Educational Conference Draws International Audience

One hundred thirty five Muslim educators from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada met March 14 – 17 at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. The conference was characterized by challenging presentations at a high intellectual level and spirited discussions among the fully engaged conference participants. This made for a scintillating atmosphere in which to face difficult and sometimes depressing realities. The conference examined issues ranging from the spiritual and moral development of children, through the consideration of the development of the Islamic Curriculum to the methods used by America’s elite private schools to teach the students who go on to become the leaders of the nation. The conference concluded with a public forum at a packed Convocation Hall, the largest auditorium on the UT Campus, where a crowd of over 1700 gathered for an evening entitled “Beyond Schooling: Building Communities where Learning really matters.”

The lecturers at the conference were John Taylor Gatto, Hamza Yusuf Hanson, Abdullah Trevathan, and Karima Alavi. John Taylor Gatto is one of the foremost voices for educational reform in the United States. Abdullah Trevathan is Head Teacher (principal) at the Islamia Primary School in London, which he founded together with the former pop star Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam. Karima Alavi is the Director of Dar al Islam’s Teachers Institutes. There was also a panel discussion at the conference where representatives from Montessori and Waldorf Schools together with representatives from the Home-schooling movement, outlined their alternative approaches to education.

 The conference was organized by the Imam Zarnugi Institute on Education, a group of Muslim educators in Toronto. Institute logistics ran smoothly and the seasoned conference team worked tirelessly to insure its success. Dr. Mohammad Shafi, Chairman of Dar al Islam welcomed participants to the conference, and gave the final, ecumenical prayer at the public forum. Dar al Islam was a major sponsor of the conference. Something of the seriousness of the conference may be judged by the 200-page reading package sent to conference participants in advance of the conference in order to prepare them for the conference itself and to establish a common frame of reference upon which the conference presentations could build. Along with the reading package sent to conference participants was an article entitled “A Vision of Islamic Education,” by Dawud Tauhidi. This article was an edited excerpt from the work sponsored and guided by Dar al Islam on the Tarbiyah Project.

Convocation Hall was filled by capacity crowd who turned out on a snowy Saturday night to hear Hamza Yusuf and John Taylor Gatto address the topic “Beyond Schooling: building communities where learning really matters.” Mr. Gatto spoke for just under an hour, weaving together the threads of the historical development of modern compulsory schooling to show its fundamental incompatibility with the development of truly educated individuals. Imam Hamza Yusuf placed the issues of education in a moral and spiritual context and delivered a stirring call for action and individual responsibility. Both talks were enthusiastically received.

Mr. Gatto’s address amounted to an abstract from his 310,000 word An Underground History of Schooling, to be published in the spring of 2001. He showed how the gathering momentum of the Industrial Revolution and Social Darwinism combined in the 1870’s with educational techniques imported from Prussia resulted in the notion of compulsory schooling. The Captains of Industry, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and Henry Ford made use of academics at Harvard and other Institutions to detail both the rationale and methodology of this new approach. The move to compulsory education was a fundamental shift away from emphasis on educating the individual to fulfill his potential towards training the individual to be a compliant tool of industry and government. In order to succeed at this task, the removal of the children from the home for extended periods, the extension of childhood beyond puberty, segregation of children by age groups, and stratification of age groups by numerical ranks based on --Assessment Tests were seen as essential. Mr. Gatto’s presentation painted a complex picture of the roots of the system that has resulted in the educational malaise of today.