Untold Facts

Exploding pejorative term against Madarasa education

Everybody’s job
Talking about education is everybody’s job. Teachers, parents, educators, and all in any profession may take interest in education. But using pejorative term like say in Bengali ‘Mandhata’ or in English meaning outdated or ‘Jongi Projonon Kendra’ that stand in English breeding ground for terrorists are possibly more for irrational hatred and ignorance than for usefully critical anything for development for better.

Irreconcilable ideas
Educators of standing can certainly appreciate that educational problems in developing country like Bangladesh owe much more to irreconcilable philosophical points than anything else in other relevant issues in curricula set up, school learning process, measurement of learning attainments, organization, funding, management and administration of institutions at various levels.

Looking into depth of quality issue
Talking is essentially needed to sort out issues in regard to quality and efficiency of learning outcomes compatible with needs for life and living. But only talking wildly without probing into depth of problems is not enough to mend all crucial problems involved much less improve on comprehensive learning quality in real classroom situation.

Bangladesh education in shambles
To be more specific, Bangladesh education is undoubtedly in shambles. But what went wrong is though not very difficult to ascertain, fixing up issues for something better remained very difficult for all concerned not only for the past few decades but also for centuries. Why, we must dispassionately probe into, if one would be serious to get and implement any acceptable solution of the so-called ‘outdated mode’ and from the negative attitude in looking down upon tendency, particularly, to the Madarasa system institutions.

Philosophical issues
The first problem to me that surfaced in first priority is the irreconcilable philosophical points of education for Bangladesh. The difference in thoughts and ideas remained for decades even after independence that obviously produced not less than four systems having their own philosophical pursuit, and also despite the fact that about half a dozen Commissions Bangladesh had since 1972. If one would look at the advanced countries of the West, they have more or less settled to one philosophical system for the State not in any regimented way but through consensus having had as well incorporated provisions for diversity of religious options at the secondary school level. For example, in Britain, Religious Education is compulsory in secondary schools having had dropped it for some time but even so, opting out from religious course instruction remained an option based on parental choice. In the USA there is no religious education in school syllabus. But the society is fully filled up with organized churches at the private level that hardly give scope for any progeny to miss socialization through the church system. That continued as the past legacy from the British colonial period. The modern education hardly made any dent. In addition, most of the colleges and universities, in particular, maintain department /faculties of divinity or religious studies. Graduates from these higher learning areas fill up positions of church hierarchy throughout the country. British church system (Anglican not Catholic) is not only equally organized but having also sanctioned authority from the sovereign Crown-Queen or King. These are the ways the church or religion socialize the progeny and maintain control in the society through implanting and, you can say, brainwashing all in the Christian value system, no matter whether in their maturity some would care for the Christian values is a different matter. But overwhelming majority remained thus conditioned in their attitudes to beliefs, for example, to Christianity.

Past to present
Bangladesh as part of India in the past had education systems based on individual religion. The Muslim rulers in the middle ages introduced a modern system based on Arabic and Persian traditions as the Muslim rulers of Arabic and Persian origin used to rule India and they devoutly followed, except few, Islamic beliefs. The British as foreign ruler took to change the system into a model neither of the English kind nor anything caring for the local people’s religious belief systems. The Muslims, in general, took the British system of early 19th century as secular one and so distanced away from it. In the set up of British foreign rule, Muslims not only distanced away from the system but also went to devise and make their own system. The Deoband model of the mid nineteenth century and the Aligarh model of the late nineteenth century stood then as proofs of the Muslims distancing away from the English system of secular education in the Indian subcontinent. In the early twentieth century the Deoband and the Aligarh systems had another innovation in East Bengal and Assam following the passion of the creation of the new province of Bengal and Assam with capital at the Muslim historic city of Dhaka. Though the province did not sustain after 1911 having a very short life span of only about six years, the model in somewhat revised form of both the Deoband and the Aligarh got started in 1915 styled as the New Scheme Madarasa. The system had been expanding for it became popular among the enlightened Muslim parents and produced many brilliant Muslim scholars, a few of them still alive in Bangladesh. Unfortunately soon after in mid 1950 the system was abolished without good reason but for their secularization hype by the then East Bengal Government.

Post 1971 Bangladesh educational scenario
The immediate 1971 post independence period of Bangladesh had a period of still bigger hype for secularization of the State and the education system. Both had been difficult propositions. Education experienced much more difficulties to get secularized. The Kudrat E Khuda Commission though went to make recommendations for secularization in the final report made in mid 1974, it faced a fate of being under lock and key by the same charismatic person and leader who had appointed the first Education Commission in independent Bangladesh in mid 1972. The clue for the lock and key though was a bit mysterious, but there were other hunches that the leader did not like that for it’s over secularization even surpassing British bureaucrat T.B. Macaulay of 1830s. In other words, the report recommendations not only kept silent about traditional Madarasa education of the Muslims that had a history of continuity for over 1000 years but also wished to ring the death knell for Madarasa education in Bangladesh.

Revived initiative in mid 1970s
The change of the government in mid August-November 1975 picked up the report that remained almost abandoned for 3 years by the next government hinting at disliking the wholesale secularization process in education with little bit of Islamic tint. The Madarasa education of the British Kolkata variety of late eighteenth century received some attention, but not the Qaomi system (Nesab) at all. In the backdrop, the government of Awami League and Sheikh Hasina is now known to have declared a new crusade not only against Qaomi system but also blaming them as ‘outdated mode’ and for ‘breeding ground of terrorists’. Dr. Faisal Mustafa’s Green Crescent Madarasa located in a rural area in the district of Bhola raided late in the March 2009 and ‘found’ there by the special police RAB some arms and ammunitions have given the Awami League government to summarily blame the Qaomi Madrasas as the terrorist training camps. But they would not use such pejorative term for other secular higher education institutions wherein arms use and killings are almost an everyday matter, now beginning in 2009 by the students’ wing cadres of the Awami League! Now there was interesting news that the P.M. Hasina who bred all those terrorists all throughout since early 1980s and murdered many in cold blood on her instance has decided to distance away from the student organization in a sort of caricature of hide and seek. These are the sorts of politics she is used to, and let her do so at free will. But should she venture crusade like the past US President Bush did against the Muslims and Hasina wishes to do in a slightly slanted way against the Qaomi Madrasasa making ploy not only in that these are breeding ground for terrorists but also of outdated nature? Or else she has to think over very seriously along with sound and patriotic educators to do something rationally acceptable to the people of Islamic belief, and not going to trade in romanticism as some of her ministers have lately been venturing only in diverting people’s huge wrath from the liabilities she owes directly to the BDR massacre of 2009 end February.

Education is also matter of parental choice
Education is no doubt an affair of the State and the Government. It is at the same time individual parental matter for young children. Parent’s decision even comes first in priority over the Government so far as democratic norms and polities are concerned. It thus is not that the choices and priorities of the huge number of parents and guardians who kept going the Qaomi Madarasa‘s existence for centuries without any support, much less financial one, from the government sources that kept these institutions running and so providing social and religious services based on continuing demand in society for centuries. Government has little business to go in any way disturbing the system except possibly through mutual understanding and accommodation. Such mutual understanding and accommodation may extend not only to control and management but also in matters of curricula change and innovation to fit into social and economic needs not totally ignoring religious and spiritual needs of the people of immense values to common people. There is little rationale to ignore the spiritual needs and craving of the people. Spiritual demand is not always without economic utility but of economic utilities as well that many secularists fail to appreciate. Spiritually sound and elevated worker can be more productive in their professions and vocations.

Qaomi Madarasa has to be looked into with broader outlook
What I, as a life long educator and a retired person with one leg in the grave, wish to maintain is that the government has to stop looking into the affairs of the Qaomi Madarasa in pejorative way but to approach the matter both as of necessity and to give due respect for the issues people are emotionally attached to the system. Otherwise, it would be a sort of romanticism of the government that is certain to end in failure in the plural democratic society Bangladesh had set up goals and yet meeting the need for an integrated curricula to turn out ‘good and righteous’ men and women or a humane society based on higher human ideals for the country in perpetuity.

Education means not only secular learning but also outlook of life integrated with spiritualism
Training for vocation through secular learning is certainly a need for life and living. But each and every averagely intelligent human being craves for spiritual attachment as well. Additionally, being the only rational animal distinct from all other living animals, human mind naturally seeks for spiritual end of life. Some exceptions only prove the rule. It is as such only logical and reasonable that education and learning must provide integrally both learning, as some educators call them, secular learning meaning ‘acquired knowledge’ and those relevant to spiritual as the ‘revealed knowledge’ or knowledge that is divine in origin. People of almost all countries since the days in the past have had their education and learning so integrated of the two. It is only recently that some societies went for all secular learning and nothing of spiritual. They could do that somewhat at ease for they had no revealed knowledge in original form. The devastating result was obvious in disintegration of family, society broken of bondage of love and fellow feelings, drug addiction, promiscuity, free sex and the spread of all the killer diseases costing huge to individuals and society. Can Bangladesh afford to set goal for that sort of secular learning in the government institutions? The stand and position of the Qaomi Madarasa must be comprehended with these issues in view.
The Muslims are the only people who are very fortunate to have their revealed knowledge in exactly the same original form as they came to the last and the great prophet of Islam. The Qaomi Madarsasa genuinely claims the learning of the same revealed and stored knowledge. That is why there is no practical possibility to finish up the system by any government that in the one and a half millennium year period no state power could do. In Bangladesh as well, the overtly secular government of Hasina cannot do it. Playing with the system for romanticism is a different matter.

Author: Dr.M.T. Hussain