Education Is Key to Winning the Future belongs to those who best educate their young people will win in the global marketplace.

The future belongs to those who best educate their young people. And right now, America has fallen behind. We know that education is key to winning the future and that, in order to compete, we need to challenge ourselves to improve educational outcomes. The countries that best educate their children will be the ones that win in the global marketplace.

Several countries with large Muslim populations, including Malaysia, Indonesia,India and Pakistan, have been trying to reform their religious seminaries to introduce rational sciences with varying degrees of success. GivenPakistan’s proximity to conflict-riddenAfghanistan, focusing on madrasah reforms within this specific context is particularly important.

Many senior Taliban leaders are the products of madrasahs within Pakistan, though it is important to clarify that not all madrasahs across the country promote outright militancy. Many of them are, however, established along sectarian lines and their students are often trained to rebut other sects through fierce polemics, which is partly responsible for sectarian strife in the country. There is thus an urgent need for students trained in dialogue, rather than violently denouncing divergent belief systems.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 led to a spike in funding of madrasahs within Pakistan, and supplied a steady stream of ideologically motivated students to fuel the US-backed insurgency across the border. US and Pakistani use of madrasah students in the proxy war in Afghanistan, promoting them as mujahideen who were supposedly fighting in the name of Islam, led to a disturbing trend of growing militancy inside such schools, which has now become a major problem both for the international community and for Pakistan.

According to research conducted by the World Bank, the number of madrasahs is small compared to the Pakistan’s public and private schools, and accounts for less than 200,000 full-time students, or less than one percent of total students enrolled across Pakistan.

This study, however, does not count the number of students who attend madrasahs in the evening to study the Qur’an, which perhaps explains why the International Crisis Group estimates that closer to 1.5 million students attend madrasahs across the country.

Due to the rising militancy and extremist violence within the country, Pakistan’s government has been struggling to bring madrasahs under its control. But attempts to register and scrutinise madrasah finances have met with much resistance. At the end of this past year, the Pakistan Ministry of Interior concluded yet another agreement with the United Organizations of Pakistani Madaris (ITMP), a coalition of five major madrasah boards in the country, which grants them independence in designing religious curriculum. However, they must begin teaching modern subjects like mathematics, science and social studies in accordance with the syllabus prescribed by the government.

This agreement, however, did not clarify exactly what the religious curriculum for madrasahs would encompass. This is worrying since inclusion of modern subjects alone is not sufficient to prevent intolerance, especially if madrasahs continue to propound myopic worldviews.

Surely the Muslim world has produced sufficient knowledge in Islamic subjects as well as contemporary disciplines such as the sciences and humanities over the past 14 centuries, which is acceptable to different schools of thought and could creatively be infused into the existing religious curriculum to expand the worldview of madrasah students. Curriculum and pedagogical improvements are the only way that dialogue and understanding can take the place of polemics amongst madrasah graduates.

Yet, efforts to help promote a culture of tolerance within madrasahs, by engaging constructively with their existing syllabus and teaching staff, have been limited. Although madrasahs do admittedly need a multi-tiered accountability system to ensure that extremist ideologies are not being inculcated, it is equally important that religious scholars and community members are involved in ensuring such a system comes to fruition, instead of relying upon government officials alone. Coercive attempts at external scrutiny of madrasahs, be it through government or donor agencies, will only be met with suspicion by madrasah teachers and administrators, and will continue to yield disappointing results.

It is not the international donor community but Muslim intellectuals themselves who must seriously look into these issues and try to promote intellectual awakening and serious research through madrasah education.

It is thus imperative to encourage entities like the ITMP to include the works of mainstream Islamic scholars on a range of topics within their existing religious curriculum and to pay more attention to the quality of teaching by encouraging critical thinking rather than rote learning in their schools.

[Syed Mohammad Ali is a development practitioner and columnist for The Express Tribune and The Friday Times in Pakistan. This article is published with the permission of the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).]

(Courtesy: AlArabiya.net)

BY MARIAM UZMA AHMED, MARCH 21, 2011 Before the 2011 revolutions, I never saw reflections of myself in the media portrayal of Muslim women. The women covered by the media usually played into the stereotypes of Muslim women as weak, silent, and victimized, and the only discussion about Muslim women that ever got any airtime was about their clothing. Many so-called experts, media gurus, and politicians obsessed over head-scarves (hijabs), face veils (niqabs), and cloaks (burkhas), clearly believing that Muslim women were somehow defined by their clothing choices.

When the media images of women from Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen began rolling in, I was thrilled. Here were women who were neither submissive nor silent, and their clothing appeared to pose no barriers to their participation in the demonstrations. There were pictures of young girls with hijabs tucked around animated faces, arms raised high and fingers split in the universal signs for victory and peace. There were images of women in black burkhas kissing soldiers and women in niqab bowing down in prayer shoulder-to-shoulder with men, in front of tanks and barricades. Also present were women in skinny jeans and uncovered heads, screaming revolutionary slogans in Arabic and English. In fact, some of the key leaders in the protests were women wearing burkhas and hijabs. In Yemen, Tawakul Abdel-Salam Karman, a fiery female activist managed to lead the protests while wearing a hijab and black burkha. Asmaa Mahfouz, who is credited with a significant role in igniting and then leading the revolution in Egypt, wore a hijab. When the stories and images of these thousands of diverse and complex Muslim women hit the airwaves, they not only shattered stereotypes, they also revealed the fallacy of focusing solely on the veil. These discussions have been counter-productive, divisive, and have perpetuated an understanding of Muslim women as exotic and different from non-Muslim women. These revolutions have made clear that these women are not so different after all, and that their peaceful struggle for freedom of expression, justice, and equality exhibit the same ideals that underpin our country and Constitution. The important question, which had been obfuscated all this time by the discussion of the veil, was whether Muslim women had the right to choose how to practice their faith and express their religiosity. Their issues therefore were not gender-centric, and the only way to help them was to promote freedom for all. As explained by Egyptian feminist Mozn Hassan, the director of the Egyptian NGO Nazra for Feminist Studies, “The clothing of Egyptian women should only be discussed within the context of whether they have the freedom to choose how they dress. It should be part of a greater political discussion which moves us towards reading women’s issues within the whole context of political and social change.” Hassan and her NGO have long been vocal advocates of gender equality and freedom, and she was thrilled by the involvement of women from all social and economic backgrounds in the revolution. She noted that through their involvement in the protests, Egyptian women had created a greater public space for themselves, and important work needed to be done to ensure that the future of Egyptian society and politics was shaped around the protection of women’s rights and minority rights. In order to promote our ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom in the Muslim world, we Americans must move past stereotypes of Muslims, so many of which are tied to misconceptions about women and gender-relations in Islam. As Muslim women demonstrated through these revolutions, Muslims are not a monolithic entity, and in their diversity and complexity encompass cultures, languages, and customs from every country in the world. At a time when Representative Peter King is conducting hearings on the purported radicalizations on Muslims in America, it is important to reflect on the insidious nature of stereotypes about Muslims, and the extent to which they lead us in circles and make us miss opportunities for understanding and connection with Muslims in America and abroad.

This week, hundreds of educators, policy makers, business and community leaders are gathering in Washington, D.C. to discuss this challenge and the way forward. The three-day Building a Grad Nation Summit aims to inspire a national movement to reach the goal of a 90 percent national graduation rate by 2020. With this goal comes the imperative to not just get our students across the stage at graduation, but to ensure those graduates are prepared for future education and 21st century careers.

The single most important factor in supporting that type of student success is the teacher in their classroom. That's why the president's Budget proposes an investment of $100 million to prepare science and math, engineering and technology (STEM) teachers and devotes $80 million to expand promising and effective models of teacher preparation, which will help train 10,000 more effective STEM teachers per year. Additionally, the plan invests $20 million in research that will improve our understanding of how to best recruit and prepare new teachers and retrain current teachers.

Recent results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that too few of our students demonstrate real proficiency in science -- a subject vital to sparking innovation and ensuring our future competitiveness. The OECD Program for International Student Assessment also found America's educational performance is lagging. While 10 percent of American students perform at the highest levels in reading, twice as many in Shanghai do. And although American students have improved, so have students in other countries -- leaving us ranked 17th in science and 25th in math, far behind countries like China and Korea.

There's a clear link between education and prosperity. The White House Council of Economic Advisors found education was responsible for up to one-third of the productivity growth in the United States from the 1950s to the 1990s. And a McKinsey & Company study concluded that raising U.S. educational achievement levels to those of better-performing nations like Finland and Korea would have lifted our 2008 GDP by 9 to 16 percent. Looking forward, over the next ten years half of all new jobs will require postsecondary education, and half of today's thirty fastest growing job opportunities require at least a 4-year college degree. Make no mistake, those jobs will be filled -- the question is whether they will be in the United States or elsewhere. These warning signs all point to the same conclusion: Our prosperity, America's standing in the world and our ability to grow our economy all rise or fall on the quality of education we provide. We simply can't afford to remain in the middle of the pack. So we must be bold, and we must do what's necessary to give every child a chance to succeed.

Education reform is an area where all parties can work together. President Obama, Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress and state houses across the country can make high school graduation and college and career-readiness a top priority. The Obama Administration has already supported state-led efforts, including the Race to the Top competition, to bring together teachers' unions, state school chiefs, the business community, and political and community leaders to spur reform. But government can't shoulder this challenge alone. That's why over 100 companies, including AT&T, have answered the president's call to action to strengthen STEM education. Through public-private partnerships such as Change the Equation, a new non-profit established by the business community, we can invest in what works and scale up successful STEM programs across the country. AT&T has made the reduction of dropout rates a major focus for its philanthropic efforts through its $100 million AT&T Aspire program -- as have other businesses who recognize that quality education is critical for economic growth. America can reverse the course to out-educate the world and win the future. We need to confront the challenges and build on the strengths of our education system. Key to that effort will be turning around low-performing schools; building accountability while supporting teachers and giving them the flexibility to spark creativity; placing greater emphasis on critical thinking and collaborative problem solving -- critical skills for tomorrow's workforce; and most important, we must direct resources where they make the most difference and tie them to needed reforms. The educational successes seen in other countries are achievable here. Schools and communities have demonstrated the importance of a standard of excellence for teachers and students, the value of a more rigorous and engaging curriculum, and the importance of making education a data-driven enterprise to measure progress and mobilize entire communities. We're making progress, but there's more we need to do. In his State of the Union, President Obama called this is our generation's "Sputnik moment." He couldn't be more right. After our original Sputnik moment more than 50 years ago, bold goals were set, resources were committed and a vital partnership with the private sector was forged. Every level of society was engaged, and public opinion stayed focused and held politicians accountable. The question now is: What will we make of our new Sputnik moment in education? Will we mobilize our nation to make a quality education a priority? The answer is -- we must. We can't let other nations "out-educate" us today and "out-compete" us tomorrow. Working together, we can transform our schools and once again lead the world in education. Melody Barnes is President Obama's Domestic Policy Adviser and the Director of the Domestic Policy Council, which coordinates the domestic policy-making process in the White House. Randall Stephenson is Chairman and CEO of AT&T Inc. Under his leadership, AT&T announced AT&T Aspire, a $100 million philanthropic program to help strengthen student success and workforce readiness.