Untold Facts

Qudrat E Khuda Education Report was not a Bible

It was only expected that the Education Minister of 2009 Bangladesh Government has let us know that the Qudrat E Khuda Education Commission Report of 1974 would be implemented by them. We heard this once back in mid 1996, as well, for the simple reason that the post Bangladesh independence government did initiate the commission in late 1972. I am not certain how many of the fortunate men and women of the main body of the Commission are still alive in January 2009 except that one important member Professor Dr Muhammad Nurul Haq in his mid eighties. I had also the fortune to get in touch with the Commission not as a full member but as a pigmy in two study committees. However, we two still maintain a close rapport in matters of education and malaise in the system of the country.
Now that a new government is in power and so a new education minister, it is quite likely that the people would hear fresh rhetoric in educational innovation. In a Dhaka English daily today (29 Jan 09), one report says that the Khuda Commission Report would once again get a restart. The minister as well gave his idea that they would ‘launch one syllabus for all’. The idea is not a bad one but a good one. But how would they do it is not clear. May be, they would give the task to do to some group constituting persons as had been seen to be present as the photo showed with the minister yesterday.
Framing a lone or single syllabus for even the primary level is not that easy unless the three main systems- Bengali, English medium and the Madarasah system- are integrated into one. The Qudrat Commission wished to do that by keeping in reality the Madarasah aloof from the general education system. Unfortunately, the report once reached the hand of the then all powerful leader and the Prime Minister in mid 1974, but curiously enough it found its safe place in the Locker not to see light until after two years by the next army President of the country. Since then Bangladesh had as many as six commissions/committees, but education and the curricula remained as before back to square one. In other words, T.W. Macaulay of 1835 kept us haunting to pursue his set goals in learning since then.
In 1915, a system of curricula was framed in response to the common demand of the Muslims away from the Macaulay model since then gaining popularity among the Muslim guardians and learners for that combined Islamic learning and secular courses integrated together. Unfortunately the process was dropped altogether in mid 1950s, and went back to Macaulay again. The Khuda Commission did many exercises but only to end up in what Macaulay had intended for. Neither the subsequent commissions/ .committees, one after another, could come out of the syndrome of early nineteenth century model somewhat imposed to train ‘interpreters’ and not to have educated and learned wholesome balanced human personalities with both secular and spiritual faculties simultaneously nurtured as had been the tradition of the Muslims, in particular, since the seventh century days of the Medinite model, but for which the Muslims for centuries shied away from the Macaulay model. Not only that, Muslims aspired for their own model to continue that ended up in the Deobond model, Aligargh model, Rahimia model (now replaced by the post 1947 government of India into a secular one now called Jamia Millia), but still others kept on the Madarassa (two modes) for religious learning of the upcoming progeny all on the cost and management of the communities and guardians concerned. In Bangladesh, as well, these two systems not only survive but also thriving having no scope to brush them off to relapse into oblivion.
Launching a lone syllabus may be a possibility but not making the curricula so called secular but by integration of both secular and spiritual dimensions of learning together, albeit, not excluding any religion but including not only all formal Great Lone God believing religions but also having religious belief in the truth of human equality.

– Prof.M.T. Hussain