Some Thoughts on Education

Note: I give up on my vows... Don't ask... These are some unpublished materials I've written for quite some time.

Before I start, a brief history of John Taylor Gatto:-

He was named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children.



Last winter break, I bought Al-Hambra Productions’ audio lecture: Educating Your Child in Modern Times, featuring Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson and John Taylor Gatto. I think Shaykh Hamza has something cool to say on almost any topic, but his ideas on child education is something I would really like to hear. Simply because: 1) He himself has gone through the traditional Islamic education system. 2) His children are home-schooled.


Talking about Shaykh Hamza’s children, one of his sons almost joined RIS 7 children’s program. But the kid was too smart and well-behaved for the ‘havoc’, so he decided not to join the program (that’s what I was told). Anyway, I guess lucky for him, or not he will have to face one thousand one interview questions from me, and oh, pictures... By the way, I had ‘fun’ playing with the children, and I miss home, especially my little brother.

The process of shaping up our children is very much related to the kind of education system that we expose them to. With all due respect to teachers and those who are involved in the education system in my home country, I think our education system limits creativity, inhibits critical thinking, and does not instill enthusiasm on acquiring knowledge. Our education system is big on drilling for exam questions and how to conform to sometimes nonsensical rules. The end result: we are not critical, we are passive, we lack creativity, we study only for exams, and we don’t have a genuine passion for knowledge or reading.

As John Taylor Gatto puts it, “School is the axon of the American economy.” There are reasons as to why America is leading the world today and it is no brainer that one of them is their education system. People like Shaykh Hamza, Dr. Umar Faruq Abdullah, and others have repeatedly said that education system is the root of the backwardness of most Muslim countries today. Simply put, if we are to lead the world again, we must rethink about our education system. Having said all that, of course, Malaysia has a pretty decent education system as compared to other Muslim countries.

I would like to remind the reader that there was a time when the Muslim world was the chief inventor of some world-changing ideas on education system. Actually the whole idea of endowed college (i.e. university) started from the Muslim world, with Qarawiyyin (Fez, Morroco) and al-Azhar (Cairo, Egypt) listed as two of world’s oldest universities ever established on this planet. If you think I am kidding you, then pray read Wikipedia by yourself. By the way, Shaykh Hamza studied at Qarawiyyin.

Furthermore, PhD actually originated from Islamic scholasticism (based around madrasah). It is when a scholar reaches the highest level of knowledge, he gets the license to teach, called ijazah al-tadrees. A Dr. was a Faqih or a Mujtahid. So PhD is a word derived from latin, Licentia docendi (license to teach), reflecting its origin ijazah at-tadrees. One can read George Makdisi’s The Rise of Colleges for further details.

Back to Educating Your Child in Modern Times, actually I was pretty let down by the lecture. I was expecting more on instructions and tips by the two maestros on actually how to “educate your child in modern times.” But the lecture is more about convincing to home-school your child, rather than telling you how to actually do it. Nevertheless, I still learned a lot from it.

"Taha, don't say bad words..."

Shaykh Hamza mentions some interesting points about traditional Islamic education system that has been lost in modern times. One of them is of course the passing down of knowledge/tradition directly from a teacher to a student, in contrast with today’s lecture-oriented system. Secondly, education is futile if it doesn’t make you human. So, Shaykh Hamza’s favorite quote on education is: "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without loosing your temper or self-confident" (Robert Frost).

As for John Taylor Gatto, he is a big advocator of homeschooling. His lecture is mainly about, simply put, why school sucks... You aught to listen to this guy because he won the best teacher award when he decided to quit being a teacher. So he is not some random angry guy who dropped out of school shouting “school sucks…” Essentially John Taylor Gatto complaints about the American education system as “the dumbing down of us.”

So the verdict: I wasn’t convinced about homeschooling. I hoped Shaykh Hamza would have shared some tips on how he home-schools his children (I bet he has an awesome wife who is an awesome mom) but none of that is on the lecture. As for John Taylor Gatto, I get his part on “why school sucks”, but I don’t get how homeschooling actually works as he does not talk about it. So you know what, I think I’ll send my future-kids to school, insyaAllah. I think I don’t want to burden my future-wife with too many responsibilities. Taking care of little rascals is the hardest job on this planet.

Having said all that, I am still intrigued by the idea of homeschooling, it’s just that I am not convinced it will work on a practical basis. In his lecture, J.T. Gatto mentions about Francis S. Collins, the head of human genome project, who used to be home-schooled by his mom. Francis S. Collins is one of my heroes since I read his book The Language of God, and to know that he was home schooled by his mom with no curriculum at all is really cool.

As I ran out of sources for how homeschooling works, it dawned upon me to ask the most wonderful lady + wife + mom + (former) teacher + my best friend on this planet: My mom. So I told her about J.T. Gatto’s lecture, Francis S. Collins, and everything. My mom said home-schooling takes a lot of effort and these mat sallehs put in a lot of effort to make it work. “Owh…” I told her that in Sweden they don’t have kindergarten, school starts at 7, and now I can see her wisdom for not sending (or sending only for a short while) me and my siblings to kindergarten or pre-school.

By the way, my mom knows what it takes to do homeschooling because she home-schooled me until half-way through grade 1. Well, to be precise, I did go to kindergarten for around 5 months beforehand. Anyway, it was not that my mom had this crazy idea to home-school me and abandoned the formal-school system (I don’t want her to get locked-up in jail for such accusation), it was because we were living in Europe for a short while during that time; travelling, language differences, etc. made going to formal school an impractical thing to do. After that of course I did go to school, but I would say I learned my ABCs and 123s all from my mom. By the way, for a dyslexic ABC is like Quantum Mechanics, you know…


Talking about my mom, she has always been lenient with my little brother when he gave excuses for not wanting to go to school, and for a while I thought she was being a tad too lenient on that issue until recently. Well, we had to teman him rehat at canteen for about 8 months. But I always get that school is boring for him, and it is sort of a ‘dumbing down’ of his intelligent. Plus, he is a gentle, well-mannered kid, and kids at school are pretty rowdy. So when I heard the news that Shaykh Hamza’s son didn’t want to join the children’s program after seeing how the rowdy kids were playing around in the room, it was dejavu for me and the situation reminded me of my little brother.

So I guess my mom always gets that sometimes ‘school sucks.’ I told her about my ‘enlightenment’, she conformed my conjecture, but she pointed out that my little brother likes going to sekolah agama in the morning – he just finds sekolah kebangsaan too repetitive and the kids are too noisy. Indeed, isolating children in compound with total strangers (classroom), far from family, and data can be get about their obedience, concentration, etcetera is human’s greatest social experiment.


Jumping on, I would like to pay tribute to my former high school teacher who understands what education is all about. This teacher of mine hates childishness in his students because he thinks we should learn how to be grown ups. So main jentik-jentik pemadam is his pantang larang datuk nenek moyang. One day he spotted me playing airplane made of pencil (as its body) and a ruler (as its wing). I was called up to the front of the class to explain what was so interesting about playing with this child-like pencil airplane of mine. By the way, he is a stern disciplinary teacher famed for his strictness, so I was naturally scared at that time. Anyway, I went on in front of the class and explained to everyone about my imagination: Hydraulic-pressure-controlled flappable wings, which someday will be used in the airplane industry to increase fuel efficiency during take-offs.

I was dead sure I will be punished during that time as I just broke one of his pantang larang datuk nenek moyang. But it turned out that he let me off the hook just like that. He told me to keep on imagining and not to forget him if someday I become somebody. I was relieved… He recognized that I wasn’t being childish, but I was just being child-like. You may ask, what’s the difference between these two? Well, John Taylor Gatto ‘s definition of child-like is being inventive, innocent, and trusting; while childish is being bored, tantrum, and irresponsible. In other words, I played pencil airplane like a child, but I was/am a responsible adult. Get it? I hope so… Anyway, I went on to represent my school for water-rocket competition the next year, so I guess I repaid back his trust.


Last but not least, I have a couple of book recommendations to make: Monty Roberts’ The Man Who Listens to Horses and Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture. Of course these two books are not about education per se, but they have special meanings to me. Simply put, my dad and horses are the two greatest influences in my life. In case you’re wondering, Randy Pausch reminds me so much about my dad – minus the cancer. Hint: His biggest brick wall was just five feet three. As for horses, they thought me to always be gentle. Isn’t that the most important lesson to learn in life? And I am still learning. I end my random rambling with John Taylor Gatto’s awesome quote: “The key to a rich inner life in a complex society is principally through tradition, family life, religion, exploration, reading, reading, reading, solitary reflection, and so on.”