A Vision - by Abdullah

In order to initiate a discussion on learning and education generally and for my own personal clarification I set out my vision of education below:

Perhaps somewhat negatively, I will start out with what I see as not desirable, based on my own experience of education within mainstream and Islamic schools.

Institutionalization – by this I mean the whole structuring of teaching and learning within a narrowly confined syllabus, schemes of work tied to such syllabi based on a rigid timetable with very clear role demarcations; (hierarchy of staff, pupils, teachers, auxiliary staff, etc) uniforms, corporate identities and the seeming necessity of purpose built buildings beyond the need for shelter, etc.

My experience of institutionalized collective education is that it doesn’t work very well. Without cynicism, schools may be more positively regarded when perceived as day care centres where young people are supervised allowing parents to engage in the material production process, (stemming from a valid Marxist critique but which communist countries offered nothing but arguably worse alternatives). Another perfectly viable argument, frequently used by home schoolers, is that the majority of parents knowingly or unknowingly allow the responsibility for the education of their children to usurped by Government control. This doesn’t mean that some learning doesn’t takes place in such institutions but it does so at a cost to the individual and to my mind that is a price to dear to pay. Then again many would say the learning is minimal and mediocritised. From my own day-to-day experience the educational system tends to generally foment resentment and defiance on the part of both staff and students.

My thinking on institutions would generally follow along the critique of Foucault, namely that by their very nature institutions end up to be self serving and thereby end up at odds with the original intentions in setting up the organization. In this case educational institutions eventually obliterate the basic human act of passing on, imparting or the sharing of experience and knowledge. An aspect of the Ofsted inspection criteria of successful schools provides an example of this. Successful schools are seen to have good student attendance whereas low attendance signifies bad teaching and management resulting a lack of motivation on the part of children and parents. In the school where I was Headteacher of there were high instances of families taking leave during term time to visit the home country. Personally, I could think of nothing more educational than an urban child experiencing another world as in a rural setting with attendant agriculture and animal husbandry, a rooting sense of family relations truncated by migration and a different language based environment. Despite that the school was criticized as a result, (though the school was judged overall as ‘good’- Why do I hasten to add that?). The point is there was an inability to see that education could take place outside of the classroom or school. The initial impulse of setting up schools; i.e. that children are educated had been eclipsed by the needs of the institution to maintain the criteria of the inspection system.

Foucault further posits the idea of institutions as serving to contain and sustain the status quo and its values, (he sees institutions modelled on prisons). In addition, the discourse of such institutions, educational or otherwise is unable to conceive of anything beyond the social context they are embedded in. I would like to suggest that sacred traditions; Islam in particular, are based on a different paradigm which runs counter to that discourse. The development of institutionalized education systems within those communities, particularly those based on sceptical western rationality has resulted in confusion and a schizophrenic discourse within these traditions.

Supremacy of rationality and the scientific paradigm – more on this later

Separation of mind and body - more on this later