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The second most important purpose of education, and by second, by no means do I mean that in any hierarchical fashion, it’s not less important. it just that as i said there are two points to be kept in mind the first one is developing taqwa and the second one is developing akhlaq now akhlaq is not a
it’s not training as in how you would train an animal when you train animals you just train them to perform certain tasks on command. Akhlaq is not that. Akhlaq begins with how we treat children. The way we treat children, those children we learn to treat others in the same way.
It begins with how we treat those who have less power than we do. How do we treat servants? How do we treat people who are not servants, but who are in serving positions, waiters, drivers, people who have less power than we have? As they see, so they do. Two, children have never been known to obey parents particularly well, but they never fail to imitate them. And that is why I say that children listen with their eyes. They don’t care what you say until they see what you do. Let me repeat that. Children listen with their eyes. is they don’t care what you say until they see what you do. If you treat them like they are incapable of being responsible, incapable of self-regulation, incapable of planning and executing those plans, incapable of working together in teams that they form and pick leaders for, that’s exactly what will happen. They will be incapable of all these things. By all means, guide them but there’s a world of difference between guiding and directing if you have a doubt ask what happens if they decide not to follow the guidance but to arrive at the result by a different route the goal is non-negotiable but the route the root doesn’t need to be non-negotiable are tested in how we deal with conflict and difference of opinion Can we disagree without being disagreeable? This is one of the biggest problems that we have, if not the biggest problem that we have among Muslims globally. We just do not know how to disagree without being disagreeable, without abusing the other person, without lambasting the other person, without defaming the other person. We just don’t know how to do that. We treat disagreement, we treat difference of opinion as enmity
We treat a difference of opinion as enmity As something which is as a rebellion How do we treat dissent? Just see that Do we accept it? Do we encourage it? Do we use it as an asset? Or do we suppress it and treat it as rebellion rebellion, and treason, and destroy the dissenter. What do we do? You don’t have to look very far for this, believe me. You will find it in your own family, you will find it in yourself. Developing collaborative decision-making, Majlis Ash-Shura, is critical to success. As we know, Allah decreed it, and Rasool Allah practiced it. Even though he received Wahi, even though he was the recipient of revelation, still he asked people for advice and he took their advice. He was not just asking advice as lip service. He actually asked advice and he took advice. We see evidence of this in major decisions like the battles of Badr and Uhud and we see how he took the advice of his Sahaba. In this particular case, his wife, our mother, Umm Salman Radhiyallahu Anha in Sulayh-ud-Dabiyah. And in the Battle of Ahzab, he took the advice of Salman al-Farsi in how to defend Medina by digging a trench, which was new to the Arabs. There are many other instances in the Sira, but these will suffice. The final culmination of this was in the fact that he didn’t nominate his successor no matter our opinion our opinions about that today the fact remains that he didn’t name anyone in specifically in my view this was because of two things he knew who they would pick and that was the one he wanted to succeed him and that was and secondly because he wanted them to come to that decision on their own so that they would then support the successor sure there was a risk that their choice may have been different from his but that’s the risk that every coach takes and which is a test of his coaching. In this case, even if they had chosen one of the others, each was a paragon of virtue, of talent, of ability in himself. And therefore, the Ummah would not have gone too far wrong anyway.
The coach is never on the field. The test and the risk that every coach takes, which is the test of their own coaching, The coach is never on the field, but no coach worth the name will put untrained players on the field and expect them to win. And no coach will ever train his team in one game and expect them to play a totally different game which they have never learned and in which everything they learned results in a penalty. Yet that’s precisely what we do in our schools. We condition our children to unquestioning obedience, to blindly obey authority, never to decide anything on their own but to bow in submission to whatever is imposed from on high no matter how stupid inconvenient or unfair it may be to value internal competition no matter how toxic and distrust and punish collaboration and teamwork to show up the faults of each other and snitch on our colleagues to rat on friends and neighbors and then expect them to do the opposite of all this and create a society that is compassionate, just, non-discriminatory, collaborative, kind, and caring. I know this is a sign of insanity. You tell me on whose part. Let me ask you, what you think will happen if you give those who are affected by the rules, that is children, to make the rules? If you give them the authority to make the rules? After all, that’s what democracy and freedom is all about, isn’t it? When are children supposed to learn to use democratic principles and freedom value it deal with problems that they may arise that that may arise and practice it responsibly responsibly when i expect them when do you expect them to do that when you don’t allow them to do that in their schools let’s ask what happens in our schools as i mentioned earlier if you want to see what someone values see what they measure what do we measure what are the metrics we use do we measure takhwan do we even know how to measure them you might say that’s all just two things i I say yes because values drive behavior and behavior drives results. Taqwa is the core value and Akhlaq covers all behavior. The rest follows. So what about exams? How do we know what the children learn if we don’t test them? I didn’t say don’t test them. I said test them for knowledge, not for random recall. They are human. Remember, they’re not silicon chips. Instead of asking, state Archimedes’ principle, ask, please give me one example where Archimedes’ principle is applied and one example where you would apply it. If someone had forgotten Archimedes’ principle, let them look it up. That doesn’t matter because in real life, they would be able to look it up. But how to apply it has to come from them. Application is the real and only proof of learning. Everything is possible if you want to do it. Ask, do I want to change? Do I want to change? I rest my case.