In these classes, knowledge wasn't "taught", it was applied and most of the content incorporated Philosophy, Religion etc. designed to inspire a greater consciousness and allowing us to see the bigger picture.
That said, I have to say that our Madressa's here in SA had similar problems... often encouraging parrot-fashion learning without fully creating a God-consciousness within their learners. Instead, most of the time, learners were discriminated against based on the amount of wealth their parents contributed to the institution and the colour of their skin. So in essence, whether it was intentional or not, they taught us and encouraged discrimination and prejudice. Sentiments like we should all "hate Jews" were not uncommon. As learners, we've benefited in that we can read and recite the Quran in Arabic, but we weren't taught how to be better human beings... and as such, I can say that 80% of what I had learned at Madressa has been inconsequential to me and my life.
I've had to learn about life and humanity and what it means to be a good Muslim and person outside of these institutions.
AA- Azra,
So basically, you're saying that homeschooling is the way to go. :-)
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