Excerpt From:
Islamic
Home Schooling Advisory Network Newsletter
Volume
2 Issue 3 (July 2002)
The
Realities of Institutionalised Learning
By Abdullah Trevathan
The following is an excerpt from a talk given by Abdullah Trevathan at
the IHSAN 2002 Home Education Fair at Al-Muntadah Al-Islami, April 7th,
2002.
Before
I start I would like to warn people not to go away this afternoon thinking that
we should go out right away and close the schools, either the non-Muslim schools
or the Muslim schools, because that's not really what I'm here to say. What I am
trying to point out is that maybe this is a direction we should be looking at
and somewhere, perhaps, we should orientate ourselves.
It would be silly to go out now and close the schools and I am sure that
my boss, Mr Yusuf Islam, would not be very pleased if I arrived on Monday
morning and told him "alright, let’s shut the doors, that’s it, we are
all going to school them at home" - it just won't work.
But what we do want to do is start looking, in a gradual sense, at
changing the world that we live in, Insha'Allah. And change requires young
people to be learning different ways of thinking and different ways of being and
returning to some of the simplicity and the dignity of the people around the
Prophet (saw).
Let
me just start by looking at the situation as it is.
It is also probably useful to mention that when I am talking about
schools, I am talking about the schools which are outside of the Muslim world-
the non-Muslim schools- but I am also speaking about the Muslim schools because
what we are really talking about here is institutionalisation.
As Muslims in the West- living in the world in which we do today- we are
infected by a certain malaise, a very deep malaise, a malaise that is not
apparent right away. It is a malaise of uncertainty. The methodology which we
learnt in our schools was to be constantly questioning. Every school whether it
is a Muslim school or a non-Muslim school is only a microcosm of the wider world
in which we live, so one of the primary methodologies in education is to
question and question and question everything. Ultimately, it's almost as if the
ground from beneath you is swept away until there is no ground anymore. Nothing
is certain except one thing and that is, nothing is certain - and perhaps they
might even admit that death is a certainty as well.
What this results in is the lack of any meaning in life and people with
no meaning in life become depressed, they become disempowered and they lack
dignity and sense of orientation.
I
don't want to demonise everything which is non-Muslim as there are many good
things within the non-Muslim world which we Muslims could learn from. However,
the concept of dignity is the one that suffers.
We are all brought down to a mundane oneness, a deconstruction. You begin
to look at the great people of the past and begin to question their ideals, you
begin to question their motives and you begin to look in depth and you begin to
find out spurious things about them. Until
what you are left with is the thing that that person stood for, but it has no
value anymore and when this message gets across it means that the dignity of a
man and the dignity of a woman is not there.
There's a constant debunking and it
is very manifest in the way that people dress and also in the way that young
people in particular behave.
It’s
strange that in actual fact everybody becomes a kind of mass, a homogeneous mass
of sameness. I have to contrast this to some time I spent in the Maghrib
in Morocco amongst a tribe of Berbers - this is some 25 or 30 years ago
around the time I became Muslim. These people had no desire to be individual,
they had no desire whatsoever to stick out from the crowd and they had no desire
to make their mark on society. They simply were. They wore the same clothes,
they ate the same foods, they did the same things and yet amongst them there was
such individuality. One person was the village idiot, the other was the village
wise man, this person was known for his generosity, this person was known for
his miserliness. All of the human patterns of existence were there and each
individual stood out as an individual whereas we, in our search to be
individual, become a mass of sameness. What it ultimately comes down to is the
fact that whenever people do things collectively there is a weakness, a human
weakness in that things become institutionalised.
I
think that Muslims at this particular moment in their history and development
(particularly in the West) are very prone to this illness. There is this desire
to continue to institutionalise, the institute of Muslim this, the institute of
Muslim that and institutions are often formed with a very worthwhile and good
objective. But then, as the institution becomes bigger and bigger and takes on
more and more it forgets the original reason it was there and becomes self
serving. Let me give you an
example. At my school, Islamia Primary School, for the LEA and the Ofsted
Inspection we've got to have a certain rate of attendance per year; it has got
to be 94% attendance. A lot of the
children at the school do not have parents that were born here and there are
times when the parents take extended leave to go back to say, Pakistan for three
months. I am supposed to discourage
this, I have to write them a nasty letter, I have to tell them that this could
be unauthorised absence etc. However, I can't personally think of anything which
could be more educating than a child going back to the land of their forefathers
and learning about their roots, particularly if they are born in London. To go
back to the countryside, to see the sun rise in the morning, the moon come out
at night, the eggs being laid and hear the cocks crowing - witnessing the wonder
of Allah’s creation. I can't think of anything more educating. And yet, as an
institution, we have got to keep our attendance rates up. So what has happened
here is that the institution has come first and the individual child has come
second.
Institutions
are all about codifying and standardising people; you can't run an institution
without it. For instance, I
couldn't run Islamia Primary School if we did not have the children line up in
orderly lines so they could move through the school.
It would be chaos and I accept that, but what you’re doing is codifying
and bringing people down to a kind of average mean. I am not suggesting in any way or form that we should allow
the kids to run from the classroom willy-nilly as you can't run the school like
that. What I'm talking about is the nature of the institution. There was a
philosopher called Michel Foucault, who
was in many ways a rather disreputable fellow, but nevertheless he founded the
idea that a lot of our institutions are founded on the concept of prison. And
indeed, if you go out and look into a schoolyard you'll find that it very
closely resembles the prison yard. There are huge gates, there is tarmac and
that is about it. Some schools are now doing some paintings on the walls or
whatever to make it look nicer, a little more friendly, but basically its the
prison yard.
So
the institution is one which codifies and standardises people. My understanding
of the deen of Allah and the way of the Prophet (saw) is to raise people up, to
celebrate their differences and to allow those differences to weave together –
to make a powerful net of spiritual force which can be focused and concentrated
on any particular issue with which it is confronted. I have not understood Islam
to be a marching order of people, all wearing the same type of clothes and
praying maghrib at the same time, or following the same school of thought, or
praying exactly the same way because the sunnah of the Prophet (saw) is vast and
diverse and we should be celebrating these differences. That does not mean that
our objectives and our will and our collective orientation (tawajuh) should be
in anyway compromised. Islam is
anti institutional. Islam is a dynamic, organic structure.
It is said that one of the downfalls of Islam as a world power came about
because the Ottoman empire at its end had became a hierarchical structure. A
masonic hierarchical structure is always bound to fall and we see this
throughout the history of mankind: Musa (as) versus Fir'aun, where you had the
masonic structure and you had the organic way of Musa (as). Isa (as) against the
ordinances and the dictates and rulings of the Sadducees and the doctors of law
of the Jewish religion. The organic versus the masonic structure. That’s my
understanding of Islam, that’s what I've understood and in a sense the school
does not reflect that very nature, that very core nature of Islam.
Another
thing about schooling, as those of you who are home schoolers will know, is that
if you mention the fact that you are schooling your children at home, whether to
Muslims or non-Muslims, you usually get a very negative reaction.
We could go through the plethora of things that are laid at your door but
the point is that when you take it upon yourself to educate your own children,
you are taking the responsibility in your own hands.
Allah has bequeathed these little lives to you, these very precious gifts
and you are taking sole responsibility for them.
We are so ready to give that responsibility over to a group of people
that we may not know personally. We are so ready to give over our children to a
corporate ethos which we don't agree with, we are so ready not to take
responsibility. That’s not to say that the school your child is going to is
demonic and there are Shaytaan running around everywhere.
But the point is why are we not taking responsibility ourselves for the
future of our children? The taking
of responsibility is a very important thing and it is one of the ways in which
society, current society, dominates. Death
is also often taken away from people; the State will take over the death -
having the death certificate, the place where you are buried, etc. Birth is
another one. These ‘rights of passage’ are dominated and dictated to us by
the status quo. But there is an area where you do have the freedom, although it
may not be immediately apparent if you don't dig a little bit; the educating of
your children.
Another
aspect of schooling, which I've mentioned briefly, is peer pressure along with
the popular culture which is about. Even
in a school like Islamia, which is one of the top 11 primary schools in London
and where there is a strong drive to preserve an ethos of the deen, where prayer
is paramount and the mention of the Prophet (saw) is never far from our lips,
nevertheless public popular culture is there.
You can walk by a group of children and find them discussing Eastenders
or any number of popular cultural themes that are about.
I remember when my own children were very young and we stopped watching
television, (I am sure many of you have tried this experiment yourselves.) They
went to school and learned as much about the programmes that were on because of
the discussions that took place, as if they had seen it themselves.
In some ways I would prefer for them to watch it themselves so they made
up their own minds instead of being told what to think. Popular culture is on
the threshold of every home but you can keep it at bay if you are in control and
if you are responsible for the lives and minds of your own children.
Authenticity
is another thing. We live in times which are inauthentic. What is authenticity
and inauthenticity? Authenticity is when a person’s outlook and behaviour is
moulded into what they really are- into whatever fitrah Allah (swt) has give
them. Inauthenticity is when they learn patterns of behaviour which are not
necessarily theirs and which are there to either gain something, to gain
approval, or to get somewhere- that is inauthentic behaviour.
The way of the Prophet (saw) and the sahaba (may Allah bless them all)
was authentic behaviour. What you saw on the outside was exactly what was
inside; what you saw was what you got- the meaning of Ikhlas if you like.
There
is also the problem of our children becoming what I would call neither/nor.
There is very interesting research being carried out on bilingual
children in schools, children who may speak their mother tongue at home and when
they're outside speak English. What they have found is that often these children
are not adequate at the English language. They can get by and it is rather
deceiving for the teacher because they have the degree of language needed to get
themselves known around the playground and to get what they want. They have
basic English with an accent on diction, which is fine, but they don't have
access to the higher level language, the language which gives you access to the
curriculum and higher education and eventually sophistication.
However, upon investigation it was also found that they don't possess
this in their mother tongue either. What
happens is when you have a child who’s got lots of feelings and lots of
thoughts within them that they cannot express verbally they become frustrated,
they become violent, they become alienated and they become, if you like,
dangerous individuals.
If
you just transpose this over to the idea of Islam we are going to have children
that perhaps are not particularly good Muslims and are not particularly good
Kafirs either. They are not one thing or the other.
We need to authenticate our Islam and one of the ways to authenticate it
is to make our imprint on the future generations. Authenticity is something that every person recognises,
whether they are Muslim or non-Muslim, and authenticity also comes about with
da'wah. Often nowadays a lot of
words are spoken but it is the light in people’s eyes and the look in their
eyes and their behaviour which is what attracts others to the way of Allah. So when you send your child to school there is a good chance
that some of the behaviour they are picking up is inauthentic. It is there to
please the authorities or to be in conformity with the others or to raise in the
ranks and it is found in any culture that is engendered by the collective
learning situation.
Also,
there are just the simple difficulties in trying to educate 30 children of
different abilities at the same time. It is extremely difficult and I find it
interesting to see that the Government is finally recognising this.
When I was a teacher in the mainstream here in London we would often get
children who would arrive from Bosnia, or children who had a serious speech
defect or other special needs, and we would have to just deal with them amongst
the other 29 or 28 children. That means that somebody somewhere is going to be
suffering from lack of concentration or lack of time. Dealing with 30 children
of mixed abilities is extremely difficult and sending your child into that
situation is, at least, dangerous.
Now,
I have said all these things to you and you are going to be wondering why this
man is standing here telling us this when he is the Head Teacher of a school
himself. Again I want to stress that I am not saying that every school is
wonderful or terrible. I am not saying that every Muslim school is wonderful
because I have been to some very awful ones. And I have been to some very good
ones and I hope, Insha’Allah, that Islamia School is one- and I know that Al-Muntadah
has a very good reputation as well. Neither am I saying to you that every
non-Muslim school is demonic and that they are out to way lay your children from
the Siratal Mustaqim.
Schools
at the moment, within the Muslim world, are a sign of our development in the
Western world and I hope that the development of schools does go on. But perhaps
in the future we can look at schools becoming centres of learning rather than
places you send your children from 9am to 3:30pm. We need more centres of
learning and we need people to take responsibility for the education of their
children. Children would also benefit if they could be taken to school for an
hour or so - to do a particular activity, or piece of learning - and then be
allowed to go away again. We need to start thinking more laterally and to be
more flexible.
- Abdullah Trevathan PREVIOUS PAGE HOME
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