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# Warning Signs: The Crisis in Education and the Impact of Industrialization
First, I would like to thank Marana for his choice of the ayat which he made. *Mashallah*, that is exactly what was in my mind as well.
I want to do this; we have until 10 o’clock. So now it’s close to 8:30.
I don’t want to lecture you because I don’t think you need lectures, and I don’t think anybody likes a lecture even though they might say they like it. What I would like to do is to share with you some questions which are also in my mind. So all of us can together think about those things, put some thoughts onto these charts, and then perhaps from that build a kind of strategy going forward. Now, that’s a big ask for the time given. So as long as we get it started somewhere, you know, we leave it with that. *Inshallah*, Allah Ta’ala will give us opportunities to take it forward in more detail.
One thing for sure is that we are facing a crisis in education, the like of which humanity has never faced before.
The closest sort of example I can think of when there was a crisis in education—even though it wasn’t called by that name—was at the beginning and during the industrial revolution. So we’re talking about 1748 or something like that.
The crisis that happened at that time was that broadly and generally speaking, the world changed from being an agrarian society to becoming an industrialized society. The world prior to that was by and large an agrarian world. And arising out of the agrarian economies was trade. So you had farmers, you had artisans, and you had traders. These were the three basic means of livelihood and ways of contributing to the economy that existed.
But come the industrial revolution, when machines were invented—and especially when the manufacturing method, the assembly line was invented—it completely destroyed this world. To give you a very brief idea: in an agrarian economy, the day begins when the sun rises, and the day ends when the sun sets. In an industrial economy, the day begins when your shift begins. If you are on the 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift, then your day begins at 2 p.m. and your day ends at 10 p.m. Your day is by the clock; it’s not by the sun and the moon.
One aspect of that is today, in our masajid, where we have this, frankly, I mean, I feel like laughing, the exact-to-the-dot schedule. *Asal* is at 5:30. You wait until that needle goes to 5. Allahu Akbar.
But that is an outcome. If you think about that, that has nothing to do with Islam. That’s an outcome of the industrial revolution from 1748 or 1700—mid-early 17th century—which is carrying on in a completely unrelated thing, which is your masjid. You might say, “What does the masjid got to do?” It has everything to do with it because it is also subject to the same mental change that happened thanks to the industrial revolution. So the time of day changed. We are no longer connected with the sun, the moon, and the stars. No longer connected with that. We are connected with the clock. Number one.
Second thing which changed was, in the industrial era, the teachers within quotes, changed. So in an agrarian economy, there were two teachers: the father and the mother. The father taught usually the boys skills to earn a living. How to plough the field, how to decide when is the right time to plant the seed, irrigation, animal husbandry, your bullocks and your horses, your plowshares, and so on. Everything to do with the outside world, outside the home, engaging in economic activity to earn a living. Right? Bring it to the seerah; Rasool Allah ﷺ what did he do as a child? He grazed sheep. When he grew up to a certain age, he would accompany his uncle and his grandfather on business trips. Outside the house. This is what the boys learnt from their fathers—by fathers I mean that generation. So father, uncle, grandfather, whoever. Right? The girls, on the other hand, learnt home-making skills. Sewing, cooking, cleaning the house. Now you might say, “Cleaning the house is hardly a skill.” You try and do it and you’ll know how much of a skill it is. Seriously, I’m telling you, it’s not a joke. They also learnt whatever kind of medicines, of which herbs are good. If something happens, the child is crying at night, has colic, or a stomach ache, what to give to the child, and so on. All of that: how to make a beautiful home. This was taught to the girls.
Now the industrial revolution happened. People left their farms. To give you an example from America, they left their farms and went off to Detroit, for example. Right? And there, what happened to the teachers? They were gone. The teachers changed. And our current school system was born then. One teacher with 30, 40, 50, or 60 students in the class. And if you think 60 is too much, come to India and I’ll show you more. Right? Now, it changed in another way. When the parents were the teachers, the parents were *the* teachers. The teachers also taught the children culture, their language, their religion, their *tahzeeb*. Right? Saqafah. The word saqafah comes from musaqaf. Right? And musaqaf means somebody who is honorable, knowledgeable, worthy of respect. But we have converted saqafah to mean reading and writing only. So they learned all this culture. Which is very important. But when they came to the schooling system in the industrial revolution, the teacher teaching is not necessarily from your culture or your religion. Can be anybody. And the students there are also a mixture of students from different cultures.
I’m not saying that is bad or good; I’m just explaining to you what the situation is. So now what does the teacher teach? If the teacher is a Christian, what does he teach? If the teacher is a Muslim, what does he teach? If the teacher is an atheist, what does he teach? And what are the children taking away from there? Now the point therefore is: the industrial revolution was not just about building dinky toys on assembly lines or whatever they were building. It was a complete revamp and change of society in multiple aspects which I’m sure nobody at that time even imagined would happen. It just happened. People’s lifestyles changed. Then, because the industrial revolution was successful, they ran out of workers. Because the men went to work, women stayed at home taking care of children. There were only that many men. So what do you do? Bring the women into the workplace. Now you had a problem. Because the women in the workplace, if they dressed the way that they were dressed at the time, were a hazard. Because if you are wearing a long skirt all the way down to your ankles, if you have your head covered with a veil, you’re wearing loose clothing, you are a hazard. The clothing will get caught in the machinery; you get sucked in, you die—I have to stop the assembly line. So I’m losing money. Plus I have to pay you compensation. So what must we do? Change women’s fashion.
So clothing which clings to the body is safer around machinery than clothing which is loose. Nothing to do with religion. Nothing to do with social norms. It has to do with industrial practice. Take the veil off because loose clothing—any loose clothing, whether it’s from the head or anywhere else—cut your hair short, tie it up, wear a cap, take off the veil, take off loose clothing, wear tight clothing. Complete women’s fashion, complete women’s clothing changed thanks to the industrial revolution.
Now very interesting also how these messages were given. You also need to take the woman out of the house, don’t worry about raising her, raising children and so on; come and work in the factory. Now any person with any sense of logic: if you put them down and say, “Tell me which is more significant, more important, more worthwhile, more noble, raising the next generation or working in a call center or working on a piece of machinery or doing something like that,” which is better? Which is more noble? What will they say? So you have to change that in the head. You have to change that. So what did they say? They said it’s a matter of your freedom, your significance. You are an unpaid slave in the house. So we’ve got to change that. We cannot have you as an unpaid slave in the house. Go out and work. Express yourself.
So the woman now who has a problem listening to her husband has no problem listening to somebody who is completely unrelated, who is her boss. Which woman do you know in the workplace will say to her boss, “You know, I don’t like that tone of voice. You can’t talk to me like this”? Why not? So the change was in the mind. Culture changed. Social norms changed. Man-woman relationships changed. Husband-wife relationships changed. Children-parent relationships changed. In the agrarian economy, the father—even today if you go into the traditional lands, in Africa as well as in India—you see how an African, a Zulu, a Shangaan, or a Khosa child greets elders. Forget about children; this is something which always strikes me when I travel. *Alhamdulillah*, Allah Ta’ala takes me to all over the world. When I travel to cultures like this, when I come to Africa, when I come to South Africa—just now I was in Ethiopia as well—or when I go to Saudi Arabia and other places, just this white beard: that security guard in the airport, in Lanceria just now when we came yesterday, the man says, “Baba, come here.” You know, respectfully. Baba means father, come here. Can you put your hand like this? Can I search you? Most probably. And there was a woman there, again a security officer, police woman, who tells my wife, “Amma, come. Mama, come forward.” You won’t find this in America, believe me. You won’t find this in Western economies, Western societies. Respect comes with age. With the Industrial Revolution, all of this went. Because, as I said, the teacher—the father—was not just that today; the father is the ATM machine and the mother is the cart. Not so.
There was respect for that. That’s why I am one of those who—I won’t say I am dead against it—but I definitely don’t think it’s a great idea to get your children to learn the Quran in the Maktab or from an Ustad or your Imam. So I am not against the Maktab system. I set up the first Maktab in our Masjid in Western Mass. But I am saying this is like somebody went to Maulana Abul Ma’ududi, *Rahmatullah Ali*. Somebody went to him and they said, “Hazrat, we have started an orphanage and please, we want you to come and inaugurate it.” He said, “I refuse, I will not come. Shut it down.”
I said, “This is going; we thought we are doing a good thing, starting an orphanage, and you are saying shut it down and you will not inaugurate.” He said, “To put an orphan into an orphanage makes him feel more lonely and more out of society. You are supposed to raise orphans in your homes.” Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala had only prohibited us from giving the orphan our name. He didn’t stop people from raising them. And people were… in the time of which orphanage was there? So, this is what happened. The parents—that’s why I say—teach your children Quran yourself. That has two benefits. First of all, you learn it. People can’t read. They cannot read Surah Al-Fatiha correctly. Why? Because you never learnt. Your children are going to the Maktab. So, children are learning Quran better than the parents. And the parents don’t feel ashamed. They are thinking about it. When somebody comes, tell the child, son, listen to the Quran. So, your little eight-year-old kid or seven-year-old kid is reading beautifully. *MashaAllah*. May Allah bless them. They read beautifully. You ask the father, “Have you listened?” I mean, we don’t say this and we should not say it also because we don’t want to embarrass people. But really, you should feel for yourself. If I cannot read Quran as good as my ten-year-old or my five-year-old, there is something seriously wrong, isn’t it?
In any society, take out the Maulana’s; ask the others. Are the Maulana’s only Muslims? Aren’t there others? I mean, others are non-Muslims. So, move them aside. Please read. You can’t read. That is because you never learnt. Now, if you teach your own child Quran—I am talking only about recitation—then you are forced to learn it yourself which is *Alhamdulillah* a wonderful thing. And you teach. And then what happens is: this whole issue of children not respecting the parents and generation—all this will vanish because you are the teacher of the Quran for the child. How will he not respect you?
There is a wonderful documentary. In Egypt, they have this annual Quran recitation competition. So, there is this wonderful documentary where they traced seven or eight children from different parts of the world. There is somebody from Sudan, someone from Somalia, from Bangladesh, India, and so on. A whole bunch of them. Little kids, maybe seven or eight years old. All of them are Huffahs and they are participating in this competition in Egypt, in Al-Azhar. They traced this documentary. It is a very nice documentary which I recommend all of you see. I think it is very useful to see. But there is one little sequence in that which literally, you know, I sort of went through and I saw. This Somali father—who was also very tall, slim, and very tall—and he has got this little kid who is taking part of the competition. He is about maybe eight years old. They are walking along the beach on the sand, barefoot, father and son. The son is reciting and the father is listening. The son is doing his *rest* (ruku), his *sajdah*, for his *hips*. And the father is also half his. The father is listening and occasionally he will correct him because the kid knows what to do. He is reading well. Both of them walking in the sand, the waves washing their feet.
Now, you take that father and son combination and I will tell you that that son will never destroy that father. So question does not arise. So, the son is throughout his upbringing: his day begins after Salatul Bajar walking with his father on the beach with the waves washing their feet, and he is reciting Quran. His father is this changed with the Industrial Revolution. So, the children looking up to their parents as role models, idols, ideals, heroes—disappeared, vanished. The child no longer understood what my father does. When he was walking behind the plough with his father, the son understood what the father did. He understood the complexity of it. He understood the difficulty of it. Problems happened; he understood how to solve those problems. If he got stuck, he knew how to unstick. Likewise for the girl, she would work with her mother; she would see what was happening. The mother was her role model, the hero, the heroine. But with the Industrial Revolution, the mother went to work in the factory, the father went to work in the factory. They came at different odd times. There is something in the West called the latchkey kid. Have you heard this term? The latchkey kid. You know what the latchkey kid is? This child who has… He has the house front door key on a collar. He has a strap and the strap is around their neck. That’s like they have nowadays for name tags—you know, when you go to work somewhere, lanyards, right? I consistently refused to use lanyards throughout my consulting practice. I used to throw them away. I said, “I’m not a dog.” Yeah, I said, say it clearly, “I will not wear this bloody collar.” And they said, “No, but our chairman wears it. Maybe he’s a dog, I’m not.” Yeah, I’m not putting something on my neck. Kids would have, on a lanyard, they would have a key. The school bus would drop them off. And this happens to this day. School bus drops them off because at that time, mother and father both are out at work. They’re not at home. And I haven’t even come to the single parent issue, so there’s time to go. They would be dropped off. The kid comes, unlocks his or her old house door, goes in, shuts the door, and people now start taking pride in things which are actually evil things. They have normalized it and they take pride in it. You know, “My child is so responsible. He opens the door, he locks it, makes sure the door is locked.” Then he goes and he takes the thing out of the fridge and he heats it in the microwave. This little kid knows how to… You must say, you should be ashamed of saying this. You’re showing this to me now as a great thing of how well-trained your kid is. Why is your child doing this? Why does your little child have to come home to an empty house? He’s an orphan. His mother is dead. His father is dead. What is the… Why is he coming to an empty house? Because I am fulfilling myself in the outer world. This is what happened.
And as I said, this is nothing compared to what you and I are seeing and going to see going forward in today’s world, specifically with AI. Because today in the world—and the world going forward—there are three kinds of people. So I want you to slot yourself wherever you think you belong. Three kinds of people. There are people who use AI in their life. Mildest normal form is social media. Mildest normal form is Chat GPT, which you use to write emails and stuff. You don’t need to think anymore. You forgot how to write. The beautiful connection between handwriting and brain processing—that is gone, finished. I will read for you a piece which somebody wrote and you will appreciate it in a minute. So users and consumers of AI. Right? This is the vast majority of people. Then there is a small elite group which will always be small because of what it is: people who create that AI. Who actually write the programs, who actually create AI, who create content on social media. And by that, I don’t mean influencers. I’m talking about the actual technical people who write the algorithms and so on in that context. There is a small elite group. Then there is a super small elite group who are the funders of all this. Who have the money. Who have the money to pay the creators of AI. And here we are talking about big money. We are not talking about millions of dollars. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. Very small elite group. Now why must you understand this link? Because what that AI will do—or what that AI is being created to do—does not depend on the consumer. Does not dep
It does not depend on what is good for the vast majority. It does not depend on what that vast majority actually wants.
It does not even depend on the person who is creating the technical part of that AI. It depends on what the person with the money wants. And who is the person with the money? One of them is one of yours: Elon Musk. Completely immoral. He said, “I want to go to Jahannam.” I want to go to hell. They are the people. And the others with him are no better. You’ve got Jeff Bezos. You’ve got Bill Gates. These are people whose names were exposed in the Epstein files; you know, they opened the curtain on them. And the very fact that nothing happens shows the kind of power they have. Who was adversely affected by the Epstein files? Apart from obviously the victim. I mean, I don’t even want to talk about those things. This is, you know, it’s painful for me physically to speak about any of those things. But we all of us know what we’re talking about. This is the world you’re looking at. And therefore, with this preamble, I want to leave you with a couple of questions. And then let’s see what you have to say. Because, as I said, I don’t want to lecture. My first question is, therefore, in the name of education, what should we equip ourselves with? What should we equip students for?