Before We Call It Education

Recovering the Work of Human Formation

We have become remarkably skilled at reforming education without first deciding what education is.

We revise curricula, purchase devices, train teachers, redesign examinations, publish standards and compare institutions. Ministries speak of learning outcomes. Schools speak of innovation. Parents speak of admissions and employment. Each concern has its place. Yet beneath this entire machinery lies a prior and more searching question:

What kind of human being is being formed, towards what end, and before whom?

If we cannot answer this, we may improve schooling while leaving education untouched. We may even make the machinery more efficient at producing the wrong result.

A school may be orderly, technologically equipped and crowded with data, yet educationally impoverished. It may produce high marks while deforming attention, inflaming comparison, weakening conscience, estranging children from their language and place, and quietly teaching them that only measurable things matter. Conversely, a modest school may educate deeply when it cultivates truthful speech, disciplined thought, sound habits, intellectual curiosity, reverence, craftsmanship, compassion and responsibility.

Education is not simply what an institution delivers. It is what a human being is gradually helped to become.

The Word Beneath the Institution

The history of the English word is instructive, though it is often repeated inaccurately.

Education entered English through Middle French education and the Latin educatio: upbringing, rearing, nurture or training. Its direct verbal source is educare: to bring up, rear, foster or train. Early English usage was concerned with the upbringing of children and the formation of manners and conduct. Its narrower association with systematic schooling came later. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies both French and Latin origins, while the Online Etymology Dictionary records the earlier sense of child-rearing and the later emergence of schooling and preparation for work.

A related Latin verb, educere, means to lead forth, draw out or bring away: ex-—out or forth—and ducere—to lead. The classical Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary distinguishes the two verbs while also showing that their uses sometimes overlap.

This requires a small but consequential correction. Education does not simply or literally mean “drawing out what is already inside the child.” That familiar claim is philosophically suggestive, but etymologically incomplete. The direct history of the word gives priority to upbringing and formation. Educere adds the important image of leading forth, but it does not cancel educare.

Why should this matter? Because an attractive but careless etymology can carry an entire pedagogy inside it. If education is imagined only as drawing out, the child may be treated as a complete self whose knowledge, judgment and moral direction merely await release. The teacher then becomes hesitant to teach, correct, challenge or transmit an inheritance. If education is imagined only as moulding from without, the child becomes material to be shaped into an institutional ideal. The teacher then risks confusing authority with control and formation with conformity.

Neither image is adequate to the human person.

The Antinomy Within Education

The two associated Latin meanings disclose a permanent tension.

Educare reminds us that the child needs nourishment, protection, knowledge, culture, guidance, practice, boundaries and formation. Mathematics is not hidden inside the learner waiting to be extracted. Neither are history, scientific understanding, literature, jurisprudence, craft or the accumulated wisdom of a civilisation. A worthy inheritance must be received from somewhere and from someone.

Educere reminds us that the learner is not an empty vessel. Education must bring forth attention, questions, conscience, imagination, agency, judgment and the capacity to act. Knowledge that never becomes personal understanding remains inert. Rules that never mature into moral discernment leave the person dependent upon surveillance. A learner who can reproduce the teacher’s answer but cannot recognise the question in a new context has been instructed, but not necessarily educated.

The central educational task is therefore not to choose between transmission and discovery, authority and freedom, discipline and agency, inheritance and renewal. It is to hold these goods in an intelligent relationship.

A sound education gives the learner something worthy to inherit and gradually develops the capacity to examine, inhabit, apply, renew and, when necessary, challenge that inheritance. It introduces the child to a world that precedes him without imprisoning him within the past. It awakens individuality without enthroning the self as sovereign. It employs authority so that the learner may, in time, require less external control.

This is why the polarity described in the educational literature as educare and educere remains useful. Bass and Good, in their study “Educare and Educere: Is a Balance Possible in the Educational System?”, associate one with preservation and formation and the other with questioning, creating and preparing for an unknown future. The solution is not the triumph of one over the other. The task is balance ordered by a defensible purpose.

Schooling Is Not Yet Education

We use schooling and education as though they were interchangeable. They are not.

Schooling is an organised structure of timetables, classrooms, subjects, age groups and requirements. Instruction is the deliberate teaching of knowledge and skills. Training develops capability through modelling, practice and feedback. Assessment gathers evidence. Certification declares that specified requirements have been met.

Education asks what all these processes are doing to and for the human being.

A school can deliver lessons, administer examinations and issue certificates while doing little to develop judgment, character, imagination, self-knowledge or social responsibility. It can also do something worse: it can teach intellectual passivity, status anxiety, fear of error, contempt for manual work, indifference to the earth and dependence upon external approval. Such an institution is not merely failing to educate. It is educating badly.

Education also takes place beyond school: in family life, friendship, worship, apprenticeship, artistic work, service, encounters with nature, responsibility, suffering, failure and reflection. A grandmother’s story may transmit historical consciousness. Caring for a sick parent may teach attention and duty. Tending a garden may join science, patience, gratitude and consequence. Prayer may reorder time, desire and the self. None of these should be romanticised, but neither should they be excluded from our understanding simply because they do not appear on a transcript.

Schooling is one possible vessel for education. The vessel should not be mistaken for what it is meant to carry.

Every Education Has a Qiblah

To bring up, form or lead someone forth immediately raises the question: towards what?

Every education system contains, explicitly or otherwise, an anthropology, an epistemology and an axiology. It carries assumptions about what a human being is, what knowledge is worthy, how truth is known, what constitutes a good life, what kind of adulthood is desirable, how authority should operate, and what humanity owes to society, nature and the transcendent.

Education is therefore never value-neutral. A timetable distributes more than minutes; it reveals priorities. An assessment system does more than measure; it announces what counts. A disciplinary practice does more than stop behaviour; it teaches the child what power is for. A school environment tells children whether beauty and order matter. The treatment of cleaners, drivers, assistants and struggling learners discloses whose dignity is considered conditional. The use of food, water, paper and electricity teaches a relationship with the earth.

The hidden curriculum is not hidden from children. They are its most attentive readers.

An institution may display compassion on a wall while humiliating children in the corridor. It may teach honesty while manipulating results. It may praise cooperation while ranking every learner against every other learner. It may invoke Islam ceremonially while its daily life is governed by haste, anger, vanity and prestige. In each case, the lived curriculum defeats the written one.

Even the claim that education should chiefly prepare young people for employment is not neutral. It treats economic productivity as the principal horizon of human formation. Work matters. Capability matters. Families rightly hope that education will protect their children from poverty and dependency. But the human being is not merely a future unit of labour, and the school is not a supply chain for the economy.

Iqbal’s warning remains severe:

وہ علم نہیں زہر ہے احرار کے حق میں
جس علم کا حاصل ہے جہاں میں دو کف جو

Not knowledge, but poison administered to the free people, is that
Whose aim in this world is obtaining two handfuls of grain.

—Muhammad Iqbal, Ḍarb-i Kalīm; my translation.

The problem is not that education prepares a person to earn. The problem begins when earning consumes the purpose of learning.

The Islamic Vocabulary Widens the Question

English cannot carry the entire human meaning of education. Islamic intellectual tradition gives us a richer constellation of terms. They should not be collapsed into synonyms, nor turned into slogans.

Tarbiyah carries the semantic field of nurturing, caring, increasing, developing and bringing something gradually towards maturity. It reminds us that growth has rhythm, sequence and conditions. A child cannot be hurried into ripeness. Development requires nourishment, protection, challenge, repetition and wise attention to time.

Taʿlīm concerns teaching, making known and transmitting knowledge. It protects Islamic education from becoming vague moral sentiment. The learner must encounter truthful and worthwhile knowledge. Good intentions cannot substitute for intellectual seriousness, and spiritual language cannot excuse weak teaching.

Taʾdīb concerns the cultivation of adab: right recognition, right relationship, disciplined conduct and the placing of things in their proper order. To reduce adab to politeness is to thin it almost beyond recognition. A person may perform manners while remaining arrogant, unjust or intellectually careless. Adab joins knowledge to the moral and spiritual disposition required to use it well.

Scholars have differed over which term should be given primacy. Al-Attas famously argued for taʾdīb, while other traditions and institutions have preferred tarbiyah, or have used taʿlīm wa-tarbiyah together. The contestation itself is educationally fruitful. It prevents us from imagining that a single English word has settled the matter. A recent study of tarbiyah, taʿlīm and taʾdīb similarly distinguishes development, transmission of knowledge and moral formation while recognising their interdependence.

Taken together, these concepts give us a more capacious picture. Education must nurture growth, teach knowledge and cultivate adab. Remove any one and the whole becomes unstable.

Tarbiyah without taʿlīm may become care without intellectual substance.
Taʿlīm without taʾdīb may produce knowledge without right conduct.
Taʾdīb without patient tarbiyah may harden into moral demand without developmental wisdom.

Islamic education requires their living interrelation.

A Qurʾānic Grammar of Education

The Qurʾān does not offer a modern school blueprint, but it gives us an orientation deeper than any blueprint. In describing the mission of the Prophet ﷺ, it repeatedly joins the recitation of Allah’s signs, purification and teaching. In Sūrah al-Jumuʿah, Allah describes the Messenger as one who “recites His signs to them, purifies them, and teaches them the Book and wisdom” (Qurʾān 62:2).

These are not isolated departments.

The signs are read. The person is purified. The Book and wisdom are taught. Perception, knowledge, character and action belong together. Taʿlīm and tazkiyah are not adversaries. The intellect is not cultivated while the heart is abandoned; nor is sincerity invoked as a substitute for knowledge. Wisdom is not information with a religious label attached. It is knowledge rightly perceived, rightly ordered and rightly used.

This also tells us something decisive about the learner. The child is neither raw material for the market nor an autonomous self answerable only to personal preference. The human being is honoured (Qurʾān 17:70), entrusted (33:72), created for worship (51:56) and placed on earth with responsibility (2:30). Freedom, within this vision, is not release from every limit. It is the growing ability to govern the self, recognise the good and act responsibly before Allah.

Islamic education therefore has a qiblah. It is not simply development in any direction. A plant may grow towards light by its created nature; a human being must also learn what is worthy of love, what deserves restraint, what must be served, and what must never be worshipped.

An Islamic Label Does Not Settle the Matter

An Islamic school is not produced by taking a conventional school and adding Qurʾān, Arabic, ṣalāh and a modest dress code. These may be necessary parts of its life, but they do not by themselves transform its educational purpose.

If the school still defines success chiefly through marks, rank, admission and income; if it teaches Qurʾān as recall without moral address; if it treats adab as silent compliance; if its discipline humiliates; if competition becomes vanity; if teachers are reduced to delivery agents; and if the child learns that prestige matters more than service, then the religious curriculum is being asked to decorate an educational structure governed by another worldview.

The problem is not the presence of modern subjects. Muslim learners need science, mathematics, languages, technology, history, critical reasoning and professional capability. A weak education cannot protect dignity or enable service. The problem arises when these forms of knowledge are severed from questions of truth, purpose, consequence and responsibility, or when Islamic Studies itself is subjected to the same reduction.

Memorisation has a proper and honoured place. But memorisation is not yet transformation. A child may reproduce a verse concerning truthfulness and still learn from the institution that appearances are to be managed. A student may score highly in fiqh while treating a weaker peer with contempt. A school may celebrate charitable giving while arranging its ordinary life around status and exclusion. The contradiction is itself an education.

The Islamic character of a school is therefore not measured only by how much religious content it contains. It is disclosed by how it understands knowledge, forms desire, uses authority, treats vulnerability, cultivates worship, judges success and translates learning into ʿamal and khidmah. Islam must not merely occupy periods on the timetable. It must provide the moral and spiritual orientation by which the timetable—and the whole institution—is judged.

What This Demands of a School

If we recover education as educare and educere, and deepen it through tarbiyah, taʿlīm, taʾdīb and tazkiyah, several consequences follow.

The whole person must remain visible

Education must attend to intellectual, moral, spiritual, emotional, social, physical, practical and imaginal development. This does not mean squeezing every dimension into every lesson. It means designing the total life of the school so that the child is never reduced to academic performance.

The body matters. Attention matters. Emotion matters. Imagination matters. Conscience matters. Relationship matters. Worship matters. Work done with the hands matters. A system that develops only the easily tested fraction of a person mistakes measurability for importance.

Knowledge must be worth inheriting

Student agency does not release adults from the responsibility to decide what is worthy of study. Children need access to language, mathematics, science, history, literature, revelation, art, craft, ethical reasoning and the memories of their communities. They need encounters with knowledge they could not discover unaided.

The question is not whether adults select a curriculum. They inevitably do. The responsible questions are whether the selection is truthful, coherent, developmentally appropriate, intellectually serious, open to examination, and large enough to connect the learner with Allah, humanity, culture, nature and the demands of the present.

Disciplined practice must be protected

Understanding is not produced by exposure alone. Reading, writing, reasoning, recitation, movement, craftsmanship, artistic expression, emotional regulation and ethical action all require repeated practice. The child who is interested but incapable has not yet been well served.

Practice, however, should not become mechanical performance severed from meaning. The purpose of repetition is not obedience to repetition. It is the gradual formation of fluency, attention, discernment and freedom.

Authority must lead towards self-government

The purpose of educational authority is not permanent compliance. It is the learner’s growing capacity for wise self-direction.

As children mature, responsibility should move gradually from external regulation to self-regulation; from following instructions to exercising judgment; from answering questions to framing worthwhile questions; from completing assigned work to undertaking purposeful work; and from receiving care to contributing to the care of others and the world.

An education that never transfers responsibility has confused dependence with discipline. An education that transfers it before the learner is ready has confused abandonment with freedom.

Assessment must gather evidence of formation

If education concerns what a person is becoming, assessment cannot ask only what information can be reproduced under timed conditions. It must also gather evidence of understanding, application, creation, reasoning, communication, collaboration, perseverance, reflection, judgment and responsible action.

Not every human good should be converted into a number. Character, spiritual growth and relationships require patient observation, dialogue, self-examination, processfolios, descriptive feedback and evidence gathered over time. Quantification may assist judgment; it must not replace it.

The entire institution must become educative

Curriculum documents alone cannot carry formation. The whole climate of the school educates: how leaders use authority, how teachers speak to children, how adults treat one another, how families are received, how spaces are cared for, how difference is handled, how errors are repaired, how the vulnerable are protected, and how resources are used.

A school teaches mercy by the way it corrects. It teaches justice by the way it distributes attention and opportunity. It teaches truth through institutional candour. It teaches beauty through care for language, work and place. It teaches goodness by making contribution part of learning rather than an annual performance for photographs.

The strongest character programme cannot overcome a school culture that contradicts it each day.

The Questions an Education System Must Answer

Any institution calling itself an education system should be able to answer, clearly and publicly:

1. What understanding of the human person guides us?

2. Towards what vision of a good life are we educating?

3. What knowledge is worthy of being inherited, and why?

4. What capacities should be brought forth in each learner?

5. What habits, virtues and forms of adab require cultivation?

6. How will authority be used without humiliation or coercive conformity?

7. How will students progressively gain agency and responsibility?

8. How will we distinguish formation from indoctrination?

9. What does our assessment system teach children to value?

10. Where does our hidden curriculum contradict our declared purposes?

11. How will learning become ʿamal, khidmah and responsible participation?

12. What kind of person are we helping the learner to become before Allah—and what in our institution obstructs that formation?

If the answers concern only examinations, university admission, employment statistics, institutional growth or reputation, the system may be performing schooling, credentialling or workforce preparation. These functions may be useful. But to call them the whole of education is to use a noble word for a diminished purpose.

A Working Definition

We may now venture a definition:

Education is the intentional, relational and sustained process through which a community nurtures and forms the whole person, introduces the learner to truthful and worthwhile knowledge, cultivates disciplined capacities and adab, and leads the learner towards increasingly wise, free, compassionate and responsible participation in life before Allah.

In its fullest sense, education should help a person seek and recognise truth, perceive and create beauty, desire and practise goodness, act with knowledge and capability, govern the self without becoming self-enclosed, live responsibly with other people and the natural world, and continue learning after formal schooling has ended.

The deepest measure of an education system is therefore not simply what its students know when they leave. It is what they have learned to notice, love, question, create, practise and take responsibility for. It is whether knowledge has become understanding, whether understanding has become conduct, whether conduct has become service, and whether service is carried out with the consciousness that we are never outside the Divine Presence.

Before we ask whether an education system is successful, we must ask whether it is truly educational.

And before we call it education, we must look carefully at the human being it is forming.

The Kashmiri School as Amānah

The Kashmiri School as Amānah: Adab, Earth, Memory, and the Work of Formation

There is a way of speaking about education in Kashmir that begins and ends with institutions: how many schools, how many teachers, how many classrooms, how many examinations, how many admissions, how many degrees. These questions are not trivial. A child without a school, a teacher without support, a classroom without dignity, and a village without educational access are not abstractions. They are failures of public trust. Yet there is another question, older and deeper, that no statistical table can answer by itself: what kind of human being should a Kashmiri school form?

This companion essay begins from that question. The previous argument concerned Kashmir’s long education effort: aspiration, expansion, uneven gains, public duty, private responsibility, and the work ahead. Here the concern is less numerical and more formative. What would it mean to think of the Kashmiri school not merely as a site of instruction, but as an amānah? What would it mean to regard the classroom as a place where adab is cultivated, language is honoured, memory is transmitted, the earth is read as āyah, and the child is helped to become not only employable, but truthful, rooted, merciful, intellectually alive, spiritually awake, and useful to creation?

A school is never only a building. It is a moral ecology. It teaches through timetables and textbooks, but also through tone, silence, architecture, discipline, language hierarchy, teacher comportment, cleanliness, playgrounds, rituals of respect, ways of correcting error, and the hidden curriculum of what adults reward or ignore. The child learns from what is said. The child learns more deeply from what is lived.

The danger before us is not that Kashmiri children may learn too much modern knowledge. That is a false fear. They need science, mathematics, languages, technology, history, critical reasoning, and professional capability. A weak education cannot protect dignity. The danger is rather that schooling may become a mechanism of deracination: producing a child who can reproduce paragraphs but cannot read the valley; who can pass examinations but cannot listen to an elder; who can name distant capitals but not the trees, waters, crafts, shrines, fields, and wounds of home; who can speak English with confidence but feels shame before the language in which his grandmother prays, remembers, jokes, mourns, and blesses.

Such a child has not been educated in the fullest sense. He has been displaced inwardly before he has migrated outwardly.

The Trust Before the Technique

In the Qurʾānic imagination, the human being is not raw material for the economy, nor merely a citizen to be processed by the state, nor an autonomous self to be flattered into appetite. The human being is honoured, addressed, tested, and entrusted. Allah speaks of the amānah offered to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains, which they declined to bear, while the human being bore it (Qurʾān 33:72). He also announces to the angels the placing of a khalīfah upon the earth (Qurʾān 2:30). These verses do not grant the human being permission to dominate. They disclose responsibility under Allah.

Education, therefore, cannot begin with technique. It must begin with telos. We need to proceed by stating as clearly as possible what our educational goals are. Do we want children merely to compete, or to contribute? Merely to remember, or to understand? Merely to escape poverty, or to serve with dignity? Merely to acquire language, or to become truthful in speech? Merely to master the world, or to recognise the world as sign, dwelling, trust, and field of accountability?

A Kashmiri school as amānah must refuse two reductions at once. It must refuse a narrow traditionalism that treats the modern world as contamination and leaves children unprepared for the realities they must inhabit. It must also refuse a shallow modernism that treats local memory, spiritual formation, craft, ecology, and mother tongue as ornamental or backward. The first reduction imprisons the child in nostalgia. The second uproots the child in the name of progress. Both fail the child.

The school worthy of Kashmir must be integrative without being confused, modern without being rootless, spiritual without being anti-intellectual, and practical without being merely utilitarian. It must teach children to read books, but also rivers; to understand numbers, but also hunger; to speak confidently, but also listen reverently; to enter the world, but not forget the qiblah of meaning.

Adab as the Grammar of School Life

Adab is often translated as manners, but this is too thin. Manners may be performed while the heart remains arrogant. Adab is a deeper ordering of perception and conduct. It is the capacity to recognise the proper place of things: Allah and creation, teacher and learner, elder and child, knowledge and opinion, speech and silence, rights and duties, confidence and humility, freedom and accountability.

A school without adab may still produce marks. It may even produce rank-holders. But it cannot produce a whole human being. The visible curriculum may declare values, while the hidden curriculum teaches vanity, fear, rivalry, humiliation, contempt for weakness, and worship of prestige. Children are astute readers of contradiction. They know when adults speak of respect but treat teachers as replaceable functionaries. They know when schools speak of compassion but tolerate cruelty in corridors. They know when religious language is invoked ceremonially while daily life is governed by anger, haste, and status anxiety.

The Kashmiri school as amānah must make adab the grammar of its life. This does not mean softness without standards. It means standards without harshness. It means discipline as repair, not revenge. It means correction without humiliation. It means prayer not as interruption to learning, but as the reorientation of learning. It means assemblies that cultivate gratitude and responsibility, not merely announcements. It means teachers who are not reduced to syllabus-delivery agents, but recognised as custodians of attention, language, conscience, and hope.

The teacher, in such a school, is not merely an instructor. The teacher is a student-curriculum broker, a witness to growth, and at times a healer of educational wounds. The teacher notices the hesitant child, the silent child, the gifted child being slowly thwarted, the angry child whose anger is a misnamed sorrow, the child whose strength may provide access to more challenging areas. Such noticing is not sentimental. It is part of justice.

Language as Memory and Mercy

Every serious account of Kashmiri education must confront the question of language. Not as a technical issue only, but as an epistemological and spiritual issue. Language is not merely a medium through which information is transferred. It is a dwelling of memory, a sensorium of affection, a repository of metaphors, a carrier of humour and grief, a mode of seeing the world.

The Qurʾān itself identifies the diversity of tongues and colours as among the signs of Allah (Qurʾān 30:22). A language, then, is not an embarrassment to be overcome. It is an āyah to be received with gratitude and disciplined into excellence.

Kashmiri must not be treated as a poor relative in the house of education. English opens doors, and Urdu carries a vast Indo-Muslim literary and religious inheritance. Arabic connects the learner to revelation and the sacred sciences. Persian remains part of Kashmir’s civilizational memory. But Kashmiri carries the child’s first intimacy with place. To estrange the child from it is not progress; it is a subtle impoverishment.

This is especially important because Kashmiri Islamic memory itself entered literary consciousness through the language of the people. In Prof. B. N. Parimoo’s account of Nund Rishi (Sheikh Noor-ud-Din Rishi ) and Lalla Ded are described as figures with whom modern Kashmiri became a vehicle of creative literature, exalted thought, and spiritual-moral teaching; for the first time, it became a means of communication between “the saint, seer and scholar” and “the man in the street.” (Internet Archive) Parimoo adds that the sayings of Lalla Ded and the shruks of the Sheikh are recited with feeling because their meaning “comes home,” enters the blood, and becomes part of the self. (Internet Archive)

This is an educational insight of the highest order. A school that excludes the child’s deepest language may still inform him, but it will struggle to transform him. Spiritual and moral meanings must “come home.” They must enter the blood. They must not hover as foreign abstractions above the child’s life.

A Kashmiri school as amānah should therefore cultivate multilingual strength without linguistic shame. It should teach children to move between Kashmiri, Urdu, English, Arabic, and other languages with grace and purpose. Translation itself can become a spiritual exercise: What cannot be carried from one language into another? What changes when a grandmother’s proverb is translated into English? What is lost when a Qurʾānic word is flattened into a slogan? What does a Kashmiri name for snow, bread, water, kinship, or grief reveal about a world of experience?

Such questions produce more than vocabulary. They produce epistemic humility.

Nund Rishi and the Curriculum of Khidmah

Most Kashmiris know the famous ecological couplet of Nund Rishi—“Ann poshi teli, yeli wan poshi”—which is used to connect food, forests, and the human heart-mind. For this article, I decided to choose another verse of Nund Rishi serves the present purpose more precisely, because it moves from ecology to social responsibility, from the land that feeds us to the human being who must feed others.

In Parimoo’s transliteration, with footnote markers removed, Nund Rishi says:

پَرَس وۄپَکَر یِم کرَْنْتۄ
بَرَن بۄچھِس وۄدُر تِمَے چِھی سَہ
پَرَدِ مُہِم پانَس ہیٚنْتۄ
ژیٚنْتۄ رَنِ لَجِیۄ ژیٖنِتھ اَواہ

Paras vopakar yim kranto
Baran bochhis vodur timai chhiy sah
Paradi muhim pa:nas hento
Tsento rani lajiyo tsi:nith ava:h

“Those who do good to others,
who feed the hungry, are the truly strong.
They take another’s anxiety upon themselves;
see how love gathers around such care.”

—Shaykh al-ʿĀlam / Nund Rishi, my translation, after Parimoo’s rendering. (Internet Archive)

This is not decorative piety. It is a curriculum. It tells us that strength is not domination but service; that knowledge must become food, relief, and shared burden; that the truly educated person is not the one who merely rises above others, but the one who carries something of their anxiety. A school that teaches this has begun to understand amānah.

What would it mean for this verse to shape school life? It would mean that hunger is not only a topic in social science, but a summons to khidmah. It would mean that winter is not only a season described in essays, but a time to ask which families need warmth, food, companionship, or transport. It would mean that the child who struggles is not treated as a problem to be hidden but as a trust to be carried. It would mean that service is not an annual photograph, but a spiral curriculum of mercy: revisited time and again, deepened with age, joined to understanding, and assessed through conduct.

A class may study nutrition, local agriculture, food distribution, zakāh, waqf, climate, household economies, and the Prophetic ethic of feeding. But the unit is incomplete until children ask: who around us is hungry, lonely, excluded, or unseen? What can we do with knowledge? How does learning become relief?

This is education for understanding in its Islamic form: not recall, but morally directed transfer; not information, but ʿamal; not performance alone, but formation.

The Valley as Classroom

A Kashmiri curriculum worthy of the child must recover the valley as classroom. This does not mean replacing textbooks with romantic excursions. It means refusing to teach the child as though he lives nowhere.

The Jhelum, Dal, Wular, karewas, orchards, saffron fields, wetlands, chinars, mountains, snow, springs, paddy fields, shrines, old city lanes, village paths, wooden houses, bridges, graveyards, markets, and crafts are not extracurricular scenery. They are entry points to understanding. They can teach ecology, history, geometry, literature, economics, climate, ethics, architecture, water systems, food systems, and spiritual perception.

The Qurʾān repeatedly calls us to read the signs in the horizons and within ourselves (Qurʾān 41:53). The horizons are not only far away. They begin at the school gate. The child should learn to ask: Where does our drinking water come from? Where does our waste go? What happens when wetlands shrink? How does snow feed rivers? How do orchards depend on pollination? What does a chinar record across generations? What does a graveyard teach about finitude? What does a craftsperson know that a textbook cannot easily contain? What happens to a society when its hands forget?

A school garden can teach biology, patience, measurement, gratitude, soil, weather, and duʿā. A waste audit can teach mathematics and moral consequence. A visit to an orchard can teach pollination, labour, market vulnerability, family economy, and shukr. A study of local architecture can teach climate adaptation, material culture, geometry, beauty, and modesty. A wetland walk can teach biodiversity, public negligence, and the ethics of stewardship. These are not diversions from academic seriousness. They are the conditions under which academic knowledge becomes meaningful.

Understanding is far more likely to be achieved if the student encounters the material in a variety of forms and contexts. A child who studies water only as a chapter may forget it after an examination. A child who tests water quality, interviews elders about springs, maps household use, reads Qurʾānic verses on water, writes a Kashmiri poem about rain, calculates wastage, and repairs a leaking tap has encountered water as science, language, ethics, memory, and amānah.

Less is more when less is deep.

Memory Without Nostalgia, Modernity Without Amnesia

Kashmir is a palimpsest. Beneath every school there are older layers of learning: maktabs, madrasas, pathshalas, khānqāhs, shrines, family instruction, craft apprenticeship, winter storytelling, memorised poetry, agricultural calendars, oral histories, and the quiet pedagogy of elders. These inheritances should not be romanticised. Not every older form was just. Not every memory is innocent. Some excluded girls, the poor, or the socially marginal. Some transmitted wisdom; some transmitted hierarchy. A serious curriculum must therefore neither idolise the past nor amputate it.

Memory without justice becomes nostalgia. Modernity without memory becomes amnesia.

A Kashmiri school as amānah must teach children to inherit critically and lovingly. They should learn local history not as propaganda, but as moral inquiry. They should study neighbourhoods, mosques, shrines, temples, graveyards, crafts, migration, floods, conflict, poetry, architecture, and family stories with adab. They should ask what was beautiful, what was broken, what should be preserved, what should be repented for, and what should be repaired.

This can be done through processfolios rather than only examinations: a child collects an elder’s memory, maps a local spring, documents a craft process, translates a Kashmiri proverb, photographs architectural details, writes a reflection on a grave inscription, interviews a farmer, studies a local poet, and returns at the end of the year to ask how his understanding has changed. Students become partners in the processes of assessment because they are not merely submitting answers; they are learning how to see.

This kind of local curriculum must not become parochialism. The purpose is not to shrink the child into the village or neighbourhood. It is to give him roots strong enough to enter the wider world without dissolving. A tree without roots does not become cosmopolitan. It becomes debris.

Spiritual Formation and the Sound Heart

The deepest work of the school is psychagogy: the guidance of the soul. This may sound strange to modern ears because we have grown accustomed to thinking of school as a place for cognition, skills, and credentials. But in Islamic education, the cognitive, affective, moral, bodily, and spiritual cannot be sealed into separate compartments. The Prophet ﷺ was sent to recite the signs of Allah, purify people, and teach them the Book and wisdom (Qurʾān 62:2). Tazkiyah and taʿlīm belong together.

A Kashmiri school as amānah must therefore cultivate the qalb, not only the mind. This does not mean turning every lesson into a sermon. It means restoring the sacred orientation of learning. Science should not be taught as if matter were mute. Literature should not be taught as if beauty had no moral consequence. History should not be taught as if human beings were only victims of forces. Technology should not be taught as if acceleration were the same as wisdom. Islamic studies should not be taught as if memorisation were transformation.

A child should learn ṣalāh not only as procedure, but as presence. Qurʾān not only as recitation, but as address. Fasting not only as rule, but as discipline of desire. Charity not only as occasional donation, but as purification of ownership. Tawbah not only as a concept, but as the possibility of return after failure. Sabr not as passive endurance, but as morally disciplined steadfastness. Shukr not as polite speech, but as truthful recognition of gift.

This has implications for school discipline. If a child errs, the question cannot be only: what punishment will deter him? The deeper questions are: what wound, desire, fear, imitation, or ignorance produced this conduct? What restitution is needed? What truth must be named? What habit must be built? How can the child return without being permanently branded by his worst moment?

Islamic discipline is not indulgence. It is mercy with moral clarity.

Toward a Local Curriculum of Amānah

A practical framework for the Kashmiri school as amānah would not require abandoning academic standards. It would require reorienting them. The curriculum should be built around a manageable number of big understandings and revisited through a spiral curriculum across years: Allah as Creator and Sustainer; the human being as honoured and accountable; language as memory and sign; the valley as trust; knowledge as service; beauty as a path to gratitude; community as shared burden; and the Hereafter as the horizon that judges our use of the world.

Such a curriculum would make room for local language and memory: Kashmiri poetry, oral histories, proverbs, translation exercises, family archives, local biographies, and comparative language work. It would make room for land and ecology: school gardens, water mapping, orchard studies, waste audits, snow journals, biodiversity walks, and climate adaptation projects. It would make room for craft and aesthetic intelligence: papier-mâché, weaving, woodwork, calligraphy, architecture, design, and the study of pattern. It would make room for khidmah: feeding initiatives, peer tutoring, care for elders, inclusion of children with disabilities, winter relief, library service, and neighbourhood repair. It would make room for spiritual formation: prayerful rhythm, Qurʾānic reflection, silence, gratitude journals, adab circles, and service tied to self-purification.

Assessment, too, must change. One-dimensional metrics cannot capture the child’s moral and intellectual growth. Examinations have a place, but they cannot be the sovereign measure of education. A Kashmiri school as amānah needs performances of understanding, apprentice-style assessment, contextualized assessment, oral presentations, craft demonstrations, field journals, service reflections, and processfolios that show growth over time. Assessment conducted over time with rich materials in the child’s own environment reveals capacities that a single paper often hides.

This is not lowering standards. It is raising the meaning of standards.

A child who can explain the hydrology of a spring, recite and interpret a Kashmiri shruk, calculate household water use, interview elders about ecological change, connect water to Qurʾānic imagery, design a conservation campaign, and repair a school tap has not done something “less academic.” He has performed understanding. He has joined knowledge, language, place, ethics, and action.

That is good work: technically serious, personally meaningful, and ethically responsible.

The School Worthy of the Child

Kashmir does not need a school that merely helps the child leave. It needs a school that helps the child become worthy of staying, leaving, returning, serving, remembering, and building. Some children will study elsewhere. Some will work abroad. Some will remain in villages, towns, farms, clinics, schools, workshops, offices, businesses, and homes. The question is not whether they go or stay. The question is what kind of person goes, and what kind of person stays.

A Kashmiri school as amānah should form children who can read deeply, speak truthfully, calculate accurately, observe patiently, pray sincerely, disagree respectfully, serve quietly, remember gratefully, and act courageously. It should form children who do not confuse fluency with wisdom, mobility with success, consumption with flourishing, or marks with meaning. It should form children who can carry Kashmir without weaponising it, love Kashmir without idolising it, critique Kashmir without despising it, and serve Kashmir without reducing it to sentiment.

This is not an easy task. The valley has known qabḍ wa basṭ: constriction and opening, fear and relief, winter and thaw. But education itself is a form of hope disciplined by action. We plant what we may not fully see. We teach words that may flower years later. We correct with mercy because we believe the child is not finished. We preserve language because memory deserves a future. We study the earth because it is not ours to waste. We cultivate adab because knowledge without right conduct becomes a burden against us.

The Kashmiri school as amānah is not a slogan. It is a covenantal way of seeing. It asks us to place the child, the teacher, the language, the land, the poor, the disabled, the elder, the river, the orchard, the book, and the prayer under the same moral sky. It asks us to remember that education is not finally the manufacture of achievement, but the formation of persons before Allah.

A school worthy of Kashmir will not merely prepare children for examinations. It will prepare them to answer a more searching question: having been given this language, this valley, this faith, this mind, this heart, this neighbour, and this brief life, what did you do with the trust?

After a Century of Schools

Kashmir’s Search for Education Worthy of Its Children

When one writes about education in Kashmir, one is not merely writing about schools. One is writing about a society’s long and often wounded struggle to protect its children from poverty, isolation, humiliation, political uncertainty, cultural erosion, and narrow forms of success. One is writing about the anxious hope of parents, the quiet stamina of teachers, the unfinished promise of public institutions, the expanding but uneven role of private schooling, and the deeper question that every serious civilization must eventually ask: what kind of human being are we trying to form?

For Kashmir, education has never been only a technical arrangement. It has been a route into literacy, dignity, employment, public life, self-respect, and sometimes survival itself. It has opened doors that were once closed to rural children, poor households, first-generation learners, girls, and socially marginalised communities. Yet it has also carried within itself the ambiguities of modern schooling: the narrowing of learning into examinations, the conversion of knowledge into credentials, the reduction of aspiration into government service or market mobility, and the gradual displacement of older forms of moral, linguistic, spiritual, and craft-based formation.

The story, therefore, cannot be told as simple progress or simple decline. It is a story of aspiration and uneven gains, of real achievement and real incompletion. Most contemporary public data are available for the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir as a whole, while the Valley has its own social, historical, and cultural lineaments. That distinction matters. Yet Kashmir’s education question cannot be separated from the wider policy structure of J&K: curriculum boards, public finance, recruitment, teacher deployment, private-school regulation, higher education policy, early childhood programmes, digital monitoring, and the effects of disruption all operate within that larger frame.

The task before us is to see the whole: the longue durée of inheritance, the achievements of the public project, the energy and anxieties of the private sector, the wounds beneath the numbers, and, above all, the telos of education itself.

The Older Inheritance and the Modern Turn

Before modern schooling became the dominant form, learning in Kashmir lived through a plurality of institutions and practices: pathshalas, maktabs, madrasas, Sanskritic learning, Persianate traditions, Sufi and religious instruction, family transmission, apprenticeship, craft, poetry, memory, and community-based moral formation. These forms did not produce mass literacy. They often excluded the poor and girls. They were not romantic utopias. Yet they carried an idea that modern schooling has often forgotten: learning was not simply information acquisition. It was tied to adab, conduct, devotion, language, work, memory, and social duty.

This older world began to shift sharply in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historical work on Kashmir’s educational transition notes that under Dogra rule, substantive state-led intervention in education remained negligible until the late 1880s, and that there was only one state-run middle school as late as 1890. The same study describes the later rise of a more bureaucratic schooling culture, with prescribed textbooks, inspection, teacher recruitment rules, certificates, and examinations gradually becoming central to the meaning of education. Missionary schools, especially those associated with the Tyndale-Biscoe tradition, brought a visible model of character-building, physical discipline, public responsibility, and social reform, though such accounts must also be read critically because they carried colonial and missionary assumptions.

Alongside missionary institutions, Muslim reformist initiatives played a crucial role in awakening educational consciousness among Kashmiri Muslims. The Anjuman-i-Nusratul Islam and related efforts were not merely institutional episodes; they were attempts to answer a civilizational anxiety: how could a community preserve religious rootedness while acquiring the tools of modern learning, representation, and public dignity? That question remains alive.

The modern school widened opportunity, but it also inaugurated a pattern that still troubles Kashmir: education became too closely tied to examinations, clerical employment, and status. The prescribed textbook became, in too many cases, not an aid to curriculum but the curriculum itself. Memorization for reproduction at examination became a hallmark of schooling; local histories, oral traditions, folklore, crafts, ecological knowledge, and religious epistemologies were pushed to the margins. The modern school thus brought both emancipation and amnesia. It opened the world and, at times, thinned the child’s relationship with place.

The Public Project and Its Democratic Promise

After 1947, education became one of the central promises of public life. The founding of the University of Jammu and Kashmir in 1948, later bifurcated in 1969 into the University of Kashmir at Srinagar and the University of Jammu at Jammu, marked a decisive step in the institutionalisation of higher education. The Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education Act of 1975 gave the school system another formal pillar, establishing a board to regulate, control, and develop school education up to the higher secondary level. (University of Kashmir)

The public school became one of the great democratic instruments of the region. It carried children from rural, poor, and first-generation homes into literacy, teaching, medicine, engineering, administration, higher studies, and public employment. Kashmir’s educated middle class did not appear by accident. It was made by public investment, family sacrifice, community respect for learning, and the determined service of teachers who often worked in difficult terrain and uncertain times.

This achievement should not be dismissed. In an age where cynicism is often mistaken for sophistication, it is necessary to say plainly that public education in Kashmir has changed lives. It has given children language, confidence, mobility, and a place in the world. It has enabled families to imagine futures not available to their grandparents.

Yet the public project also carried weaknesses. It often expanded buildings faster than it built intellectual culture. It produced certificates faster than it produced capability. It offered schooling without always ensuring understanding. It generated graduates without always creating meaningful livelihoods. It made education deeply desired, but not always deeply trusted.

This is the paradox: Kashmir has loved education, sacrificed for it, and invested hope in it; yet too many families remain unsure whether the school, especially the public school, can still form the child deeply, protect the child tenderly, and prepare the child wisely.

The Scale of the Present

The present system is large, active, and socially consequential. UDISE+ 2024–25 data reported in September 2025 records 24,192 schools, 26.54 lakh students, 1.67 lakh teachers, and a pupil-teacher ratio of 16:1 in J&K. UDISE-based report cards also list 10,554 primary schools, 9,145 upper primary schools, 3,185 secondary schools, and 1,308 higher secondary schools, with government schools accounting for about 54.9 percent of enrolment in classes 1 to 12 and private unaided schools about 44.9 percent. (dailyexcelsior.com)

These are not small numbers. They represent a vast social commitment. They also reveal an important truth: private education in Kashmir is not a marginal phenomenon. Parents are voting with their feet, though not always against public education in principle. Often they are voting for perceived regularity, English communication, discipline, accountability, peer culture, and a sense of seriousness. Many private schools have worked hard and built trust. Some have provided continuity when public systems were uneven. Some have fostered confidence, communication, and aspiration.

But the private sector also carries risks: high fees, social sorting, underpaid teachers, parental anxiety, narrow test preparation, exclusion of poorer children, and the subtle conversion of education into a commodity. A society cannot allow quality schooling to become a privilege purchased by those who can pay. Nor should it lazily treat private schools as enemies. Kashmir needs a wiser compact: the public sector must guarantee a strong floor for every child, while the private sector must be held to fairness, transparency, teacher dignity, child protection, inclusion, and educational purpose.

Recent policy documents show that the state understands that the next phase cannot be only about opening schools. The J&K budget features for 2025–26 include proposals for 5,000 kindergartens, modern kindergarten buildings, free textbooks for 5.75 lakh elementary students, vocational education in 554 schools, 1,000 vocational labs, district-level Vidya Samiksha Kendras, online attendance monitoring, ICT labs and smart classrooms in high and higher secondary schools, teacher capacity-building, PM SHRI schools, solarisation, a dropout policy, counselling centres, and pre-primary development.

The same question is now entering higher education. The J&K Private Universities Bill, 2026 frames private universities as a way to supplement government efforts in higher education while regulating governance, management, standards, student protection, and safeguards against commercialisation. This direction is salutary only if private universities become serious institutions of teaching, research, innovation, and service. If they merely sell degrees, they will not solve the crisis; they will deepen it.

The Challenges Behind the Numbers

The first challenge is the gap between access and continuity. J&K’s primary gross enrolment ratio appears strong, but UDISE-based indicators show weaker participation at later stages: primary GER is recorded at 113.7 percent against the national 90.9 percent, while secondary is 66.1 percent against 78.7 percent nationally, and higher secondary is 44.8 percent against 58.4 percent nationally. Retention also declines sharply by higher secondary level, where J&K is recorded at 38.2 percent against 47.2 percent nationally.

This means children are entering the system, but too many are not moving through it with strength, confidence, and continuity. Access is not the same as formation. Enrolment is not the same as learning. Attendance is not the same as belonging. A child may be statistically present and educationally absent.

The second challenge is the uneven use of public infrastructure. UDISE+ reporting shows that zero-enrolment schools in J&K increased to 146 in 2024–25, while single-teacher schools rose to 1,371, serving more than 32,000 students. This is not simply an argument for closure. In mountain regions, border areas, scattered habitations, and poor communities, a small school may still be socially necessary. But it is a sign that planning must become more precise: school mapping, transport, clustering, seasonal hostels, teacher-sharing, and community consultation must work together. (dailyexcelsior.com)

The third challenge is teacher deployment and classroom support. A good average pupil-teacher ratio can conceal local shortages, subject gaps, single-teacher schools, and uneven quality. Kashmir does not only need more teachers in some places; it needs the right teachers in the right schools, with subject preparation, mentoring, professional dignity, and freedom from excessive non-teaching burdens. A system that treats teachers as clerks, data-entry operators, or instruments of compliance cannot then ask them to become intellectual and moral mentors.

The fourth challenge is digital inequality. Smart classrooms and dashboards may help, but only when electricity, devices, connectivity, teacher training, local-language content, and child-centred pedagogy meet in the actual classroom. UDISE-based reporting for J&K lists computer availability at 43 percent of schools and internet at 49 percent, below national figures, while accessibility indicators remain troubling, including low levels of ramps with handrails and CWSN-friendly toilets. A screen does not improve learning by itself. Technology without pedagogy is spectacle. Data without judgment is noise.

The fifth challenge is disruption. Kashmir’s schools have repeatedly faced closures due to unrest, restrictions, conflict, weather, and the COVID period. Reporting from 2020 described empty classrooms, parental fear, makeshift community classes, volunteer tutoring, and the reality that repeated disruption had become a familiar part of student life. (The New Humanitarian) A society that has lived through such interruption must treat educational continuity as civic infrastructure. Children should not lose months of learning whenever public life contracts.

The sixth challenge is the old examination culture. The modern system inherited a textbook-and-examination model that helped standardise education but also narrowed it. Too many children still learn to reproduce answers rather than ask better questions. Too many schools prepare students for marks more than understanding. Too many parents, having suffered scarcity themselves, understandably confuse examination success with educational flourishing. Yet a society cannot examine its way into wisdom.

The seventh challenge is the school-to-work mismatch. Families invest in education because they hope it will lead to dignity and livelihood. When degrees do not lead to meaningful work, education becomes a source of frustration, even moral exhaustion. Kashmir needs higher and vocational education that speaks to its real economy and ecology: horticulture, crafts, tourism, mountain environments, renewable energy, public health, early childhood care, languages, disaster management, digital services, design, cultural industries, and local enterprise.

First Principles: What Is a Kashmiri Education For?

Before asking what reforms are necessary, we need to proceed by stating as clearly as possible what our educational goals are. This is not a bureaucratic preliminary. It is an axiological necessity. A fact or a statistic can never, by itself, dictate what ought to be done. The human being must first be understood.

From an Islamic point of view, education begins neither with the market nor with the state, but with the command to read in the name of the Lord who created (Qurʾān 96:1). Knowledge is not severed from Lordship. It is not a neutral accumulation of information. It is a discipline of perception, gratitude, responsibility, and transformation. The human being is honoured by Allah (Qurʾān 17:70), entrusted as khalīfah on earth (Qurʾān 2:30), and called to carry amānah with humility rather than arrogance.

A Kashmiri education worthy of this anthropology cannot be merely utilitarian. It must prepare children for livelihood, but not reduce them to economic units. It must teach science, mathematics, technology, and language, but not at the expense of moral imagination, ecological responsibility, aesthetic sensibility, and spiritual refinement. It must enable mobility, but not deracination. It must open the world, but not estrange the child from home.

The school, then, is not simply a delivery mechanism. It is a place of psychagogy, the guidance of the soul. It should cultivate literacy and numeracy, but also adab, sabr, shukr, intellectual honesty, ecological tenderness, courage, and khidmah. It should form children who can read a text, a river, an orchard, a machine, a poem, a public problem, and their own inward state with growing discernment.

The Arabic-Andalusian adab tradition sharpens this point with a severe and necessary reminder: knowledge is not acquitted by being possessed. It must answer for what it became. Abū Isḥāq al-Ilbīrī writes:

فَوَاظِبْهُ وَخُذْ بِالجِدِّ فِيهِ

فَإِنْ أَعْطَاكَهُ اللهُ انْتَفَعْتَا

وَإِنْ أَعْطَيْتَ فِيهِ طَوِيلَ بَاعٍ

وَقَالَ النَّاسُ إِنَّكَ قَدْ عَلِمْتَا

فَلَا تَأْمَنْ سُؤَالَ اللهِ عَنْهُ

بِتَوْبِيخٍ: عَلِمْتَ فَمَا عَمِلْتَا

فَرَأْسُ العِلْمِ تَقْوَى اللهِ حَقًّا

وَلَيْسَ بِأَنْ يُقَالَ: لَقَدْ رَأَسْتَا

“Persevere in knowledge and take it up with seriousness;

if Allah grants it to you, you will benefit.

Even if you are given a wide reach in it,

and people say, ‘You have surely learned,’

do not feel safe from Allah’s questioning of it

with the rebuke: ‘You knew—so what did you do?’

For the summit of knowledge is truly taqwā of Allah,

not that it be said, ‘You have become a leader.’”

—Abū Isḥāq al-Ilbīrī, Manẓūmat al-Ilbīrī, my translation.

This is an exacting verse for Kashmir’s educational moment. A century of schools can produce literacy, certificates, institutions, careers, and a visible educated class; yet the deeper question remains: what did this knowledge become? Did it become ʿamal, khidmah, taqwā, public justice, ecological care, teacher dignity, inclusion of the disabled child, safety for the poor, and tenderness toward the learner who struggles? A system may proudly say, “we have educated,” but the moral question returns with Qurʾānic force: having known, did we act?

This is why education cannot be judged by institutional visibility alone. Buildings matter, enrolment matters, budgets matter, examinations matter, and data matter. But they are not the final measure. The final measure is whether knowledge becomes responsibility. A Kashmiri education worthy of its children must not merely produce those whom people call learned; it must form those whose learning becomes taqwā, service, courage, and repair.

The Work Ahead: From Schooling to Formation

The public sector must remain the moral anchor of education. Its first duty is not competition with private schools; it is justice. Every child, whether in Kupwara, Shopian, Srinagar, Baramulla, Anantnag, Bandipora, Kulgam, Budgam, Pulwama, or a remote hamlet beyond easy visibility, must have access to a safe and meaningful school.

The first priority is foundational learning. National policy already places strong emphasis on foundational literacy and numeracy, with NIPUN Bharat aiming for every child to attain foundational literacy and numeracy by the end of Grade 3. (Press Information Bureau) Kashmir should treat this not as a slogan but as a social mission. Every primary school should know which children can read, understand, count, speak, listen, observe, draw, move, and express themselves. Early childhood centres and Bal Vidyalayas must be staffed by trained educators, not merely decorated with bright furniture. Play, rhythm, stories, mother tongue, nutrition, movement, and affection are not ornamental; they are the roots of later learning.

The second priority is compassionate rationalisation. Low-enrolment and zero-enrolment schools cannot be ignored, but blind closure would harm remote and poor communities. The better path is humane clustering: shared campuses where possible, safe transport, local learning centres, seasonal hostels, community libraries, digital access points, and teacher-sharing models. Efficiency without mercy becomes violence; mercy without planning becomes drift.

The third priority is teacher renewal. Teacher training should move from episodic workshops to continuous mentoring. The best teachers should become master mentors. DIETs should become living academic centres rather than administrative extensions. Training should focus on reading instruction, mathematical understanding, multilingual classrooms, adolescent counselling, inclusive education, assessment for understanding, art, craft, environmental learning, and the relational work of building trust.

The fourth priority is resilient schooling. Kashmir requires education continuity plans for snow, floods, heat, unrest, internet shutdowns, road closures, and health emergencies. Learning continuity should include printed home-learning packets, school and community libraries, offline digital content, radio and audio lessons, community tutor networks, local assessment support, and safe reopening protocols. Resilience should not mean expecting children and teachers to absorb endless disruption silently. It should mean designing institutions that protect learning when public life is strained.

The fifth priority is secondary and higher secondary strengthening. Adolescents need more than textbooks. They need career guidance, counselling, laboratories, libraries, sports, arts, safe transport, menstrual health support, civic learning, life skills, and exposure to real work. Girls’ continuation through secondary and higher secondary education should be treated as one of the most important indicators of social health.

The sixth priority is a wider definition of quality. A good Kashmiri school should produce literacy, numeracy, scientific temper, ethical judgment, ecological responsibility, respect for diversity, practical skill, aesthetic taste, and spiritual seriousness. Children should learn Kashmiri, Urdu, English, and other languages with pride and purpose. They should encounter rivers, forests, farms, crafts, architecture, poetry, local history, and the wider world. Understanding is far more likely to be achieved when the student encounters material in a variety of forms and contexts. Rich, generative ideas must be revisited time and again. Less is more when less is deep.

The seventh priority is assessment reform. We should move from one-dimensional metrics toward performances of understanding, contextualised assessment, processfolios, apprentice-style assessment, and feedback conducted over time with rich materials in the child’s own environment. Students should become partners in the processes of assessment, not merely subjects of judgment. Assessment should reveal growth, not merely rank anxiety.

The eighth priority is private-sector responsibility. Private schools must accept that they are part of a public trust. They may be privately managed, but they educate society’s children. Transparent fees, fair teacher pay, child-safety systems, inclusion policies, parent communication, and accountable governance are not optional refinements. A school that underpays teachers while charging high fees weakens the moral basis of education. A school that produces marks without kindness has misunderstood its work.

Private schools should also root learning in Kashmir’s life. They can build serious programmes around local ecology, water, orchards, crafts, architecture, poetry, climate risk, peace education, and community service. In higher education, private universities should become research hubs, teacher-training centres, innovation spaces, and partners in local development, not degree shops. Partnership is welcome; abdication of public responsibility is not.

Toward a Culture Worthy of the Child

Kashmir has spent more than a century building schools. The task now is to build a culture of education worthy of its children. This culture must be rigorous without being harsh, modern without being rootless, spiritual without being narrow, practical without being merely utilitarian, and ambitious without forgetting the poor.

We must resist the false comfort of numbers alone. Buildings matter. Enrolment matters. Budgets matter. Dashboards matter. But education is not finally measured by institutional visibility. Its deepest fruits are often qualitative: a child who reads with understanding, a teacher who restores confidence, a girl who remains in school, a boy who learns tenderness instead of aggression, a student who discovers an authentic domain of excellence, a village that begins to trust its school again, a graduate who returns to serve rather than merely escape.

The history of Kashmiri education has known qabḍ and basṭ: constriction and openings, difficulty and release. That rhythm should not make us fatalistic. It should make us sober and hopeful. In the Islamic imagination, hope is not passivity. It is a disciplined form of trust, inseparable from action. We do not despair because the work is unfinished. We accept the work because the children are an amānah.

The true measure of Kashmir’s educational progress will not be the number of institutions alone. It will be whether a child in any neighbourhood, village, orchard belt, mountain settlement, old city lane, or marginal household can read deeply, think honestly, work skilfully, live peacefully, care for the earth, honour the sacred, and grow into a human being of courage and grace.

That is the work ahead. It is not small. But neither is the promise of a child.

What We Think We Are Building

Strategic Drift and the Search for Shared Meaning in School

There is a peculiar comedy in institutional life, and like most deep comedy, it carries within it an element of tragedy. A leadership team spends months refining a strategic direction, carefully crafting its language, anchoring it in mission, vision, values, and long-range institutional aspiration. The plan is presented with sincerity, perhaps even with eloquence. Yet by the time it travels through the living ecology of the school, it has become several different things at once.

Leadership thinks it has communicated a moral and educational direction. Principals hear operational accountability. Teachers hear additional workload. Parents hear either an anxiety about academic standards or a promise of competitive advantage. Students hear new rules, new slogans, perhaps another assembly. Society at large hears the marketable surface: rankings, college placements, public image, employability, institutional prestige.

And beneath these six panels lies the hidden seventh: what is actually enacted.

This is why the familiar “What People Think I Do / What I Really Do” meme, though unserious in form, offers a surprisingly serious diagnostic image for schools. It reveals not merely a communication problem, but an interpretive one. The same institutional aspiration is refracted through different fears, hopes, incentives, wounds, and responsibilities. One phrase becomes six stories. One strategy becomes many psychological realities. One educational telos becomes scattered across the school’s moral imagination.

In leadership and management language, this is the problem of stakeholder sensemaking and the strategic alignment gap. Karl Weick’s work on sensemaking has helped organizational theorists name how people construct meaning amid ambiguity, especially through identity, retrospection, social interaction, and plausible cues rather than pure accuracy.   Stakeholder theory, associated especially with R. Edward Freeman, reminds us that institutions do not exist for one constituency alone; they create, negotiate, and sometimes distort value among many affected groups.   In education, this matter becomes still more delicate, because the “value” being created is not merely operational efficiency or customer satisfaction. It is human formation.

The strategic alignment gap, therefore, is the distance between what an institution intends, what its stakeholders understand, what its people enact, and what its students finally become. It is the space between message and meaning, policy and practice, mission statement and hidden curriculum.

For Muslim educators, this gap is not merely managerial. It is moral. It is spiritual. It is an issue of amānah.

The Problem Beneath the Problem

Many schools respond to misalignment by increasing communication. They issue more circulars, hold more meetings, refine more policy documents, add more dashboards, and produce more polished presentations. None of this is useless. A school must communicate clearly. But more communication does not necessarily produce shared meaning. Sometimes it simply multiplies noise.

The deeper problem is not that stakeholders have received too little information. It is that they inhabit different interpretive worlds.

The principal lives inside the exigencies of implementation: staffing, timetables, parent escalations, compliance, teacher morale, budgetary limits, and immediate crises. The teacher lives in the intimate theatre of the classroom, where every strategy must pass through the realities of attention, behavior, fatigue, lesson design, assessment, and relational trust. Parents live inside love and anxiety: Will my child be safe? Will my child succeed? Will this school protect faith without compromising worldly opportunity? Students live in the immediacy of experience: Does this matter? Do adults mean what they say? Am I seen, or merely managed? Society lives inside its own often-impoverished metrics: rankings, performance, branding, employability, spectacle.

Thus, when leadership says “holistic education,” one stakeholder hears tarbiyah, another hears co-curricular enrichment, another hears less academic rigor, another hears an expensive slogan, another hears extra work, and another hears a branding device. When leadership says “student agency,” one hears empowerment, another hears indiscipline. When leadership says “Islamic integration,” one hears sacred coherence, another hears more religious content, another hears moral policing, another hears decorative Islamization. When leadership says “excellence,” one stakeholder hears iḥsān; another hears ranking.

This is interpretive drift.

The tragedy is that the school may appear aligned on paper while being misaligned in meaning. A strategic plan may be visibly present in documents and absent from consciousness. A mission statement may be recited often and understood rarely. A value may be displayed on a wall and contradicted in a hallway. A school may speak of raḥmah while operating through fear, speak of adab while humiliating students, speak of excellence while rewarding only compliance, speak of Islamic education while leaving the heart untouched.

This is where misalignment becomes a hidden curriculum. Children learn not only from what adults teach, but from how adults cohere. They learn whether words carry weight. They learn whether values survive inconvenience. They learn whether institutions mean what they say.

From Strategic Alignment to Moral Coherence

In conventional organizational language, strategic alignment refers to the congruence between goals, structures, processes, people, and measures. In schools, instructional coherence is often used to describe the alignment of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and professional practice around shared learning purposes; school improvement research has treated coherence as a serious condition of meaningful reform.   But Islamic education requires a still richer account. It is not enough for our systems to be aligned technically. They must be aligned teleologically.

We must ask: aligned toward what?

If the telos is merely examination success, then alignment will mean efficient test preparation. If the telos is market competitiveness, then alignment will mean branding, rankings, and performance optics. If the telos is institutional expansion, then alignment will mean growth, replication, and managerial control. But if the telos is the formation of the human being before Allah—cultivating ʿilm, adab, iḥsān, taqwā, khidmah, intellectual seriousness, and a sound heart—then alignment must become a sacred exercise in coherence.

The Qurʾān does not imagine human beings as isolated consumers of institutional services. It speaks of amānah, responsibility, witness, consultation, mutual recognition, and moral accountability. “And those who respond to their Lord, establish prayer, and whose affairs are by consultation among themselves…” (Qurʾān 42:38). Consultation here is not a procedural ornament. It is an anthropology. Human beings are entrusted creatures whose understanding must be dignified, whose voices must be heard, and whose shared affairs require disciplined moral deliberation.

Similarly, the Qurʾānic idea of taʿāruf—“that you may know one another” (Qurʾān 49:13)—is not reducible to social courtesy. It is a civilizational principle. Communities fail when they stop seeking to understand the inner worlds of those entrusted to them. Schools fail when they mistake stakeholder management for stakeholder knowing.

The Prophet ﷺ gave us a language of distributed responsibility: “All of you are guardians and responsible for your wards and the things under your care” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 893). (Sunnah) This narration should unsettle simplistic leadership models. Responsibility is not monopolized at the top. The principal is a guardian. The teacher is a guardian. The parent is a guardian. Even students, as they mature, become guardians of their own learning, conduct, attention, and moral agency. Strategic alignment in an Islamic school is therefore not the mechanical cascading of instructions from leadership to subordinates. It is the cultivation of a shared guardianship.

This does not mean everyone decides everything. That would be administrative chaos masquerading as participation. Rather, it means that every stakeholder must understand the amānah in a form appropriate to their role. Leadership must practice sensegiving with truthfulness and humility. Principals must translate vision into conditions. Teachers must translate conditions into pedagogy. Parents must translate trust into partnership. Students must translate belonging into responsibility. The wider community must translate expectation into support, not merely judgment.

The Rūmian Warning: Each from His Own Assumption

Rūmī offers a verse that illuminates the inner problem of sensemaking with remarkable precision:

هر کسی از ظن خود شد یار من
از درون من نجست اسرار من

“Each became my companion from his own assumption;
none searched out the secrets within me.”
—Rūmī, Mathnawī, Book I, my translation. (Ganjoor)

This is the pathology of institutional misunderstanding. People attach themselves to an initiative from within their own assumptions, but do not search out its inner secret. Parents become companions of the school according to their anxieties. Teachers become companions of reform according to their fatigue or hope. Students become companions of values according to the credibility of adults. Society becomes companion to education according to its idols.

The task of leadership, then, is not merely to announce the strategy. It is to help the community search out its inner meaning.

Naming the Educational Problem

In educational terms, the stakeholder alignment gap has at least five dimensions.

First, it is a teleological gap: stakeholders do not share a sufficiently clear account of the school’s ultimate purposes. We may use the same terms—success, excellence, Islamic identity, wellbeing, rigor, character—but attach to them divergent ends.

Second, it is an epistemological gap: stakeholders differ over what counts as valid evidence. Leadership may value long-term formation; parents may value grades; teachers may value classroom behavior; students may value lived fairness; society may value visible outcomes. When evidence is not discussed, one-dimensional metrics quietly become sovereign.

Third, it is an axiological gap: stakeholders differ over what is worth prioritizing when values compete. Academic performance versus character formation. Compliance versus agency. Speed versus depth. Coverage versus understanding. Reputation versus sincerity. Standardization versus the child’s cognitive profile. These are not merely technical trade-offs. They are value conflicts.

Fourth, it is a pedagogical gap: strategy often remains abstract because it is not translated into the daily grammar of teaching, assessment, feedback, discipline, curriculum, and school culture. A school may affirm “education for understanding,” but continue to reward recall. It may speak of student agency, but deny students meaningful participation in assessment. It may speak of holistic education, but design schedules and reports that honor only the measurable.

Fifth, it is a spiritual gap: the institution’s declared commitments are not always animated by iḥsān. The Prophet ﷺ taught that Allah has prescribed iḥsān in all things (Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1955a). (Sunnah) If iḥsān means doing what is beautiful and excellent under the awareness of Divine Presence, then incoherence is not harmless. Carelessness in meaning becomes carelessness in trust.

What Can Be Done?

The first requirement is to state our educational goals as clearly as possible. This sounds simple, but it is among the most neglected acts of educational leadership. Goals must not remain at the level of atmospheric virtue: “excellence,” “innovation,” “Islamic values,” “global citizenship,” “lifelong learning.” These phrases are too porous to carry institutional meaning by themselves. We need expansive framing, but not semantic vagueness. We need to say, with disciplined clarity, what kind of human being we are trying to help form, what kinds of knowledge are worth knowing, what kinds of habits are worth cultivating, and what kinds of evidence will persuade us that formation is actually taking place.

Second, schools need a stakeholder meaning map. Before launching a strategic initiative, leadership should ask: What will principals think this requires? What will teachers fear? What will parents assume? What will students experience? What will society reward or misunderstand? What counterstory already exists in the minds of each group? This is not pandering. It is epistemic humility. It recognizes that strategy does not enter a vacuum. It enters a climate of opinion, a history of trust or mistrust, and a field of competing meanings.

Third, schools need repeated shūrā-based sensemaking forums, not merely announcement meetings. Consultation should be structured, purposeful, and educative. It should not become a performative ritual in which decisions are already complete and stakeholders are invited only to absorb them. Nor should it become endless deliberation that paralyzes action. The aim is disciplined participation: to clarify first principles, surface fears, refine language, and build shared ownership.

Fourth, strategy must be translated into role-specific praxis. A value is not aligned until it changes what people do. If we say “raḥmah,” what changes in discipline? If we say “iḥsān,” what changes in assessment? If we say “student agency,” what changes in classroom discourse? If we say “Islamic integration,” what changes in science, literature, history, art, economics, and pastoral care? If we say “parents as partners,” what changes in reporting, listening, and decision-making? Every strategic commitment should have a visible pedagogical, relational, and operational expression.

Fifth, schools must align their measures with their meanings. We must resist the seduction of one-dimensional metrics. Grades matter, but they do not exhaust learning. Attendance matters, but it does not reveal belonging. Behavior logs matter, but they do not reveal the state of the qalb. University admissions matter, but they do not tell us whether a student has learned humility, courage, adab, sabr, gratitude, or service. We need richer forms of evidence: portfolios, processfolios, performances of understanding, reflective conferences, community contribution, apprentice-style assessment, student self-assessment, teacher narratives, and assessment conducted over time in the child’s own environment. The goal is not to abandon measurement, but to discipline it under meaning.

Sixth, schools must attend to the hidden curriculum of adults. Strategic alignment fails when adults contradict the strategy through conduct. No vision of adab can survive habitual sarcasm. No commitment to dignity can survive public humiliation. No claim of student-centered education can survive institutional indifference to student voice. No Islamic ethos can survive a culture of gossip, fear, vanity, and performative religiosity. The school’s deepest strategy is always embodied before it is documented.

Finally, leadership must develop feedback loops that are truthful without being punitive. The question should not be, “Who failed to implement?” but, “Where did meaning break down?” Was the strategy unclear? Were teachers unsupported? Were parents uninformed? Were students unconvinced? Were measures misaligned? Were principals overwhelmed? Was the initiative too large, too fast, too abstract, too poorly sequenced? Such questions preserve accountability while avoiding the scapegoating that so often destroys trust.

Toward a Shared Moral Horizon

The aim is not total uniformity of thought. A school is not a machine, and human beings are not identical parts. Difference in interpretation is not always a threat; at times it is a mercy. The Qurʾānic world is not monochrome. Human beings come with varied dispositions, histories, intelligences, and concerns. A healthy school does not erase this plurality. It gives it orientation.

The opposite of misalignment is not sameness. It is coherence.

Coherence means that leadership, principals, teachers, parents, students, and the wider community may speak from different locations but still face the same qiblah of meaning. It means that strategy is not merely imposed, but understood; not merely understood, but enacted; not merely enacted, but embodied with sincerity. It means that the school becomes a moral community in which intention, interpretation, practice, and formation are brought into greater harmony.

This is slow work. It requires sabr. It requires listening. It requires courage to name confusion without contempt. It requires leaders who can hold helicopter vision without losing sight of the child in front of them. It requires teachers who can inhabit the daily difficulty of implementation without surrendering the larger telos. It requires parents who can love their children beyond the narrow anxieties of comparison. It requires students who are invited not merely to comply, but to become partners in their own formation.

Most of all, it requires remembering that a school is not a factory of outcomes, nor a marketplace of services, nor a theatre of institutional prestige. It is a trust. It is a place where meanings are made, souls are shaped, and futures are quietly prepared.

When the six panels of perception begin to converge—not into uniformity, but into shared amānah—the school becomes more than strategically aligned. It becomes spiritually legible. Its words begin to carry weight. Its values begin to acquire flesh. Its mission descends from the wall into the timetable, the corridor, the lesson plan, the parent meeting, the staffroom, the playground, and the heart.

And perhaps then, by Allah’s mercy, what leadership intends, what teachers enact, what parents trust, what students experience, and what society witnesses may begin to tell one coherent story: that education is not merely the management of learning, but the humanization of the human being in the light of the sacred.