Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim

In this country, although almost every child attends public school, it is customary that parents still sent their children to tuition centre as an additional effort to get their children attain good result in exams thus providing them better chances to be admitted into better schools or later; to local universities. However, in my point of view, this exam orientated mindset does not have the ability to produce citizens with plenty of resources and skills to earn their living. As a result, typical people that live in boxes are created throughout the country's 50 years history of independence. But nobody is to be blamed because this is how our fathers and forefathers had been educated since the British came 300 years ago.

In Malaysia, our education system still follow the aging British system. Although after time and time of alteration by our ministry of education, a lot of criticisms still risen by both parents and educators because the constant changes and heavier load for the teachers and students. Students in school does not enjoy learning anymore compare to the time of discovering their early childhood. Educational books is read only because they are told to read it, not driven by intrigue, not even by the interest of the mind. But maybe it is not that they do not love knowledge, maybe it is only not the right kind of knowledge that Rasullullah SAW had teached his students, or maybe not the kind of knowledge that Allah wants this kids to have.

An open eye might be able to pinpoint elements of Materialism, Darwinism, Secularism and Capitalism in our current educational curricular. For example, the first sentence in Form 1 Science textbook read as follow: “Science is a study of natural phenomena” which is clearly from Darwin's quote. Furthermore, the disentanglement of religious teaching from civil affairs and public teaching is the way of Secularist.

Recently, during my research, I had come across Kinza Academy, which provides homeschooling service in US http://www.kinzaacademy.com/, whose among its advisory board are John Taylor Gatto and Syeikh Hamza Yusuf Hanson. The contents of its curriculum are the seven arts of liberal education i.e. grammar, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, music, geometry, and astronomy. I am not able to see its contents but I wish I can. Insha Allah.

John Taylor Gatto is a retired teacher. He is an expert in US education system and the author of “Dumbing Us Down”, a book about the failure of education system in US. I'd looked in Kinokuniya at KLCC but without any success and yet it is not cheap either (USD12). While Syeikh Hamza is a renounce speaker in the Muslim community. As a matter of fact, I'd downloaded quite a numbers of his lectures into my hard drive.

To this day, because there has never been found or created a better education system to cater for our diversified ethnicity and religions in this country, issue of mis education is still hanging in the air. An appropriate educational system must completes the requirement for both this life and the afterlife and also will not only available to an engineer's siblings but also to a rubber tapper's son.

I pray to Allah for the dimensional luxury of space and time.