Educational Institutions: Social Laboratories

If the purpose of education is to prepare healthy citizens for the society who could positively contribute to its growth then there is something which is a must: Helping them feel comfortable in that society which includes a dignified living and economic security as well as prosperity – before anything else. I find that as regards this objective of education we haven’t given enough thought to it especially in the case of madrasaahs, which is the focus here.

There is a threat perception as if they will lose their identity. If the identity is so fragile it raises even more serious questions and it is by itself a cause of concern. Instead of finding ways to reinforce the self-confidence and putting in measures in place to remove the threat perception we rather create an isolated environment to reinforce the same psychology which is itself a cause of concern. This sounds a very strange phenomenon to me.

Our madrasaahs are a glaring case in point. How much these seats of learning equip the students for healthy and confident interaction (in today’s communication language) with the larger sections of the society is a subject that requires much deliberation. I have noticed that these institutions create an isolated and artificial environment much different from the actual environment in the larger society. After spending a considerable time in an isolated environment the students are not very comfortable with the outside world.

After these students have lived in an environment of like-minded people for a very long time – that too in the formative years of their life – they are not quite comfortable in the ‘outside’ world. It is a natural outcome of the closed, isolated and artificial environment. The educational environment and institution is supposed to be a small laboratory wherein all those experiments are carried out which are to be carried out later at a larger level i.e. the bigger laboratory of the entire society.

Leave alone the larger society and other faiths, the students in madrasaahs do not interact much with the students of other schools of thought – knowing that each madrasah has a specific school of thought in almost all cases. Coming out of the madrasah we immediately face a different world – for which we aren’t really ready. A Hindu, a Sikh and a Christian we are not used to dealing with. We are comfortable only in our environment.

This trait might have been noticed by many among the members on our Froums about the graduates of madrasaahs when the latter (luckily) join Universities. I have noticed that the graduates of each madrasah are mostly found with the graduates of the same madrasah. This is obviously a human tendency. As underscored by the following couplet (underscoring the adage ‘birds of a feather fly together’):

kunad hum jins baa hum jins parwaaz

kabootar baa kabootar baaz baa baaz

We can conveniently call it a failing, though. We can call it an unfortunate deviation from the real purpose of education. It could be argued that an educational institution should reflect all the different colors of a society. We should apprise the students of all those colors much in advance and enable them to actually live with those colors and deal with it themselves.

This whole issue requires serious thinking. We cannot let it go as it is. Because a lot is at stake. The community is spending a lot on its educational institutions without actually getting enough in return.