The Economics and Social Science Department (ESS) of the BRAC University, in collaboration with the Barkley Center for Religion of the George Town University, recently organised their fourth round of the Speakers' Forum Series on 'Faith and Development'. These two prime institutions have been engaged in such deliberations on different issues for the last couple of years. However, the topic of this round 'Faith and Education; Contestations around the Madrasa in Bangladesh' could claim appreciation for a number of reasons and we would thank Dr Saima Huq and Katherine Marshall of the two sides for the endeavour. First, matters relating to faith and religion rarely get a berth in academic discourse for known reasons. Second, various misgivings and misnomers hovering around madrasa education in Bangladesh need to be closely X-rayed in a regime where about 40 per cent of children enrolled in primary and secondary levels belong to madrasas. Finally, we need to know whether non-madrasa schools are better places for quality education than madrasas. Many scholars including Katherine Marshall of the Georgetown University, Professor Ebrahim Moosa of the Notre Dame University, Dr Binayek Sen of the BIDS, and other scholars spoke on the occasion. However, the views of an eminent researcher in this field Dr Mohammad Niaz Asadullah of the University of Malaya are worth noting.
The paper by Asadullah and his co-author Nazmul Chaudhury has described religious education in madrasas in Bangladesh. The emphasis was on two reform policies to modernise the Islamic education sector and their impacts. To be particular, the reforms introduced some market incentives in the faith education sector. The first reform provided public finance to madrasas provided they introduce a more market-oriented curriculum. The second reform provided financial incentives to females for attending a secondary school or madrasa. In the absence of pre-reform data, it was not possible to evaluate the effect of the curriculum modernisation and female stipend schemes on traditional madrasas -Â causally test was not possible regarding whether madrasas responded to these 'incentives'(public money), and changed their core subjects and gender orientation. Nonetheless, descriptive analysis by the researchers yields important insights into the possible ways in which madrasas may have responded to these schemes.
First, the introduction of market-based curriculum reform initiated in the early1980s appears to have succeeded in converting a significant number of traditional madrasas that previously operated with own funds and eschewed teaching of modern subjects. These converted madrasas registered with the government strictly follow state-mandated course outlines and textbooks, and have become fiscally dependent upon the state. The findings indicate that approximately one-third of the modernised madrasa system in Bangladesh today is likely to comprise formerly 'traditional' religious schools. Second, registered secondary madrasas embraced female students and today educate a large number of females. Nearly half of the student population in these religious seminaries today is female. This feminisation of modernised madrasas in Bangladesh was driven allegedly by transforming formerly all-boy madrasas into centres for co-education, which can be conjectured as a by-product of a conditional cash-transfer scheme that gave financial incentives to females for attending a religious school. Lastly, regression analysis of region-level data on student enrolment shows that presence of modernised madrasas and the stock of converted madrasas in the region are both positively associated with the probability of achieving gender parity in secondary enrolment in rural Bangladesh. And hence corroborate the hypothesis that madrasas may have encouraged greater female participation in secondary education rather than selectively emerging in regions where households have responded to the stipend scheme by sending daughters to schools.
These features of the religious education system in Bangladesh provide important policy leverage in harmonising schooling outcomes among students from diverse educational backgrounds. Research results of the authors suggest that 'reformed' madrasas in Bangladesh have gone beyond adopting modern curriculum by altering age-old practice of educating predominantly male students and embracing girls. This scene is in stark contrast with other countries in South Asia with large Muslim populations (and elsewhere), where most religious seminaries are of traditional types, predominantly single sex, and still untouched by any significant changes in curriculum. Therefore, Bangladesh offers an excellent case study for other countries that hope to embark on a modernisation scheme to bridge the gap between religious and secular schools.
There is no question that secondary school madrasas in Bangladesh are playing a critical role as far as enrolment and gender parity are concerned (two important Millennium Development Goals). However, researchers should instead focus on what is being taught and actually learnt in these educational institutions in terms of literacy and numeracy skills. It is expected that the inclusion of modern subjects will not only give the students of madrasa the requisite skills highly valued in a market-based economy, but will also change their attitude towards worldly affairs and members of different religions and ethnicities. To what extent curriculum reform has contributed to these objectives is not yet clear. Existing survey data do not contain information on labour market outcomes of post-reform graduates.
In conclusion, the study by Niaz and Nazmul suggests that fiscal incentives can be used to modernise madrasa curriculum and nudge them further for female admission. The optimistic note here is that this was possible in Bangladesh which has the world's second largest secondary madrasa system. Other countries with large Muslim population currently grappling with similar issues of curriculum reform and gender equity can take encouragement from it. Once madrasas are brought into the mainstream, it is imperative that we systematically measure how good these schools are in imparting literacy and numeracy skills to its pupils. This type of rigorous quality assessment should be done for schools across the spectrum - public or private, secular or religious - otherwise, it is difficult to compare across service providers. Furthermore, systematic research by a wide array of social scientists on the impact of madrasa education on 'socialisation', political participation, and labour market decisions, is essential towards assembling a holistic picture of the overall implications of incorporating religious institutions as service providers.
--The writer is Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University. abdulbayes@yahoo.com
Faith and education
Abdul Bayes | Published: March 19, 2016 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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