Despite the pride that mankind may legitimately take in the role played by rational thinking in its recent history, ideologies and their distortion can still cause a considerable amount of havoc. Every country goes through periods of history dominated by an ideology or by the results of a conflict between different ideologies. How a citizenry is shaped by and eventually responds to competing ideologies is therefore crucial. Citizenship, in turn, presumes a certain amount of civic sense or at least renders it desirable. And whether or how we adopt certain patterns of behaviour is linked to what we learn through that complex instrument called education.
I call it an instrument because it can be and is often used as a tool by countries to guard against their insecurities or to cultivate them. I am woefully ignorant about most things and last week Christine Fair drove this point home again through her enormously readable book titled The Madrassah Challenge: it examines the extent and effects of madrassah education in Pakistan. I was amazed to learn that most credible estimates state that less than one percent of children who are full-time students in Pakistan study in madrassahs. This, of course, is at variance with the by now infamous report of the International Crisis Group, in the year 2002, which stated that nearly a third of all children in Pakistan attend a madrassah. To the ICGs credit, they later rectified the mistake but we still have more than a million kids being educated in madrassahs. And this number does not take into account children who attend a maktab, i.e. an informal mosque school.
Most of us should have severe reservations about any system of education that focuses merely on religious teachings and ardently opposes teaching the more worldly subjects such as science, mathematics etc. To be fair, not all madrassahs are opposed to teaching these but many are. But the reason that more than a million kids in madrassahs are robbed of a more fulfilling education is not because their parents are poor or because they dont want their children to learn; it is because the State of Pakistan has failed them and they are caught in a vicious cycle.
A critical myth exploded by Ms. Fairs work is that poverty principally drives parents into sending kids to madrassahs. Twelve percent of the children in Pakistans madrassahs come from the countrys wealthiest families! Apart from this, many families with one child in a madrassah will also have a child in a public or even a private school.
Religion matters to our people. The dynamics of the market are clearmany parents in Pakistan believe that learning about religion at an institution with decent-quality teachers will help their children become better Muslims and, lets hope, better citizens. But parents often opt out of the dilapidated public school system because they dont trust the quality of education or teachers. And in many cases the schools are too few in number or (this is important in the case of female children) they are too far away. Not having female teachers at girls schools is another reason parents may opt out of the public school system and choose a madrassah that caters to multiple needs (including food).
By failing to devote attention to the education sector, successive governments have allowed the hold of madrassahs to grow. By failing to muster the will or courage to acknowledge its failures, the State of Pakistan has allowed a closeted system of education that breeds sectarianism as most madrassahs elevate their own maslak and deride the rest. Xenophobia is another by-product. Their contribution to militancy is growing as they increase in number along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The demand for suicide bombers is being outweighed by the supply. Furthermore, it is no secret that many Punjab-based organisations run madrassahs that threaten the core of our existence.
The attempts by our governments to register these madrassahs (last one having been made in 2002 through an Ordinance) have been apologetic. Registration, as per that law, is voluntary. The penalty for not registering is cutting off of zakat and government funding. With petro-dollar rich friends willing to fund murderous violence, I doubt that those running hate spewing madrassahs would be worried about lack of registration. The Federal and Provincial Governments need to step up and put in place an effective system of madrassah registration, reform of their curriculum and bold initiatives for overhauling the public education system with incentives for parents to take their children out of madrassahssomething I will discuss next time.
Our intellectual orientation as a society needs to be reformed across the board and we need to get the economics of this problem right. For now, consider this: why should we allow our children to be educated in ways that blind them to the world? If Pakistan is their mother, and she is that if nothing else, she must be heart-broken. And we need to act now to save more innocent minds from being forever lost to us. These are our kids and their innocence and their dreams deserve a chance.
The writer is a Barrister of Lincolns Inn and practices in Lahore. He has a special interest in Anti-trust / Competition law. He can be reached at wmir.rma@gmail.com