Forging the new Afghans
After the fall of the Talibans, an army of students invaded the few public
institutions of the country, which now may collapse. The
history of Afghan school. The role of informal
education. Numbers alone will count
for little
Omar Qargha
The current educational system in Afghanistan is a patchwork. Due to continuous change in regimes, the effects of globalization and the introduction of modern teaching systems in the absence of a defined educational theory, the country lacks a coherent and unified educational system. As such, Afghanistan is left with lots of interventions, lots of perspectives, and a great demand for education but no unifying theory of what education is aimed at achieving as a whole. To fully grasp the challenge that the country is facing we need to understand its educational history.
The Afghan educational infrastructure is composed of two major systems. The first is perhaps most famously known for producing the Taliban through the madrasas, or religious schools. What is less known is that the madrasa is part of a rich system that dates back over 1,500 years. This indigenous educational system is composed of i) mosque schools ii) halaqas or informal circles of knowledge, iii) madrasas, iv) and an apprenticeship model.
The mosque school is the first semi-formal system that children attend. In these schools the village mullah teaches children how to read the Quran, the basic tenants of faith (aqida) and how to perform the obligatory religious acts. In more traditional mosque schools, children are introduced to classical literary texts which serve as mechanisms to begin dialogue on ethics and morality.
The halaqas are circles of knowledge in which a scholar teaches some subject in an informal setting. The circle is open to anyone who wants to join and people can come and go as they please. The content of these circles can range from exegesis of the Quran to discussions of classical literature. These circles can be as small as three to five people or as large as hundreds of people depending on the reputation of the scholar and the content he is teaching.
The madrasa system is the most formal system of the indigenous model. Current madrasas tend to have a very thin curriculum focusing on a limited number of religious topics. However, madrasas of the past had a very rich curriculum which included Quranic studies, Hadith studies, jurisprudence, theology, Arabic grammar, linguistic sciences, literature, Sufism, philosophy, geometry, astronomy, medicine (including botany and biology), chemistry, mathematics, physics.
In addition to these three indigenous systems, an apprenticeship educational structure with a focus on training individuals for crafts, vocations, and the arts has also been very active in Afghanistan. A majority of these crafts and arts continue to be passed down through an informal system in which a teacher (in many cases a parent) transfers the needed skills and knowledge to his students. Ceramics, metal work, plaster working, carpentry, rug making, pottery, music, farming, and calligraphy are some examples of the range of areas that were and continue to be passed down through apprenticeships. Although this informal apprenticeship model concentrates on the skills needed for the vocation and/or the art there is an aspect of morality, spirituality and wisdom embedded in the model. You still hear Afghan jewelry makers, carpenters, and even wrestlers refer to their trade as a clean or spiritual profession (kispi pak) The second major educational system is modern schooling which has had much of the spot light, but its history has been that of a blinking light rather than a constant force. . The history of modern schooling in Afghanistan can best be described in four phases.. The first phase started in early 19th hundreds and culminated in a major push towards modern schooling during the reign of King Zahir Shah. At the peak of this period, there were around 200,000 students enrolled in over 1,100 schools and a handful of universities across the country. The purpose for education during this phase was a push towards modernization with no clear attempts at unifying this new movement with the indigenous system. There were several revolts from the general populace during this period citing the alien nature of the system.
The second phase began with the soviet invasion in 1979 and lasted for a decade. There were two systems at work during this time: the Soviet backed national system which had around 700,000 students in primary and secondary schools and 24,000 students in higher education institutes; and the refugee schools in Pakistan and Iran whose numbers are not easily discernable. The Soviet system aimed at producing an internationalist labor force in accordance with ideologies of Lenin, while the refugee schools wanted to produce a resistance force that was ready to fight the occupation and the Soviet ideology symbolized in the national educational system.
With the fall of the Soviet backed government a new phase of education started (1992-1996). During this phase, the Mujahideen replaced the existing curricula with the curricula of Afghan refugee schools mainly from Pakistan. However, in actuality not much schooling really took place for boys or girls during this period because of the constant civil war which forced extended periods of school closures. Many students simply showed up for a very unstructured final examination and were passed to higher grades without due diligence or having attended school.
Heartland
