Islamic schools and globalization

Islamic schools and globalization

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): How can the madrasah, as Moslem religious schools, function properly if allowed only two hours a week for religious instruction?

And what does it mean if one says that the madrasah must prepare their pupils to meet the challenges of the globalized future? Does this mean that madrasah must transform themselves into educational institutions teaching primarily science and technology, and negate their basic identity as institutions for religious education?

These two basic problems were expressed in a meeting of kiai and ustadz, educators working in the private sector madrasah system.

It was a small gathering which lasted for three days during which the participants intensively discussed problems they considered to be affecting the basic identity of their institutions as religious schools.

I was invited to this meeting as an "inside outsider", a qualifier which embarrassed me, and put me in an awkward position. These religious educators assumed that I have sufficient knowledge about madrasah, whereas in reality I know very little about it.

It is important to note in this regard that the Indonesian educational system has three subsystems: the traditional pondok pesantren (the traditional Koranic school) subsystem, the madrasah (the modernized Islamic school) subsystem, and the sekolah umum (the general school or non-religious school) subsystem.

The first two subsystems operate under the auspices of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, while the sekolah umum subsystem operates under the guidance and supervision of the Ministry of Education and Culture.

The serious flaw of this complex system has been that those who are working within the sekolah umum subsystem tend to look upon themselves as the only occupants of the national education system, whereas those working within the pondok pesantren and the madrasah subsystems tend to forget that they are parts of the national education system.

Madrasah people have a very strong sense of their basic identity. They feel themselves to be guardians of Islamic religious education. They are very much aware that their schools are religious schools, not general education schools.

They feel that their primary obligation is to instill religious consciousness and a religious way of life in their students. The teaching of "worldly knowledge is considered secondary to the teaching of God's revelations concerning the purpose of life".

It is against this background that the decision made by the government to reduce the number of hours for religious instruction from 15 to two hours a week is felt as a severe blow. It is as if they are being robbed of their basic identity. In this meeting I was asked to discuss why and how educational institutions should prepare their students for life in the globalized era.

Since my knowledge about the madrasah system is minimal, I tried to discuss the problem from another angle, that is from the viewpoint of our national system of education, which at the moment is being challenged by new realities in global life.

As I understand it, these new realities consist of three kinds of changes, that is changes in economic life, changes in political life, and changes in social life.

I used standard materials I found in my readings to explain that in economic life the basic trend is for developing economies to move from an agricultural economy into an industrial economy and later on to an information economy to achieve significant economic growth in the 21st century.

In political life, the basic trend is that every country has to work systematically towards political maturity, and to achieve national competence in democratic governance in order to attain a sustained economic growth.

No sustained economic growth is possible without political maturity of national scale.

In social life, the basic trend is that every nation has to learn two things, that is first to control the excesses of the new lifestyles brought about by changes in this globalized era, and second to harness social powers generated by new types of social alliances (NGO's, environmentalists, professional associations, human rights watch groups and others), and to use them for the benefit of national and global developments.

To survive in these forthcoming trends of global life -- so I went forth, relating as best as I can all the wisdom I have learned from my recent readings -- it is an imperative for every developing nation to generate a new kind of manpower, a new kind of political culture, and a new kind of social life capable of blending new kinds of social alliances with older types of social affiliations.

It is the task of every national system of education to help the young generation acquire the various kinds of knowledge, competency, and value systems which will make them become a generation within the nation capable of exhibiting the characteristics of a trained workforce, capable of developing new political systems and cultures, and capable also of building a new social life which is at once the continuation and the replacement of the old social life.

Since madrasah constitute a part of the Indonesian national system of education, they also have the responsibility of preparing their students for life within the forthcoming globalized era. Failure to do so will handicap future madrasah graduates in their competition for jobs with graduates coming from the non-religious school subsystem.

It can also cause their graduates to be rendered less capable or even incapable of participation in the building of a new political system and culture. And it certainly will make their future graduates feel disoriented, frustrated, and unproductive in the new social environment.

The problem is thus how to do this unavoidable imperative without sacrificing their basic identity as institutions for religious education. In my ignorance about the intricacies of madrasah education, I offered some questions as points of reference.

First, is religious education really incompatible with education for the understanding of physical, social, and cultural environments? Isn't there a saying somewhere in Islam which asserts that the words of God (the Koran) cannot possibly contradict the work of God (the universe) ?

The next question I posed was whether religious education is identical to religious instruction. Whether the extent to which religious education is carried out is determined solely by the number of hours per week allotted to religious instruction.

Is there really no relationship whatsoever between religious education and science education?

I realized that I did not answer their question. I was aware that I was just expressing my views about how religious education can still be carried out in this seemingly dilemmatic situation. While admitting that this is a very difficult question, I offered my view that there seems to be an urgent need to review the system of preparing teachers for religious education to find a partial answer to this problem.

At the end of the meeting, a young ustadz came to me and said, I understand your reasoning, and I can see the direction you are suggesting. But I am afraid that too many of us within madrasah will not be able to understand you. You are too much of a modernist.

I felt sad, alienated and relieved at the same time.

The writer is an observer of sociocultural affairs.