The War on Education

Two Fronts

The war on education operates on two fronts simultaneously: the degradation of general education, which produces people who cannot think critically, and the marginalisation of Islamic education, which produces Muslims who cannot access their own tradition.

The Degradation of General Education

Classical education, whether in the Islamic tradition (madrasah education in logic, rhetoric, grammar, jurisprudence, and sciences) or in the Western tradition (the liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), was designed to produce people capable of reasoning, argumentation, and the evaluation of evidence.

What replaced it, gradually across the 20th century and accelerating toward its end, is a system designed to produce employable workers rather than thinking people. The shift from education to training is visible in:

Curriculum design: The removal of philosophy, logic, classical languages, and rhetoric from standard education. These are the tools of reasoning. Their absence produces people who hold opinions they cannot justify and cannot evaluate the opinions of others.

Standardised testing: The replacement of essay-based, argument-based evaluation with multiple-choice assessment selects for memory and compliance rather than analysis and synthesis.

The university system: Higher education has become primarily a credentialling mechanism and a site of ideological formation rather than genuine intellectual development. The explosion of tuition fees has made it a financial trap that indebts young people before they have the capacity to evaluate what they are purchasing.

Screen culture: The replacement of reading with passive consumption has measurably reduced attention spans, reading comprehension, and the capacity for sustained analytical thought. A generation that cannot read long-form text cannot access the Islamic scholarly tradition, which is almost entirely long-form text.

The Marginalisation of Islamic Education

In Muslim-majority countries, colonial education systems replaced Islamic education with secular European models, producing elites who thought in European categories and could not engage with classical Islamic scholarship. This was not accidental. An educated Muslim population that could read Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Khaldun in the original was a population that could not be governed through imported ideological frameworks.

The result, generations later, is Muslim communities that have lost the Arabic language, lost the classical educational tradition, and are dependent on translated summaries of a tradition they can no longer access directly.

What Can Be Done

The Islamic tradition has its own educational model, one that produced figures like al-Khwarizmi, al-Biruni, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Khaldun, and the great jurists and hadith scholars within a framework that integrated religious and rational sciences. The Islamic philosophical tradition (the falasifah) is part of this history, but its specific positions were debated and in some cases refuted by mainstream Sunni scholarship. Recovering the broader tradition begins with:

• Prioritising Arabic as described in the Decline of Arabic entry
• Exposing children to classical texts early: even in translation initially
• Treating logic and rhetoric as Islamic obligations, not secular subjects
• Being sceptical of credentialling systems and asking what education is actually for