Secularism, Capitalism and our Education

System

A few weeks ago two of our students stole a multimedia projector. They
were eventually caught and punished. Referring to that incident, the
Director of our campus, Dr. M. A. Bodla said, what are we teaching?
Following article is my response to his question.
There are two types of education, one is value neutral and the other is
value oriented. The hard sciences clearly fall in the category of value
neutral. It does not matter what are values or belief system of a person
are, if he/she has to write a computer program, the program must follow
the rules of programming language being used. Similarly a steam
engine will be designed the same way regardless if the designer is a
Hindu or a Muslim or an atheist. The engine will work according to the
laws of thermodynamics not the belief system of its designer. But a
computer program, a steam engine, a suspension bridge etc. exist in a
human society, and every society has a belief/values system. This is
where the other type of education, the value oriented education comes
into play.

There are three important characteristics of value oriented education:

1) It does not produce any tangible stuff like an engine or a computer
program by itself, but it guides what gets produced and used. For
example it does not develop computer programs but guides the
developers as to what kind of programs are developed. In an Islamic
society it will prohibit the development of programs which promote
gambling, but in a secular society it will not object to such programs.
Similarly it will prohibit research related to wine making in an Islamic
society but not in any other society.
2) It cannot be taught the way value neutral material is taught. As stated in
the beginning, value neutral education is belief agnostic. It is not biased
by the human being delivering it; in fact it does not even require human
being to deliver it. Look at the growing trend of Computer Based
Training (CBT). Whereas value oriented education is human centric.
How successful would a CBT program be in teaching bravery, modesty,
loyalty, honesty, respect, sacrifice etc? You need human role models to
infuse these qualities. The great scholars of Islam were not just
repositories of tafseer, hadith, fiqh etc they were living examples for
their students to imitate. Hundred researchers and their research papers
cannot produce one brave person, but a simple display of bravery by one
person can inspire a thousand persons to follow him into battlefield and
change the course of history.
3) It is extremely influenced by the surrounding society. If the norms of the
surrounding society are not conducive to the values being taught then no
amount of teaching will produce the desired results. A few months back
I was standing outside an academy which was conducting a crash course
for O-level Islamic Studies course. The material of this course is quite
comprehensive. But when the boys came out of the academy they were
talking in most profane manner, which appeared to be their normal mode
of conversation. Obviously Islamic Studies did not have any impact on
them. Their environment dictated their behavior.

Now you may be asking what does all of this has to do with the topic of
this essay, ie. Secularism, Capitalism and our Education System? The
fact of the matter is that we, like majority of the world, are operating
under a secular capitalist system. I know people will remind me that we
are Islamic Republic of Pakistan and that article 31 of our constitution
guarantees the supremacy of Quran and Sunnah. Very interestingly
when I visited the official web portal of
Pakistan http://www.pakistan.gov.pk/ on 6-6-2014 I noticed that the
page mentions Islamabad three times but not Islam, not even once, not
even in the official name. Similarly article 31 and its like are mere
appendages added to satisfy the so called religious parties. The reality is
that our constitution is a secular constitution based on Anglo-Saxon laws
and our society is a capitalist society.
In a capitalistic society market is the god, and this god cares only about
what can be bought and sold. As the great proponent of capitalism,
Milton Friedman (winner of 1976 Nobel prize in economics ) once said
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what
color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares
whether they can produce something you want to buy. As a result
what cannot be bought and sold in market is not important, not valuable
and not worth pursuing. As I mentioned in point #1 the value oriented
education does not produce any tangible product that can be bought or
sold in the market. Have you ever seen some one selling 5 kg of bravery,
10 yards of modesty, or 8 liters of loyalty? Obviously not, and that is
exactly why these virtues are only paid lip service, not really valued and
taught the way hard sciences are valued and taught.
This is where education comes in. The education in a capitalist society,
like all other aspects of such a society, is market driven. What is
considered important by the market is what gets taught in schools and
universities. The rest is treated as needless baggage that needs to be
dumped as soon as circumstances are conducive. (It is in regard that one
should see the recent attempt to merge Islamic and Pakistan studies
courses into one course, for details please
readhttp://nadeemchaudhry.blogspot.com/2013/12/merging-of-islamic-
and-pakistan-studies.html).
As I mentioned in point #3 the value oriented education is extremely
influenced by the surrounding society. In a capitalistic society a culture
of personality as opposed to culture of character is promoted. A
culture of personality is mostly defined by stuff that is bought and sold
in the market. You hear people referring to someone and saying he has
a dashing personality. This dashing personality is usually composed of
jeans from Levis, shoes from Nike, sunglasses from Ray-Ban, latest
model of mobile from Nokia etc, basically stuff that is bought and sold
in market. Whereas culture of character promotes bravery, modesty,
loyalty, respect, sacrifice etc. stuff which is not bought and sold in
market. As a result culture of character takes a back seat in a capitalist
society.
If we really want to fix our education, and for that matter all other
aspects of our society, we have to tear down the capitalist based value
oriented system and completely replace it with Islamic value based
system. Otherwise our educational institutes will basically produce
efficient workers and gullible consumes for the global capitalist
enterprise. May Allah guide us all to the true path and save us from hell-
fire (ameen).