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Bismillahir-Rahmanir-Rahim. Alhamdulillahil-Rahmihil-Alameen. As-Salatu As-Salamu Ala Ash-Sharifil-Amin Bi Ayatumil-Salin. Muhammad Rasulullah, Insallahi Hayyuh, Ayyuh, S.S.A.M.T., wa S.S.A.M.T.
From my mother, a very dear friend of mine from Australia, he said to me that one of his school friends when he was in school—so we were talking about kids in maximum high school who would probably be less than that, maybe 12 or 14—he said his friend dropped out of school. He said that schooling is only public day care. He said, “Everyone knows that schooling is only public day care.”
Now seriously, this is something I have been saying for a long, long time. May Allah mercy on us; the whole concept of schooling as we know it today started with the Industrial Revolution in 1740. It was created to solve a problem, and the problem of the time was: what do you do with children who are parentless for 8 to 10, or even 12 hours a day because both parents have gone off to work in the factories?
That is the problem which was created obviously because once factories started, men went to work in the factories, and then factories expanded, needing more labor. So women were recruited also to work in the factories. In an agrarian economy—which predated the Industrial Revolution—the parents were also the teachers of their children. On the one hand, the father taught the son or sons things to do outside the house: agriculture, plumbing, planting, getting caravans, harvesting crops, and so on. And they learned buying and selling in the markets. All of that. The girls were taught by their mothers; they were taught all skills of being good housewives, good mothers—teaching, cooking, taking care of children, some level of medicine, and so on.
So all of this happened at home. The parents were also the teachers of the children, formerly and informally teaching them religion, teaching them culture, teaching them manners, teaching them traditions, teaching them their relationships in the home—who is related to whom, how to greet people—all of this, the entire fabric of what makes society. All of this was taught by the parents through their children.
Now with the Industrial Revolution, the agrarian economy practically collapsed, and people moved to industrial towns. There, in England, it was Leeds, Manchester, and so forth; in America, it was Detroit and others. People moved there and started living initially in small, literally shanty towns. Both parents went to work. As a side note, this is also how women’s fashion changed—not because of any fashion reasons but because of safety reasons. Women used to wear long, loose clothes, long skirts, full-sleeve drafts, and so on. But all of that was highly dangerous next to a machine. So that’s where women’s clothing became tighter and tighter, closer to the body, because that was safer near a machine.
So all of this happened, and then because of this, a new problem was created: what do you do with the children? This is where the schooling method started, where children were put into schools. You have 30, 40, 50, or even 60 children in a class with one person teaching them. Now that brought in its own dynamics because this person teaching them was not necessarily from the same culture, tradition, ethnicity, religion, and so on. And so he or she brought their own aspects and understanding of things to the school. The children learned new things which they would not have otherwise learnt. Some of this was good; some of this was bad, causing definite questioning and so on.
But the long and short of this is: if you look at schooling as an activity and compare it, for example, to any other activity, there’s one thing that stands out. Every other activity is the answer to a problem—it’s providing a solution to a perceived need of the individual. For example, who goes to a hospital? Somebody who is in pain, somebody who has a health problem, going to the hospital in order to have that cured. So you don’t need to convince them: “Here is a person who is feeling pain.” Therefore, they go to the hospital. A person is going to a restaurant because they feel hungry. You get on a bus because you need to go from point A to point B. Take any human activity—it is always in response to a perceived and felt need of the individual who is taking advantage of that activity.
So this is a standard rule, if I might say, for all human activity—except schooling. Schooling is the only thing where the people who are going to the school are not going to the school themselves; they are being sent to the school. And they are being sent to solve not their own problem, but somebody else’s problem. They are not the people getting anything they actually want from the school.
Also, if you say, “Well, after all, they are studying,” tell me what are they gaining? Because what they are studying is taught to them as discrete bits of information which is dumped on them, quite literally, without showing them any connections of how that bit of information connects with any other bit of information, and how that is useful or how it solves any problem. None of this is done. It’s just bits of information which come under a bucket called physics, or a bucket called chemistry, or a bucket called history, or a bucket called geography—with no connection between history and geography and physics and chemistry taught to them in any regular traditional school, in any country in the world.
And then, on top of that, to add insult to injury, these kids—who didn’t ask to be there, who didn’t go there because they felt some need or some pain—are now subjected to what is called an exam, which purely consists of regurgitating whatever they have been taught, on random recall, in a specific time window. So if the exam is from 9 to 11, they have to regurgitate what they learned between 9 and 11. And if the child, at 11:05, answers the question because he couldn’t think of the answer until 11—which happens all the time for most of us, if you think about it—the answer is there literally on the tip of your tongue but doesn’t come out; it’s just in your brain but doesn’t drop at the right time. So I know the thing, but instead of saying it at 11, I say it at 11:05, I’m failed. So sorry, you’re failed.
Now the point is: do I know the answer? I do know the answer. What’s the sanctity of knowing it within that particular window? If I know the answer five minutes later, how does it make a difference? It’s not a life-threatening thing; it’s not a make-or-break situation in life. Yet I’m failed. And if that exam is a board exam or some critical exam like that, this has the potential to completely destroy my career. That is why you find many times high school children in board exams commit suicide for this specific reason—because they’ve studied all year, they literally slog through it for a year or two to prepare for the exam, and then during the exam, thanks to the stress and whatnot, a particular answer they are not able to give right there—even though afterwards they know the answer—but they are failed, and now doors are shut for them for their education.
So schooling is the only thing which is not an answer to anything. The people who go to school—the actual customers of the school—are the children, but schooling, its entire design, the way it is run, benefits everyone other than that actual customer, which is the student. Schools make profit for their owners. Schools create an opportunity to earn a salary for teachers, for teaching something a child can learn very easily on their own. This is why homeschooling is now so popular because people have realized they don’t need to send children to a school and pay a fee, and drive them back and forth morning and night through wind and rain and snow. There’s no need to do all that; the child can stay at home and learn, and that quality of learning is as good, if not better, than school, because it is self-driven, self-motivated. And these children are getting admission to some of the top universities of the world without any problem. So homeschooling is not making them any dumber—they are doing perfectly well. And AI has opened the doors for this to an extent which one can call unlimited, because now the entire body of human knowledge is potentially available to anyone who has an internet connection and a phone or a computer.
So this is something I want to leave with you, and hopefully you can think about this and ask a simple question: what need does schooling fulfill? It does not fulfill any need for the individual customer. Think about that—I’m not talking about how it helps. It fulfills the need of the parent who wants to get rid of the child for 8, 10, or 12 hours a day because he or she has gone off to work. It fulfills the need of the teacher who needs a salary, therefore they come and teach—whether the children need that or like that or not doesn’t matter; the teacher needs to teach because they need to get a salary. It fulfills the need of the business owner, the school owner, who is doing that because he makes a profit—it is a niche in the market which has no peaks and troughs. Schools are there, fees are paid, whether the economy is going up or down makes no difference. Parents treat it as a necessity, which I suppose it is—but for the children, think about this.
Another aspect: schools are the only thing, other than prisons and jails, where the inmates have no say in whatever happens to them. No decision that impacts the inmates has any input from the inmates about that decision. Nobody asks them what time should we have lunch, what should we eat, what do you do if you’re feeling sleepy in the afternoon, what subject should be taught when and why. Whatever you want to do—including, once they enter the place, the gate shuts and they cannot leave on their own—they have no autonomy on that. They are called to classes by bells ringing, as if they have no sense, as if they don’t have access to watches so they can keep their own time. They are treated like complete imbeciles who cannot even keep to a time—some bell has to ring, or a buzzer has to go off, for them to go from class A to class B. They cannot even go to the toilet without asking permission, and obviously publicly, in the class, which is so undignified. We have all been through the system—I’m talking about what I went through, and I’m sure everyone listening to this went through in their schooling time as well.
So all of this happens, and yet we think this is a great system. It is not a great system, and AI is going to put it to death. Believe me—at least I am one person who would be very happy to see all schools closed, and then people can really focus on solving problems. I will do a second podcast on that: “How do you solve that problem?” But think about this: what problem does your school solve? And the answer is, it doesn’t solve any problem—it actually creates more problems.
So I agree with my friend’s friend who said that everyone knows that schooling is really official day care, which is what it is. And that is really, I think, for people who are going to schools, and people who are sending children to schools, and people who are running schools, to think about, and say: how can we create something which really adds value, instead of this joke that we have called schooling?
In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.