When my oldest child was very young he was in a play group with a number of other children in our neighborhood. For almost two years, Mrs. SW and Oldest Son would meet on a weekly basis with 3 or 4 other toddlers. We were friendly with the parents as couples and all the children were first children. As a general rule, parents are at their best and worst with their first children. Parents tend to be most anxious about their first children, which is ameliorated by the extra attention a first child has as compared to later children, who of necessity receive only a fraction of the attention the oldest received.
One little girl in particular, who I shall call Caroline, caught Mrs. SW's attention. Caroline's parents were an interesting mix. Her father, Ed, was a brilliant man, extremely successful in his field, and rather charismatic. He was a prominent professional, self-assured, and self-confident, already with many significant accomplishments at a relatively young age. His wife, Susan, had chosen to be a stay at home mother. As we got to know them better we discovered Susan had come from a difficult back ground; her mother had been a poorly controlled Manic-Depressive who had never been diagnosed or treated until Susan reached adulthood, despite being overtly symptomatic during her childhood. While I was not at all involved with Susan or her mother as a professional, it was hard not to conclude that her high levels of anxiety were related to her childhood experiences. Susan suffered not only from anxiety, but she also exhibited the kinds of controlling behavior that are not uncommon in people who feel an intense need for structure in order to manage their own affective states. Typically, children who were exposed to poorly regulated parental anger and anxiety attempt to control others; if they are unlucky enough to have porous (ego) boundaries, which is often a concomitant of growing up with a disturbed parent, rigid self-control, accompanied by (unconscious) attempts to control others allows them to feel protected from the vagaries of intense affects. Susan was especially controlling with her young daughter. She had a long list of do's and don'ts (mostly don'ts) and whenever Caroline moved too far away from her or began to explore areas that made her mother anxious, Susan would become anxious, even agitated, and physically remove Caroline from the perceived danger. The dangers that Susan reacted to were nothing out of the ordinary. While the other children would put all sorts of toys in their mouths and climb on furniture, often gathering bumps and bruises from the subsequent falls, such activity was off limits for Caroline whose mother would react with anxiety verging on panic if Caroline so much as mouthed a doll. Since a significant part of a young child's exploration of the world involves putting things in her mouth, Susan's behavior cause Caroline to incorporate powerful inhibitions for such exploration. Further, when everything is a danger, the children quickly learns that the world is a dangerous place and vigilance must be exercised at all times. Uninhibited play, a direct precursor to uninhibited thought, is crushed.
By now, you may be getting some idea of where I am going with this. Although Caroline came into the world with a good intellectual endowment and had a high IQ, by High School she was an unhappy, inhibited, deeply incurious young woman who scored well on tests but had no spark of creativity or liveliness to her.
Consider a culture composed of Susans and Carolines.
Yesterday, the invaluable MEMRI posted a rather bizarre discussion from Al-Jazeera's Children's Channel:
Debate on Corporal Punishment in Koran Schools
Mahmoud, member of the audience: "In some schools, children are beaten if they don't memorize the text, or if they don't prepare their homework. This makes the children reluctant to go to school, out of fear."
Interviewer: "Is this a principle of Islam? Is education..."
Dr. Arabi 'Atallah Al-Qweidri, child psychologist at the Qatar Ministry of Public Health: "No, it isn't. But the teacher or the sheikh must be strict with the student, especially when it comes to the memorization of the Koran. When we examine the history of Koran schools, we see that all scholars - especially the psychologists and educators - including Alchabitius, Avicenna, Al-Farabi, Ibn Khaldoun, Ibn Badis, and Sheikh Al-Bashir Ibrahim... They all say that the teacher must be strict, but not cruel."
Interviewer: "But 'strict' does not necessarily mean beating."
Dr. Arabi 'Atallah Al-Qweidri: "That's right, I don't mean he should be cruel, but he may be strict with the student, and say: 'Memorize it!'"
Interviewer: "But isn't it possible that the beatings might deter the student in such schools from continuing to memorize the Koran, since it leads to beatings and pain?"
Dr. Arabi 'Atallah Al-Qweidri: "But there must be cooperation between the teacher and the student's family. We must be clear on this: There shouldn't be any beatings."
[...]
Interviewer: "Fatima, have you ever been beaten to make you memorize the Koran - you or any of your classmates?"
Fatima Abd Al-Hamid, a student at a Koran school: "No, but sometimes the teacher punishes me. If I make a small mistake, for example, she says that I must concentrate on this. Sometimes, she tells us to concentrate on it again."
Interviewer: "How are you punished?'
Fatima Abd Al-Hamid: "She tugs our ears or strikes us with a ruler."
Interviewer: "What about you, Luqman?"
Luqman Abd Al-Hamid, a student at a Koran school: "When I don't memorize the lesson, the teacher gets a little angry with me. One must be a little strict with children, because that's the only way children memorize the material."
Interviewer: "Have you ever been punished like Fatima, or beaten, for not understanding something, or for being remiss in your memorizing - you or any of your classmates?"
Luqman Abd Al-Hamid: "Yes, once I was remiss, and the teacher got a little strict with me, but Allah be praised..."
Interviewer: "In what way was he strict?"
Luqman Abd Al-Hamid: "He hit me on the hand."
Interviewer: "With a ruler?"
Luqman Abd Al-Hamid: "No, he hit me lightly with his hand."
Interviewer: "Can you show us how he hit you?"
Luqman Abd Al-Hamid: "He has a strong hand, Allah be praised, and he hit me."
Interviewer: "So he hit you on the hand with his hand."
Luqman Abd Al-Hamid: "Yes."
Interviewer: "What do you think, Dr. Al-Qweidri?"
Dr. Arabi 'Atallah Al-Qweidri: "That's what I said about punishment. I am not talking about severe beatings, like when a student is beaten senseless. The punishment is meant to serve as an example. When Luqman or Fatima are beaten, it is meant to serve as an example to others, so that they devote themselves to their memorization, and keep things quiet and orderly. No punishment - no order."
The discussion is bizarre for several reasons. There is no question that schools which lack order are difficult places for students to learn, yet consider what the goal of education in this system actually is. I discussed the damage that is done to young psyches by substituting rote memorization for true learning (the accumulation of information and the ability to manipulate data and problem solve) in my post on Memorizing the Way to Heaven, Verse by Verse, which discussed an Islamic school in New York in which children were taught to memorize the Koran without even understanding the language:
I am not interested in arguing whether or not the Koran, or any other book, is the direct word of the Deity; if that is your belief, more power to you. However, such beliefs exact a price in the real world. Children have the potential for boundless imagination. Our most successful scientists (as well as artists and writers) have maintained a connection to their childhood mind (often referred to as the ability to undergo "regression in the service of the ego") that keeps their imagination alive. Taking children, during the most important time in their mental development, when they are forming their conclusions about how the world works and how their own minds work, and drilling them in this fashion for two to three years is the equivalent of placing them in a mental straight jacket. Will many, perhaps most, of these children maintain the ability to learn and function well in our society? Maybe, but they will certainly have been impacted by the direct repetitive message that the highest form of knowledge they can aspire to is the rote memorization of words they do not even understand. Taking your best and brightest and placing them in such a system ensures that they will be less likely to question the authoritarian dictates of those who are regarded as the arbiters of the sounds they have memorized.
Working with children, it always pains me to see a bright young child whose intellectual curiosity is inhibited by internal conflicts. Much of the work of Child Psychoanalysis is directed at resolving such conflicts and allowing the child's native intelligence to flourish. Turing a child into a recording device seems so limited and limiting. If such rote learning is the goal of education, the average student is likely to be left much less prepared for entrance into a modern, technological society, which rewards those with the most flexible and inquiring minds.
Add in the use of corporal punishment, which can so easily slip into child abuse, and you have a prescription for a culture which celebrates ignorance and inhibited thinking. When a culture takes its best and brightest and turns them into tape recorders, creativity and free thought suffer. Combined with strict Prohibitions on anything which contradicts the inflexible rule of Allah, it is no surprise that the Arab world and the greater Muslim world have been such spectacular failures in every intellectual realm extant. The Islamists may yet manage to bring a significant portion of the world down to their level of dysfunction, which in some evolutionary sense would mean they are successful; they have traditionally been expansionist and colonialist; but such a world would be unstable to the extreme. All that such a world would support would be subsistence and without the continuing assistance of modern technological societies, the Muslim world would crash.
Once we no longer need their oil, the Muslim world has nothing to offer anyone and that is the saddest and most profound indictment of their failed culture.
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