What is the problem with Western schooling and education?

Western education preaches a number of ideologically loaded tenets:

1. Naturalism

Everything that exists is material. All that is true must be sense perceivable, experimentally repeatable and peer reviewed. This marginalises ethics, metaphysics and spirituality as unimportant, mythical, folkloric, superstitious or simply mad. All non-naturalistic truths are reduced to perspectives and opinions, all equally valid or invalid.

2. Chance controls the world

There is no logos, no dialogue and no supernatural force. Suffering is meaningless, and comes from individuals, institutions, and nature - it is not a trial, it is not a purification, it is not person-building and it is not a supernatural punishment.

3. Individualism

The agency of the individual must be maximized. Your identity is whatever you individually feel. It is not negotiated with your surroundings, nor is it demarcated by anything physical. You can choose whatever you want about yourself. "As long as you're not hurting anyone" (even though harm is relative), anything goes.

Everyone is in constant competition for their own material interests. Society is just an amalgamation of individuals with their own independent goals. Forget the "Umma", the "Church", or even familial or tribal associations. Economic prosperity is more important than family and community. If you decide to get married - if it suits your selfish interests - then "economic independence" must precede marriage, even though Allah encouraged early marriage and promised to give sustenance to couples and parents.

4. Personal Religion

Deen is reduced to a non-rational private conviction, faith or religion, practiced only at home and in a place of worship. It is completely separate from all public affairs, even though politics should never be separated from ethics, and ethics is related to religion. Most religion is mythology, and mythology is no different than storytelling.

5. Sexuality

Your sexuality should be celebrated, and it is either just as important or more important than your religious identity.

These values are reinforced everyday and have become the basis of our conscious and subconscious beliefs and actions. Not only is it difficult to transcend this matrix, but it is resilient to change and unyielding to resistance.

So, how will children maintain an Islamic worldview amidst all of this noise?

If their schools, universities, and workplaces all operate under these values, then wouldn't they simply see the way of their parents as old-fashioned and socially irrelevant?

According to Pew, 77% of children who are raised Muslim in America still identify with Islam as adults. That means 23% leave Islam altogether. How much of that remaining 77% actually maintain an Islamic worldview; how many even practice their religion. What will our communities look like in a few generations is anyone's guess.

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When 'Islamic' needs to be prefixed to something, alarm bells should sound.  'Islamic' schools, akin to 'Islamic' banks or 'Islamic' states like Pakistan are riddled with kufr - one simply needs to take a close look to see this.  All schools in Britain and elsewhere are highly regulated by a secular state to further its secular agendas. The state sets their aims via legislation and a national curriculum which are then aggressively policed by its regulator Ofsted. The aims are simple and straightforward: take a conveyor-belt of young children, indoctrinate them to produce secular apolitical workers for an industrialised capitalist economy, ensuring they develop a liberal taste based on liberal values to take their place in a secular democratic pluralistic  society whilst apolitical and submissive in their outlook. All this contrasts sharply with the aim of producing a faithful servant of Allah cognisant and loyal to him alone with a rich understanding of the creedal worldview and morality built on the sharia with messengers and prophets as models to emulate to live by Islam within the khilafah and in its absence work to reestablish it.  The differences are visible in the subjects carefully selected by the secular state out of the thousands out there... STEM subjects (science, technology and maths) are emphasised and foremost, supplemented with art, drama, literature and music with a token perennial religious education subject thrown in there to appease the church. In contrast subjects like Arabic, aqeedah, Quran, hadith, fiqh, usul, tajweed, tafsir, akhlaq and tarbiyya,  qasas al-anbiya etc are nowhere in sight aside from a token presence or soundbite to deceive and mislead.   All the subjects are grounded in secular ideology, torn asunder from their divine worldview, basis and imperatives - thus truth, languages, morality and universal laws that appear in the sciences, arts and humanities are all taught without reference to a lawmaker, his commands and sharia. Political understanding of society, along with its vocabulary and tools necessary for understanding, are all unnecessary for docile obedient workers so marginalised or removed as they lead to awkward questions and unrest.   Even mundane subjects like maths  or geography do not escape the ideological treatment, becoming secular at root, where they disconnect a symbol system and a planet from its source, namely the divine; the depoliticised nature of maths delivery in schooling visible by mundane examples of fractions of pizzas and areas of lawns that ignores distributions and concentrations of wealth, power and authority or maps that exagerrate Western geographical presence and dominance exorcising all alternatives contributes to the construction of an apolitical populus, whilst its instrumentalisation as a tool allows it to be hijacked to further capitalism.   Teachers are prohibited to express their religious or political opinions, now explicitly obliged to peddle British ideological values to deal with Muslims since the rise of Prevent.   The traditional sites of learning that used to be the masjid or its annexes within the context of the hijri calendar measuring the passing of time are something the secular state has marginalised or removed. Likewise the design of classrooms, mixed genders, pew like lines based on the sermon on the mount now becoming small clusters mirroring the capitalist workplace as does the bell that mirtors the factory whistle, mirtoring the working day and holiday with its bank holidays and historic factory summer shutdowns.   On and on the issues go, not unnoticed by academics like Apple, Illich, Gatto, Holt et al interested in critical pedagogy but remaining a specialist area of education that is never publicised to the mainstream.   These are all significant ideological issues that are not perceived by most who assume all subjects and the educational project, to be ideologically neutral even universal albeit with the odd controversy here and there over evolution or lgbtq, mixed genders and drugs or racism, bullying and discrimination - selecting 'Islamic' schools to save their children from them.   The fact that something can contain benefits or empowerment does not negate toxicity or even falsity. There are many examples where benefits exist alongside toxicity - disastrous to the human condition.  The only solution to end all this and prevent it reproducing itself generation after generation is we join and contribute to the struggle for reestablishing Islam via the khilafah and its sharia. Until then each will struggle and respond as best they can - ideally with eyes wide open.
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