‘Dear parents,
Hope you are doing well!
Whenever you buy any new appliance , to know how it works you always go to the manual and follow the directions there, right?
Similarly, if you have a child, it is compulsory to find his/her ‘manual’ and figure out how she/he works. Unlike machines, each human being is different and they have their own customized manual.The current education system give us ONE EXPLANATION for all of that but is it really working?
I too am a victim of the current system, as it didnt work out for me as well. It was amidst my existential crisis at the tender age of 13 that I started asking myself,”Where is my manual?”. This was the first step in my self discovery.
I was always a position holder at that time, and I used to think I was smarter than most. It later reveled upon me that I was just bombarded with information; I was given the answers but I didn’t know the questions. I didn’t really know what my purpose in life was, what life was really about. I was a bomb of knowledge but without any perspective at that time.
That path led me to question the ways of parenting and education in the present time, and I got to know the problems.Scholars have been saying these things for many years but still daily we wake up and are supposed to send kids to school and madraasa and subject them to the conventional schooling.
In the words of Hamza Yousuf who used the analogy of ‘lambs to the slaughter’ for sending kids to schools:
‘The question for a solution took my entire teenage and I could not move on with my life until I figured out a solution. I never just wanted to spread awareness, but wanted to make my debut in the real world with some form of solution because I didn’t want the future generations to go through what I went through, which was a constant question of being lost without a manual.
Dear parents, if a you have a Fatima in your homes, you need to figure out what her ‘manual’ is and explore new solutions to parenting and educating her, because no kid should have to go through an existentially confused teenage life. It is the job of parents and educationists to take care of that, because she might not be able to weather that storm alone.
I say goodbye to you in the words of Ignacio Estrada — ‘If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn!”