Untold Facts

Curriculum Reorganization 2009: Issues of Concern

2009 Committee
I came to know from a news item published in a Dhaka daily on the 4th October (09) that the co-convener of the Curriculum Reorganization Committee formed earlier by the present Government have recommended to reorganize the Madarassa curriculum keeping their basic reading materials unchanged. He spoke on the issue in a meeting organized by a group that appeared to have some concern about the reorganized curriculum of the on going Madarassa education. The meeting organized seems to have been against the other group now making agitation opposing the proposed reorganization by the committee constituted by the Government.

Naïve and yet
I am not fully certain what proposals the committee has made. But from the points I could gather from various media sources and from the past knowledge about the reports of 1974, 2000 and present government’s open agenda for education curriculum change already stated to be based on the 1974 and the 2000 reports, I, as a retired Professor of Education and qualified and trained educator of some standing felt interested to make some points that came to my mind as a response.

Committee’s Headache
The committee seemed to have been more and seriously concerned with the Muslim children’s Madarasa curriculum as if they have concentrated all their energies and persuasions against the Madarasa curriculum and much less on the general school curriculum. Why?

Fishy
The 1974 Education Report was silent about the age old and traditional Madarasa system then nearly seven hundred years in about this locality. The 2000 report was in a sort of fix as earlier the governments in between from 1976 to 1996 did much during about two decades in reorganizing the Alia Madarasa curriculum. The Qaomi system left almost untouched and on their own as before. The 2009 government and the committee they formed have been having more enthusiasm for the Government not only has brute majority in the Parliament but also that the Government is run by mainly the leftists of the Awami League led by Sheikh Hasina.

Informal to Formal
Educational curriculum is nothing new but as old as human existence in this earth. However, the learning of human child from parents is also as old as ever. That remained out side formal school not established any where but inside home as informal learning, training and education. Formal institutional learning as history says is credited to Islam in the establishment at the mosque of Medina in the early seventh century A.D. Earlier learning institution like conducted by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle in Greece in the fifth and fourth century B.C. was informal one like teacher-apprentice system and not any formal institution or formally organized schools as we know today. The Medina model of formal school was naturally known in Arabic term as Madarasa. In some way the Madarasa curriculum had close similarity with Plato’s curriculum for education that he outlined for training of his model of ‘Philosopher King’.

Plato’s Curriculum
Plato’s education and training curriculum for Philosopher King had prescriptions for primary learning until the age of human child to 18 years of age followed by two years of physical and military training, learning Mathematics for ten years that included then astronomy, metaphysics etc., then five years in dialectics, practical work experience for fifteen years, etc, having selection and screening at every stage until the age of fifty, if successfully completed, he would qualify to become the ruler or Philosopher King. (Plato, The Republic, Penguin, London, 1955/1963, p.304). Others who would not fully qualify and drop out at various levels would go for employment in various cadres of professions and vocations. The curriculum at the mosque of Medina had primary learning of alphabets, Arabic language of the local people along with basics of metaphysics or the belief in the lone and absolutely powerful Creator. Some vocational learning for both male and female children was also there. The Prophet worked as the head of the Madarasa, the Mosque and of the City State of Medina. As the Prophet would not read and write even in his own mother tongue in Arabic, he employed other literate ones even from other religious beliefs for conducting literacy training. European history is the witness that their earliest formal educational institutions like Oxford, Cambridge etc. had adopted the model of the mosque of Medina later on more institutionalized and organized in about the 10th and 11th century at the Al Azhar (Cairo), Nizamia (Baghdad), Cordova (Spain), etc. Even the Khilizee Madarasa of the Sultanate of Delhi of the 14th-15th century served as model curriculum framework and operation for many countries around. India owed much for her illumination in knowledge, learning and civilization before the coming of the British to the Madarasa curriculum.

Calcutta Madarasa of the colonizers
The Calcutta Madarasa, however, established though by the British colonizers in 1781 A.D. had a different story not necessarily for spread of Muslim learning of the Medina curriculum style but for training of some workers needed in the administration that in many ways had been dependent of Arabic and Islamic learning persons (Completely closed down and movable properties driven out to Dhaka in the wake of division of India, end of the British rule and establishment of Pakistan in 1947).

Macaulay
Even after the British colonizer’s attempt to shun the Muslim learning schools and introduce their own one as prescribed by Macaulay in early the nineteenth century, William Adams, a voluntary British religious person of knowledge stood to nourish the existing curriculum instead of the Macaulay one, because the Maktabs as they were known existed then, as he found by survey, in almost all rural villages for mass education at the primary level. Macaulay, however, having had support of the London authorities managed to introduce the so-called modern English education curriculum not for mass education but for training of the few selected one as ‘interpreters’ in the secondary level completely ignoring the primary and mass education. That was how the Muslim primary learning was relegated to some despised position. The hatred so created by the colonizers is remarkably in existence since then and still so in 2009, particularly, in the eye of the latest education committee in Bangladesh. But the people kept them going almost all on their own, particularly the Qaomi curriculum. That the Madrasa system exists for hundreds of years even without any support from the government proves beyond doubt that the system is in demand and has popular support in the community and people.

Hedging
The Committee obviously for people’s resistance took to some sort of hedging and saying that they would have the curriculum adjusted with the modern subjects. That’s not a bad proposition. But should not other ask if the modern curriculum followed in the Macaulay model schools need also be reorganized and adjusted with demand and aspirations of the people including common people’s spiritual aspirations?

Christianity
We know of modern advanced education curriculum in Europe and America where the model is spiritually Christian, no matter whether they style them as ‘secular’ or not, their curriculum aims to turn out ‘Christian Gentlemen’. In Communist countries they care not for spiritualism but only for narrow vocational training in exclusion of belief in the Lone Great Creator to produce ‘Red’ meaning Communist atheist and ‘Expert’ in trade or profession. What the present Education Committee planning the school curriculum for in the perceptible plan in shying away from the Muslim philosophy to the left?

Atheism
Atheism is a system of life but not for commoners but for few, possibly of high IQ. As the US President Barack Obama has cited in his book, The Audacity of Hope (p.198) that even the secular Americans to the extent of 95% believe in the Lone Great Creator God. Former Indian President Abdul Kalam has asked very passionately his country’s younger generation to grow up for building India’s secularism derived from ‘spirituality’ (Ignited Minds, p.114). The facts are nothing useless but very pertinent as spiritualism is very core and essence of confident human entity.

Ethics and morality
Human society honorably subsists provided it follows viable ethics and moral codes. Bangladesh is already in moral shambles not for ineffective operation of rule of law alone but for degeneration of ethics and morality among rather modern ‘educated’ lots. Would the Committee deny the moral degeneration phenomenon? If not, how would they go for rebuilding moral and ethical strength in the minds of the younger generation except through illuminating their minds through viable religious teaching and training in schools in early childhood?

An instance of shame
We have been hearing volley of abuses against the Madarasa system and against Muslim heritage since early 1972. The 1974 and the 2000 Education Commission reports and now the 2009 committee have been making and repeating the same echoes. The 1974 report was locked in shelf by the leader of that period, and not made public till he was alive. The leader during 1996-2001 had the same odd idea against Islamic learning and Muslim heritage but failed in the main. Even so, they did some evils. One, for example, was a text book produced under government fund and project I came across that was edited by three history professors wherein they mentioned that the Muslim widowed women used to get self immolated in our locality in the funeral pyres of the dead husband (p.135.) That was a textbook of the Open University History–2 first published in 1998 and reprinted in 2000. I made a protest to the untruth so far as the widowed Muslim women were concerned some time then but I am not certain if the learning material clearly anti-Muslim in feature was corrected and dropped afterwards from the same textbook.

Unfortunate
There are complaints that the committee recommended learning materials in some textbooks that by all measures have been divisive of valid historical facts. Is that so?

Fidelity
Seen in the context of experience of the three governments and the commissions and committees, one can hardly be anything but skeptics about their real intention against Madarasa curriculum and evil machination about the Muslim identity and heritage. The 2009 Education Committee has thus been put in a trying task about their fidelity.

Author: Dr. M.T. Hussain