'What do You Want to Become?' By Bint Akram

“Everyone wants to make enough money to live comfortably, but what does this mean? Should one aim to make millions? Or is this a questionable aim for a moral life? Should one aim at a profession in order to achieve high status? ... The big question: What kind of work will contribute to my becoming a whole person and also contribute to my community...?” - Nel Noddings, Critical Lessons: What Our Schools Might Teach but Do Not (2006)

Not an unfamiliar scenario: An adult asks a small child, ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ The child looks at his interlocutor confusedly. He is immediately given his options, ‘Engineer, doctor, pilot…’ and the clichéd list would go on to bog the child down with the weighty responsibility of either ‘becoming’ any of these or remain a ‘good-for-nothing’ all his life.

If only we could control our formative influences, life would be so much better! If only…

Dreams and Desires

‘Dreaming Big’ is the slogan of the modern day world. We ‘dream big’ by wanting our children to grow up into doctors, engineers, corporate professionals, etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with adopting any of these professions, but let’s face it squarely: ‘dreaming big’ is naught but a lust for accumulating money. Money, as they say, makes the world go round! Even if we are reluctant to admit this consciously, there is hardly any doubt that when we ‘dream big’ for our children, we mostly want them to be monetarily rich – ‘stable’ as we call it. We end up circumscribing the horizon of the dreams of our children. We drill into their minds the options that they are supposed to consider when opting for courses in their schools, colleges and universities.  For most of our children, growing up these days, therefore, is simply a process of inheriting the corporate dreams and aspirations of their elders, and then working day in and day out to turn them into reality. 

Becoming Educated

First parents ‘dream big’ and then schools catalyse the process of magnifying these dreams for their young ones. The process of education, most of us believe, is ‘formally’ set into motion the moment our child first steps into school. From then on there is no turning back. It is the school that now takes care of the aspirations parents so dearly possess for their children.

Let us just consider one major aspect of schooling: formalising competition. Students are encouraged to ‘beat’ each other at studies and become high-achievers in school. The underlying assumption for this attitude is that good grades guarantee one’s entrance into a good professional college, which is a necessity if you wish to climb the social ladder and secure a monetarily rewarding profession for yourself.

What the school does not teach is the “what-next” part after one has become a ‘professional’. In school, students dream to get into institutions of higher learning. Once, however, the dream is realised, these very people simply go on performing the function of cogs in the machinery of a capitalist society, harbouring for their children exactly the same dreams and success criteria, which they inherited from their parents. The vicious circle goes on – our aspirations forever remain chained to owning a big house and numerous cars, sporting a luxurious lifestyle, and minting money.

The Predicament

The actual problem that besets our present Western mode of educational system is that there is no place for the discussion of topics like death and afterlife. All we have to live for is this world and keep on striving to better our material conditions – get educated in ‘good’ schools, obtain good grades, get into some outstanding college or an A-level school, go to a reputed University, get a well-paying job and settle down in life – till we reach our graves. Our concept of education does not go beyond the idea of making good money.

We are not taught how to approach things in this world with a unified outlook, which is a necessary result of the concept of tawhid and prepares Muslims to keep everything subservient to the commands of their religion. For example, there remains no distinction between a man and a woman when it comes to producing able professionals in society. The role of the man as a breadwinner is no more significant than that of a woman these days, because it is perceived that she can also perform a similar role in an equally efficient manner. Hence there is nothing objectionable if a girl chooses to make a career in marketing because gone are the days when girls could either opt for being teachers or doctors. My readers will be able to read more on this specific issue in an upcoming article on the idea of ‘women and work’, but presently let us get back to the crisis that our educational system is giving rise to in our society.  

The Crisis of Individuality

The journey that began with a single question, ‘what do you want to become when you grow up?’ has brought us this far to the discussion of a social crisis. Our current system of education is aimed at promoting the ideal of individualism. Phrases that have become commonplace are ‘be yourself’, ‘have confidence in yourself’, ‘do what you think is best for you’, ‘it’s my life!’, ‘…my personal matter’, and the list continues. Every man, as they say, to his own island. This is a topic that needs to be written about at length, but here I will limit myself to the fissures this approach has created in our traditional view of knowledge.

When our children start school, they are actually stepping onto the first step of the ladder of individualism. They are stepping onto the path that divorces them from the rich intellectual tradition they belong to. They do not attend schools in order to learn, appreciate, and love their salaf, but to ‘become something’ (we have already discussed what that ‘something’ refers to!). They are not there to understand the true meaning of knowledge as it was passed down through generations of their Muslim predecessors, but to cram what is written in the O-level Physics and Chemistry textbooks so they can get the maximum number of ‘A’s – something that would get them a ticket to the most well-known A-Level school! They are there to ‘discover themselves’ but not under the spiritual tutelage of their religious tradition. They are treated as singular beings who carve out their paths of life based on their own rational decisions. Following into the footsteps of one’s spiritual elders is an idea unheard of. Take the example of how Islamiat is taught in our schools and colleges – a separate subject for which you have to rote learn and produce answers in an exam, a subject that does not carry any weight when applying for admissions in some institutions of higher learning. Our education, hence, makes us into individual, isolated beings by imperceptibly implying that Islam in life is confined to the Islamiat class (which, by the way, hardly anyone is interested in. Teaching methodologies would require me to write another full length article!), and has nothing to do with our personal lives.

The Alternative

Some years ago, I happened to meet a small child of approximately three to four years of age in a religious gathering - a majlis held by a famous Shaykh of tasawwuf of our times. When asked the perennial question, ‘what do you want to become when you grow up?’ the child replied in utmost innocence (which exuded confidence too), ‘hazrat!’ referring to the Shaykh in whose gathering he was present along with his mother…

This incident has stayed with me all these years. It has been helpful in giving me insights about how instrumental our elders (parents, in particular) are in shaping our aspirations. The question, ‘what do you want to become?’, if replaced with, ‘who do you want to become?’ in the formative years of our lives, might give us one of the alternative ways of approaching life. The ‘who’ question focuses on shaping ideals in terms of personalities in the minds of our children. Idealising the pious, for example, would make them want to achieve and approximate the highest level of piety.

If we wish to hold on to our roots, and make our children idealise the lifestyle of our pious predecessors, then we would have to make an effort to introduce our children to the rich Islamic intellectual tradition at a very early stage, that is, well before their intellects are schooled by the school. We need to let them realise that they cannot ‘be themselves’ unless they get subsumed into a tradition that the pious and God-conscious Muslims have been following. This requires foregoing one’s individuality. Or let us put it this way, it requires one to redefine ‘individuality’ – not being an isolated soul left to its own whims, but someone who joins in the caravan of those following the Prophet SAW and his spiritual heirs.

I am indeed making a case for the possibility of introducing Rumi and Sa’adi to our younger lot before they begin poring over the pages of Shakespeare; of telling our teenagers who Imam Ghazzali was before they opt for a course in Philosophy in their A-Level school; of encouraging our youth to make an attempt at reading the classical Islamic works on Economics before they enter into a business school; of making them realise that any field of study is useful only when it lets our aspirations remain within the bounds of the shari’ah and the lifestyle of the Prophet SAW and his Companions RA. The criterion for the usefulness of our education should be that it does not make us forget the Afterlife, and plunge us into the rat-race of materialism. 

Published in: The Intellect Magazine; Issue 12