In the conceptualization of school culture, culture as a word has its roots in developing and growing something. In this regard, the careful training of people lies at the core of the definition of school. Culture describes a common lifestyle with its implicit and explicit agreements. A school's contribution to socialization cannot be denied. In terms of education management and educational processes, school sociologists will assume an essential role in the matters affecting the social learning environment and student motivation, such as students' socialization process, friendships, peer-student and school–family relations and interactions, schooling, the school's social environment, eliminating factors that disturb school culture (e.g., violence, student gangs, substance abuse), and discipline (Bayhan, 2015, pp. 264–268).

School climate engenders a culture that indicates how a given school improves and embraces differences. Reflecting the culture of a school community, school climate and culture have profound impacts on students' achievement and behavioral development. Thus, the school will help shed certain toxic characteristics of a child and replace them with motivation for learning with the help of a positive environment (Lindstorm & Drolet, 2017). When schools equate to learning, they exclusively focus on what falls in and out of the curriculum, as well as additional resources, recommendations, and supplements. Thicker books have been produced and school hours extended to adapt to the diversification of informational resources (Collins & Halverson, 2010, p. 20).

The school will never disappear, but its role and function in learning are expected to narrow down and get redefined. The classroom environment is difficult to replace in terms of aspects such as measuring students' levels of understanding, the effects of competition in the classroom on learning and student success, how students overcome anxiety and gain self-expression, the holistic presentation of a physical classroom, participatory discussions, and group work. Discipline in schools is tacitly accepted to undergo a more relaxed process with digitalization. While the new processes are open to constructive opportunities that may give individuals the chance to transform themselves, these new processes may also lead to destructive measures being taken. Therefore, individuals must develop new ways of perceiving and thinking. To adapt to changing conditions, they must find paths to explore new ways of living. Nevertheless, the role and function of the school as a pedagogical and social environment should never be undermined in terms of its contributions to behavioral development, provision of values education, and promotion of art, sports, painting, and music, and development of children's talents.

Schools offer a state of praxis that contains complex levels of knowledge. Terry (1997, p. 275) placed great emphasis on culture, mentioning that education traditionally functions as a mechanism of social reproduction and cultural preservation in many contexts. According to Terry, culture is a vibrant phenomenon that constantly changes. Educators should respond to the new conditions brought about by these changes by encouraging students to ponder upon these cultural conditions and assist their development through this process of thinking. In particular, Terry emphasized that educators should come up with an approach and methodology to make culture suit students, not themselves.

## The Future of Education: The Roles, Functions, Learning Processes, Models, and Methods

of Learning-Teaching and Ecology of Learning During the pandemic, global digitalization in education and the transition to online education had to be implemented without any preparation or prior testing. The experience of teaching during this process foreshadows the necessity of blending traditional education with distance/digital/online education to establish a hybrid education model that will function more healthily in the future. Thus, after the pandemic, we can neither go back to the traditional education model nor resume a strictly online education. Each country should also take global trends and needs into account in developing a teaching-learning model also suitable to their gradual transition processes. Universities in particular should carry out a series of academic research using a functional structuralist approach to thoroughly inspect and analyze the online education that has been implemented urgently due to unforeseen circumstances while taking into account the aforementioned dimensions.

COVID-19 has had serious consequences regarding the reshaping of educational perspectives; the reevaluation of the necessary educational technologies; the design of distance education courses; the assessment and evaluation of student performance; digital data and ethics; newly emerged educational roles; digital competencies; skills; conversion, and division; the philosophy of openness in education; social equality; preventing and treating trauma and anxiety disorders; the pedagogy of care, understanding, and empathy; and inspecting economic dimensions of higher education with support groups and mechanisms (Bozkurt, 2020, p. 112).

As a direct result of today's Zeitgeist and modernism, schools and educational systems will transform their role, mission, function, curriculum, methods, and forms of management. Over time, serious differences will occur in schools' role and function in terms of education and training. Teaching will take place in digital space through different modules and package programs, while assessment and evaluation of student performance, accreditation, and certification will also mostly occur online. While the current education system forms itself based on this situation, school as a social learning environment most probably will be reshaped with a functional mission in mind in terms of behavior, morality, values, culture, civilization, history, arts, sports, developing talents, teamwork, students' social and psychological development, and improving analytical thinking.

Influential in many fields, Industry 4.0 is the application process of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices. Education is one of these affected fields. The rapid development of technologies and the growing need to integrate them into teaching obliges teachers to keep up with new technologies and design the pedagogical implementation of new technologies (Dong et al., 2020). Digital learning has become an issue concerning teachers' digital literacy, more so than that of students due to a lack of interest and knowledge in the "digital information network" (Çiftçi et al., 2020, pp. 126–127). Yet, we undeniably need to train the labor force to design, develop, produce, and use the produced technology in all fields necessary for Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0 needs individuals with high-level cognitive skills using methods that require not only knowledge but careful thinking. Educating individuals in all fields to perceive and define global problems correctly (critical thinking), produce innovative ideas as a solution (creative thinking), and use the proper methods and techniques to solve the problems (scientific and analytical thinking) is of utmost importance. This is an issue that needs to be addressed in a broad perspective and thought concerning other parts including preschool, primary, secondary, and higher education as well as lifelong learning (Öztemel, 2018, p. 27).

The European Commission (EC) carried out comprehensive research between February and September 2020 regarding how to compensate for the interruption in education due to the COVID-19 pandemic and what to do to make up for it. Using a participatory method, the draft was made accessible for informing and evaluating member countries and the public, receiving a total of 2,700 ideas and suggestions by consulting all parties involved (EC, 2020a, p. 5). Taking this research as a reference point, the European Union has adopted the Digital Education Action Plan (2021–2027) to reorganize education and training. This action plan draws attention to the transformations in work, daily life, and labor force market through many aspects over the last ten years with the rapid digitalization, as well as the hardships employers from various sectors have gone through due to the insufficiency of digital literacy (EC, 2020a, p. 2). Another action plan, Skills for Industry Curriculum Guidelines 4.0, has a special place on the European Union agenda and has been prepared and put into practice to position Europe on a higher step in terms of industrial competitiveness in order for Europe to have more sustainable growth, create work opportunities, prepare road-maps for improving social welfare, and harmonize the technological investments required for a high industry with human resources (EC, 2020b, p. 21). The essence of the action plan involves the actions and lifelong learning philosophy summarized as "the re-alignment of the educational and training systems with the industry and institutional reconstruction by industry" combined with the motto "the society of tomorrow is the curriculum today" (EC, 2020b, p. 156). According to the report, robotics and other automation technologies, including technologically advanced manufacturing and material processing equipment and machines, have increased their potential and broadened the scope of their potential implementations to low budget, APR, and SME-friendly production opportunities.

Both within the context of Education 4.0 and Industry 4.0, some research fields and topics considered necessary for identifying and defining the new situation caused by the pandemic and also for building the economic and social order of the future might be listed as follows:

Digital Education Action Plan of the European Commission of 2020 revealed how much help parents need to assist their children during the process of online and distance education that had been hurriedly implemented due to pandemic, how parents remain insufficient in terms of contributing to the ways their children spend their free time, and the need to transform educational understanding in accordance with the necessities of the digital age (EC, 2020a, p. 6). This situation indicates that traditional education and distance/online education have non-interchangeable roles and functions.

Although many successful as well as unsuccessful applications have occurred in the hurried distance education process, one of the biggest controversies and shortcomings was experienced regarding the assessment and evaluation processes of student performance. Educational institutions' sudden transition to online education due to the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated temporarily suspending assessment processes based on a pass/fail system or holding online exams without sufficient validity or credibility instead of the traditional exams. However, another fact that comes to light with this situation is that almost all educational processes are structured around results-oriented assessment and evaluation approaches while process-oriented assessment and evaluation approaches are not sufficiently used. As a probable result of digitalization, the analytics of learning or alternative solutions allowing for processoriented assessment and evaluation will likely be used soon (Bozkurt, 2020, p. 121).

Another striking research and descriptive analysis proved the presence of technostress in teachers (Nimrod, 2020; Wang et al., 2020). Because some teachers are not accustomed to online education, they have to deal with psychological problems such as anxiety, tension, and anger. Additionally, the discipline of a traditional classroom environment may not be maintainable in online education, resulting in unwanted behaviors being observed in students such as undisciplined behavior, non-compliance with deadlines, and insensitivity (Çiftçi et al., 2020, p. 126). In online and distance education, technostress is a big factor causing problems such as lack of focus, tolerance, anger control, and attention (Kuday, 2020).

Education systems that fail to focus on understanding, research, and producing results can in no way meet the expectations for future human resources. This failure to transform result in the phenomenon of the emergence of a young unemployed group that is Neither in Employment nor Education and Training (NEET, as defined by ILO, 2005); Turkey has yet to find a unified concept to express this, instead finding the various abbreviations of NEIY, NE-NE, or NE-NI (Bauman, 2020, p. 73). NEET describes youths who are not enrolled in any kind of educational institution while also not showing any effort to seek work or participate in youth employment; namely, they are not involved in the labor force (Cansever & Namal, 2019, p. 112). Many observe a global generation about to emerge that is inactive and not interested in employment. The presence of this NEET social segment is in itself a great indicator of the deep inequality of opportunity, while also being a notable sociological manifestation of an increasingly bohemian outlook on life. The NEET group should be considered a minefield, a dangerous space that will place serious risk on countries' future; thus, NEET should also be seen as a problem related to future survival, socio-economic peace, and welfare (Ulusoy, 2020). In the upcoming period, human resources, especially professions, will change shape and quality, while technological literacy, adaptation, and ability to adapt will produce either stunning or devastating results such as being included or excluded from the process of transformation. Setting out a human resources management policy and action plan to analyze the whole process will alleviate the devastating impacts.

Regarding another aspect, the rapid and uncontrolled growth of digital space has led to a discussion on the limits of modern surveillance. Endless and automatic observation of individuals' daily lives has led to a great increase in the use of classification systems. Individuals may not realize they are the object of surveillance; more importantly, they probably don't understand how citizen, employee, or consumer profiles are kept in databases on networks (Hope, 2018, p. 70), or they simply do not care. The digital footprint of any individual who connects to the Internet and carries out a task is not deemed important. However, constructing people's profiles by analyzing the information obtained from their ordinary actions through algorithms is a violation of the preservation of personal data. In this context, noting the presence of surveillance in studies aiming to achieve digital literacy within the education system is necessary. Surveillance culture is the provision of individual and student behavior in terms of controlling, socializing, normalizing, adapting, and assisting students on self-regulation (Bauman, 2020, p. 76). However, the entire online space has the structure of a panopticon with a "central watchtower which continuously sees the individual without being seen as the surveillant" (Hope, 2018, p. 65). This condition should be examined carefully by modern social theory in terms of how the individual becomes subject to this procedure, standardized, and objectified.

## Conclusion

The future is no longer a bright and promising time for many of us. The future is a point of concern with a series of challenges to overcome that need to be constantly managed now. The now revolves around eliminating future threats (Bauman, 2007, p. 38). Schools as an institution, a social system with students, parents, teachers, and administrators, will adopt an institutional order to guide the narcissistic and alienated individual of the global neo-liberal order more than it had previously guided. With the Socratic motto of "Know thyself" as its groundwork, the counseling system will be strengthened by sociologists analyzing the society and culture and implementing counseling activities by keeping the thought of the individual among society in mind (Bayhan, 2015).

The new global state due to the pandemic has generated many discussions around the concepts of school, teacher, information, education, learning, assessment, and evaluation and revealed the emergence of new forms to be inevitable. In this regard, several new strategies, action plans, and pilot implementation studies on new forms of formal education will be set in 2021. Secondary education will need to increase the digital literacy of educators and form new specialties integrated into education more than before. These specialties will be mainly IT (software and hardware) specialists, data analysts, content analysts, and data miners, as well as event managers, training coaches, school sociologists, science, culture, art, and sports experts.

One of the biggest observations during the pandemic has been the comparisons between distance education and face-to-face education (Kvashko, 2020). When approached critically from this point, the indicators of success are questionable for most universities in Turkey, as is also the quality of education and educational materials. Therefore, comparing distance and face-to-face education forms an artificial basis for discussion. From this point of view, the main focus of education, whether distance or face-to-face, should be to have quality assurance in the presentation of both education and educational content. Distance education is not a mere structure or a single pedagogical approach; it is a systematic approach consisting of several different learning materials, forms of communication, and interrelated parts serving a specific purpose. Resuming education online requires a systematic and preplanned understanding. To have the right balance in distant education, to run technology and pedagogy in a meaningful way for effective and efficient learning, and to ensure meaningful learning experiences are all equally important. Examples of the common use of technology include using learning management systems, live lesson tools, or digital environments. Although learning management systems are effective at providing content to the masses, they also have certain limitations in the context of supporting social learning processes and forming an ecology of learning. Within this context, the need to design teaching-learning with concepts such as blended learning and reversed learning is important in the context of having effective learning outcomes for maximum learner satisfaction (Bozkurt, 2020, pp. 118–119).

The intensive and rapid shift to working from home during the pandemic has led to serious changes in home and family dynamics, roles, and responsibilities. Pedagogues and families are concerned about the security and nourishment of children, especially for working families who spend more time outside school; their children receive online education at home and are mostly alone in an uncontrolled space. The conflicts and problems that might be caused by the increase in work-from-home practices and online education in our business life will become clearer over time. Whether this domain will function to the desired extent and effect is unclear, especially for the planning and management of extracurricular activities that students will perform.

Education's shift to the digital sphere has led to the emergence of discussions related to political, economic, and cultural hegemony and authoritarianism (Morozov, 2011, p. xvi). Digital space not being monocentric and uncontrolled leads to aggressive and restrictive measures being taken; this in turn leads other ontological questions to arise. Discourses that argue the evolution of future technology to necessitate an evolution of public order are increasing.

The traditional, sociological, philosophical, and pedagogical debate that digital-online education would never replace traditional face-to-face education is also growing. In particular, many dimensions of the digital field, which is mainly seen as a field of unlimited freedom, have gone unnoticed such as the drop in the quality of information and information pollution due to the uncontrolled space of the net. Neuman (2018, pp. 108–111) focused on "the exponential growth of information" and the information environment's hegemonic effect on the human brain, drawing attention to the following issues from Marjorie Connelly's (2020) article in the New York Times "More Americans Sense a Downside to an Always Plugged-In Existence." Some adverse effects of the age of information and digitalization have occurred such as digital tools depriving the brain of the time needed to rest, technology causing impatience and forgetfulness, the price paid for getting addicted to plugged-in devices, how visuals and audios control our lives, the mess caused by data overload, the lack of time management, and attention deficiencies.

In the work The Dark Side of the Internet, Morozov (2011, p. 28) emphasized the lack of control in the digital sphere, noting that "most policymakers instead choose sleepwalking through this digital minefield, refusing to face all the counter evidence by whistling their favorite cyberutopian melodies."

A fundamental problem exists that is caused by the disagreement between a paradigm of proficiency and competence toward a certain goal in the educational field and the pedagogy-centered paradigm. In face-to-face education, arts, sports, culture, behavior, values education, personality and character development, socialization, and social interaction come to fore, while only teaching and teaching techniques are emphasized in online education.

The ongoing pandemic has once again revealed schools to be a social learning environment and climate to have extremely valuable functions due to school providing children and young people with a safe environment where they can take risks, see several possibilities, and discover and realize new goals. School is the key to opening the door for students on their way to becoming the person they wish to become. Most importantly, schools also offer a humanitarian environment, enabling both self-learning and learning with others (UNESCO, 2020, p. 16).

This study describes the results of urgent distance-online education practices implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic and the phenomenon of digitalization. Policy makers, theorists, educational institutions, educators, learners, and parents in particular as well as all other sections of society should pay due attention to the preparation of action plans and new strategic plans by taking into account the need for social and economic order. A new balance should be established between online and face-to-face education through comprehensive and extensive analyses and studies concerning all methods for training and teaching, methods of education for training teachers, the processes one has to go through to become a teacher, all curricula, tools and systems for learning management, assessment and evaluation systems and tools, social learning processes, school climate, and the ecology of learning. Distance/online/digital education, which has become an educational phenomenon with the pandemic, should have its weaker aspects developed (i.e., the lack of management culture and of an organizational structure that allows effective management of virtual education processes; Arkan, 2020). However, under the intense digital bombardment of information, "optimizing human capacity of positioning and benefiting from information" (Neuman, 2018, p. 113) stands as another question that needs to be urgently addressed.

In summary, the value of creating information within educational formats, social learning processes, and ecology of learning should not be overlooked, notwithstanding the efficiency of accessing information on the net with the rise of digital spheres.

# References

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# The Concept of Change and the Teachers' Role on the Implementing Technological Transformation at School

*María-Elena Gómez-Parra and Bashar Daiss*

Change in the educational system is a concept that must be thoroughly analyzed as it covers a wide range of aspects that impact the organizations in which they are implemented. According to Almog and Schechtman (2007), change can be defined as any significant difference in ideas, approaches, leaders, products, and technologies. Thus, change is a continuous activity of managerial positions in education. Successful change management requires first and foremost proper arrangement and preparation, and planned change is managed according to a clear and well-known strategy for its leaders and employees (Unger et al., 2011).

At the end of the twentieth century, Samuel (1996) suggested that the need for organizational change arises when a gap is created, a rather large implementation that cannot or should not be sealed by routine means; he added that changes do not occur under fixed and stable conditions

B. Daiss e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Y. Alpaydın and C. Demirli (eds.), *Educational Theory in the 21st Century*, Maarif Global Education Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9640-4\_4

M.-E. Gómez-Parra (B) · B. Daiss University of Cordoba Spain, Córdoba, Spain e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
but rather in response to values that threaten an organization's functioning (schools are an example of an organization) in various aspects either in the present or in the foreseeable future. Alternatively, changes are a response to transformations of values that are interpreted as opportunities to improve an organization's resilience and increase its achievements. Sarason (1995) claimed that any effort to bring a change that does not take into consideration an understanding of school culture will ultimately fail. Any change can be operated in the school if money is invested, but that is not enough. Investing money without understanding the school culture does not guarantee the success of such change. People, ideas, motivation, and resources are needed in order to create a significant change in an organization such as a school. The ideas should be translated into perceptions, lead people according to established guiding principles that transform them into action. For such a process to remain and to be maintained, change must become a part of the school's language and tradition, so that it stems not only from the people, but is also assimilated into the spirit of the organization as a part of its identity, belonging, and main objective (Kfir, 1997). Moreover, Fox (1995) stated that the process of change is dynamic and has permanence as well as periodicity. For change to be successful, the conditions that allow it must be present, and if they do not exist, they must be created before the transition begins. Managing change is not a one-time action but rather a permanent action that occupies a significant part of the administrator's day-to-day activities. In other words, a means (i.e., "how") must be present such as an organizational backbone through which the change will be implemented and assimilated in practice in order to create a change (i.e., "what").

In the twenty-first century, Cohen and Lechner (2011) established three main steps for a process of change to take place in the school:

(iii) *Third step:* Continuity. The school must maintain the change for a suitable and rather extended time because the effects of change begin to be reflected after a year or more. After the initial experience of such a change, the school will be able to consider its suitability and success and decide if proceeding with it is worthwhile.

Shamir-Inbal and Kelly (2011) showed that, when teachers are involved in implementing change, they can better cope with challenges and develop themselves professionally. For such involvement to be possible, the teacher must be surrounded by a learning environment, a supportive school, and a regional system. The acquisition of innovative pedagogical-technological knowledge requires systemic interventions and detailed planning of teacher-training activities in accordance with the school's needs. Shamir-Inbal and Kelly (2011) addressed three aspects of systemic interventions for implementing a technological process into education:

that teachers will learn specific teaching methods that incorporate technology, develop collaboration with other teachers, and encourage development of the teacher-student-parent relationship. A pedagogical change must be separated from the change in the level of teachers' professional knowledge: They should be taught and trained to adapt to new and evolving technology.

(iii) *The organizational-administrative aspect:* A school must constantly adapt to innovation for the success of both its programs and the school. Staff cooperation and provision of assistance for organizing and planning school policies is a method suitable for implementing information and technology (IT) programs (e.g., acquiring new computers).

Ertmer and Ottenbreit-Leftwich (2010) emphasized the effective change in a school to only be possible if the change is also operated on teachers' personal level. Using the external tools provided by official institutions (e.g., Ministries of Education) tests the effectiveness (indicators of success), constantly presenting the benefits and gains from the change (increases motivation and willingness to help) and providing extensive, clear, and accurate information about the project and how its efficiency impacts the school management team and other teachers' departments. Presenting a clear plan with measurable goals is very important for ensuring staff guidance and instruction and for building confidence against failure. In addition, both expected and existing difficulties should be presented to foster attentiveness toward problems and difficulties. The school administration should aim to create a climate where room exists for developing new ideas.

According to Guskey's teacher growth model (2002), a change in teachers' perceptions is firstly a learning-based process rooted in experiences and educational activities. Therefore, one can assume that during the teachers' attempts to assimilate modern technologies in their teaching processes, they will expand and perhaps change their opinions and views on learning, teaching, and technology. Avidov-Unger (2011) affirmed cultural change to be an outgrowth of teachers and leaders' desires within and outside the school to reshape the school's reality and shift it from a "traditional" direction (frontal instruction, learning-focused teaching) to an innovative direction (student-focused learning combined with technology).

A number of theories exist that focus on schools as being organizations. Schools around the world are currently undergoing changes in relevant areas such as their social and educational mission, managerial methods, structure, connections with social communities, and more. For Nir (2017), these changes stem from a perception that sees schools as organizations for everything; this may help in understanding the nature of school functioning in terms of management style, teamwork, decision-making process, environmental relationships, teaching methods, and evaluations for academic and social achievements. According to Holt et al. (2007), schools that have adopted the culture of being a learning organization have found adapting to changes easier and are more successful than schools lacking such a culture. Such schools encounter no opposition from the teaching and administrative staff to a new technological culture because teachers participate in the processes of change and in constructing the necessary pedagogical knowledge. According to Mât,a ( ˘ 2021, pp. 44–45), teachers can no longer close themselves off "in the ivory tower." Such a move substitutes opposition with innovation, leading toward change and aiding in its success. Sharing strengthens the sense of control; it is perceived as a legitimate move at the same time as allowing for a better understanding of the change and increasing the sense of commitment. The components of dialogue, sharing, knowledge transfer, and knowledge preservation create the behavioral patterns in a learning organization that is essential for effectively implementing innovative technologies. A learning community is characterized by respect, sharing, and communication among peers when teachers take making the change upon themselves of their own free will. If they believe that change is necessary, they will make great efforts to implement it effectively in class and at school.

# Technology, Change, and Teachers' Ethics

An "online teacher" is an up-to-date teacher who uses information and communication technology (ICT) and routinely works online in their personal and professional works (Ham & Davey, 2005; Rotem & Oster-Levinz, 2007). A perceptual change in teachers' role and working methodology focuses not only on integrating ICT but also on updating educational goals, adapting the skills graduates require, redesigning the learning environments, and implementing innovative teaching and learning processes (Loveless, 2011; Prensky, 2008; Rotem & Avni, 2011). Integrating technology in teaching involves personal, creative, and dynamic decisions made within the contexts of education, society, and community. The new possibilities that ICT calls for also entail dealing with the moral aspects that arise from the characteristics that technology has and the possibilities for its use (Koehler & Mishra, 2008; Loveless, 2011).

Decisions about ways to integrate change into teaching are part of the ethics of a teacher's professionalism as an educational-social agent, one in which the teacher deals with complex and multifaceted innovations where ICT functions as a powerful and meaningful mediator (Fisher, 2006). In this process, the teacher undergoes both personal and professional changes as part of the process of development and growth that takes place over a lifetime (Hargreaves & Fullan, 1992). This change relies on practical experiences in unique situations based on time and context (Fox, 1995). Events teachers perceive as critical and formative, especially those that evoke negative feelings of panic, apprehension, and appeal, are the turning points in initiating change and development (Shapira-Lishchinsky, 2011). The search for and construction of a new path may be accompanied by resistance, apprehension, embarrassment, and coping with limitations and constraints (Bell & Gilbert, 1994, 1996; Jones, 2004). In the process of change, a teacher's perception of their professional identity gets built into a creative and critical educator who works to shape culture in a changing learning environment (Loveless, 2011). The transformation an online teacher undergoes is perceived by the literature not only as streamlining and role shaping but also as a professional and moral renaissance (Fisher, 2006).

Morality and ethics are the valuable infrastructure of human existence and education. The moral dimension of teaching is the basis for a good teacher's professional and personal identity (Clark, 1990; Sockett, 1993). The teacher as a moral agent has a double commitment: the commitment to their ethical standards as a moral person and moral professional and their commitment to guiding students to a moral life (Campbell, 2003). A teacher's ethical behavior is derived from their ethical knowledge and personal, social, cognitive, and emotional abilities (Berkowitz et al., 2006; Hoffman, 2000). Ethical knowledge involves understanding the essence and role of morality, developing an inner conscience that guides to the right and the proper, the ability to listen, sensitivity to ethical issues, the ability to think and judge morally, the ability to make moral decisions, and moral cognition. A person's ethical awareness is a significant part of their own development and the formation of their professional and personal identity (Scheffler, 2004). In contrast to approaches that perceive moral identity as an integral and complete self-understanding, other approaches can be found that view human ethics as a multifaceted, dynamic, and polyphonic being (Tappan, 2006; Turiel, 2006). A person who functions at a high and conscious ethical level is considered an autonomous person who takes responsibility for their ethical behavior as part of their identity, worldview, and lifestyle (Campbell, 2003). A teacher with a high ethical awareness is aware of their role as a moral agent and is able to apply ethical behavior in the practical aspects of daily life (Campbell, 2003).

Ethical dilemmas are part of teachers' personal and professional lives and are seen as an important part of their function. An imbalance among ideal perceptions, personal voices, and considerations in practical applications can cause tension in a teacher's ability to deal with dilemmas. Such situations can lead to a loss of focus where actions are justified through defense mechanisms and ethical decisions are compromised (Cherubini, 2008). At the same time, some teachers can clearly express the upcoming ethical awareness to be expressed in their behavior, especially in the aspects they believe in and value.

Ethical knowledge includes understanding the essence of morality and its role, the development of an inner conscience that guides to the right and proper, the ability to listen, sensitivity to ethical issues, the ability to think, moral judgment, the ability to make moral decisions, and moral cognition (Narváez, 2006). A person who functions at a high ethical and conscious level is considered to be an autonomous person who takes responsibility for their ethical behavior as part of their identity, their perceptions of the world, and their way of life. A highly ethical teacher is aware of their role as a moral agent and can implement their ethical behavior in practical aspects of everyday life (Campbell, 2003). Thus, the added value of the ethical responsibility imposed on each teacher is the behavioral summation of all teachers (Sichel, 1993).

According to Campbell (2003), teachers are unaware of the ethical disturbances involved in their work and their actions. Even if teachers are aware, gray areas in everyday experiences can disturb their intentions, the rationality of their decisions, and their emotional instincts (Campbell, 2008).

Ethical dilemmas are a part of teachers' personal and professional lives and are perceived as an important aspect of their work (Campbell, 2008). An imbalance between the ideal concepts and inner voices regarding the teaching praxis can cause tensions in a teacher's ability to deal with dilemmas. Such situations would lead to a loss of focus, justification of defense mechanisms and defensive actions, and compromises in ethical decisions (Cherubini, 2008). However, some teachers are able to clearly express the ethical awareness of their behavior, especially in the aspects they believe in and value (Campbell, 2008).

ICT not only increases the frequency and intensity of teachers' encounters with ethical issues but also raises new questions about values, rights, laws, norms, and etiquette (Campbell, 2008). The transformation of information and communication is not only a technological revolution but also a social and ethical change in a complex weave between technologies and their creators, users, interactions, and social contexts. In this way, both digital culture and human behavior are designed in such a way where morality and ethics is an integral part of what the technology and online experience provides; they are also accompanied by the psychological effects that are unique to the online environment. All this creates a new reality characterized among other things by easy access to information, the ability to use information and copy it by means of producing and publishing personal and collaborative information, and communication channels that enable free expression on a variety of platforms and identities. In this reality, values and rights change their appearance and get renewed (Bynum & Simon, 2004).

The ethical issues arising as a result of the use of technology are related to technological systems (both hardware and software), information, and human and social interactions. Among other relevant topics, such issues concern accessibility, equality, digital disparity, freedom of information, intellectual property, copyrights, collaboration, fair use of information, reliability, credibility, freedom of expression, privacy, anonymity, security, control, power relations, hierarchical structures, online bullying, and enforcement. Just to quote a few examples, these issues also deal with the blurring and transgression of limits such as space, location, and time as well as the limitations of personal and professional presence (i.e., legal versus virtual entities).

In addition to general ethical issues, online teachers are faced with ethical issues in the professional context (Avni et al., 2010; Rotem & Avni, 2011). In this context, a teacher may behave properly and act out of ethical and legal awareness. Conversely, the teacher may break the law and not respect the rules of ethics, sometimes from lack of awareness and sometimes deliberately. Teachers may also discover they are a victim of illegal or unethical behaviors involving the use of technology. In regard to coping with such ethical issues, a teacher's expertise and skills can be defined as complex and intricated. Teachers' increasing use of ICT and their encounters with ethical issues summon and even force the awakening of ethical awareness (Brey, 2007).

Parallel to the development of personal ethical awareness, broad perceptions of ethics have been developed in the context of ICT. Gorniak-Kocikowska (2007) believes that local ethical theories will be replaced by a universal and global theory of the age of information that will address the whole of human relationships and actions in all cultures of the world. Bray (2009) believes that "netiquette" (network ethics) can develop only as an addition to the local ethics that resolve people's local problems.

Dealing with ethical issues and legal questions is part of the reality of online teachers' lives, and regarding technology, they function as a consumer and user in both their personal and professional lives. The teacher as a consumer takes advantage of software, digital means, and online services; uses online information and content; and maintains a variety of interactions. As an active user, the teacher provides information, publishes content, initiates interactions and message delivery, leads activities in digital environments, and takes an active part in their personal and social presence on the web. Furthermore, the teacher as a social agent creates a learning community and shapes messages; the way they guide and mediate among students is aimed at activism, collaboration, involvement, and higher-order thinking (Velmer, 2011).

Every teacher who integrates ICT technology in their work must consider its proper use, the proper behavior in its environment, and students' education in this area (Beycioglu, 2009). Using the Internet for educational purposes means that ICT is integrated into controversial education such as learning on social networks (Velmer, 2011); this needs to be reconsidered.

As part of applying ICT in teaching and learning, the teacher faces ethical issues and legitimate questions that arise from various aspects of using technology. Some issues involve the use of hardware, software, digital tools, and online environments, while others involve information and rights over that information, intellectual property, copyright, sharing, information evaluation, and information security. Some issues also deal with interactions, presence in the online environment, ways of expression, freedom of speech, privacy, safety, and protection.

Although educators are generally honest and ethical, Johnson and Simpson (2005) argued that they very often break the law in copyright protection online. These researchers included lack of knowledge among the reasons for these offenses to be mainly due to two factors: (i) lack of sufficient information and difficulty in monitoring the complexity of the law and its interpretations, and (ii) lack of understanding and misconceptions. This is because educators treat information that is not marked with a copyright as free information for use, or they interpret "fair use" as any use made within the school or from which students can benefit.

The limits of the permitted use of law and the definition of fair use, especially due to the new Israeli copyright law (Israeli Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports [IMECS], 2012), are also flexible and subjected to interpretation. Hobbs et al. (2007) carried out a study among teachers in the USA; they found teachers to be frustrated and fearful due to lack of or conflicting information regarding copyright and the fair use of information and materials in education. As a result, these teachers restrict their use, which harms their new ability to exploit innovativeness, cooperation, advertising, and distribution of materials and deliverables. Beyond legal recognition and understanding, teachers are in conflict between policies and action (Hobbs et al., 2007). Thus, they might be torn between copyright protection and copying materials that could help their students gain higher achievements. According to Johnson and Simpson (2005), every educator involved in technology should understand the legal and illegal uses of intellectual property and whether to protect the school from lawsuits or serve as a role model for students. Elkin-Koren (2004) warned that uncertainty about the permitted uses of works may lead to a "cooling effect" in promoting online teaching.

A study on unethical behavior among 314 teaching students at a university in Turkey (Beycioglu, 2009) used a scale identifying unethical behavior in the use of computers. The scale had been formulated by Namlu and Odabasi (2007) and identified five main categories (see Table 1).

Beycioglu (2009) found future teachers to be somewhat sensitive to the ethical use of computers, but their actual behavior undermines this. For example, they respect intellectual property, but in practice they use unlicensed software, usually due to financial considerations. In addition, female teachers were found to be more bothered than male teachers regarding ethical issues, and teachers who have more than five years of

**Table 1** Categories identifying unethical behavior

*Source* Namlu and Odabasi (2007).

experience with a personal computer address ethical issues more than those with less experience.

Teachers have to deal with legal and ethical issues that arise from students' behaviors. In a survey by the UK Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL, 2008), teachers raised the problem of pupils copying materials from the Internet without citing the source. In examining teachers' awareness of school policy regarding the plagiarism, close to a third of teachers stated not knowing if their educational institutions had any policy, and less than a third stated their school had no policy to address the phenomenon.

Online harassment and cyberbullying are other issues that teachers address or find themselves victims of (Hinduja & Patchin, 2012). Gudmundsdottir et al. (2020) found a positive relationship to exist between perceived competence with privacy issues and the handling of cyberbullying. Williamson et al. (2007) found 32% of teens who use the Internet in the United States to have been harassed online by receiving threatening messages, sending emails or text messages without permission, uploading embarrassing images without consent, and spreading rumors: 13% were reported to have sent abusive messages; 45% had received abusive messages through instant messaging applications, 16% through chat, and 6% by email. 18% of the teens had reported being bullied on the net, 16% had experienced molestation on the net, and 38% of those receiving an abusive message indicated that they had replied with an abusive message. A survey the Geocartography Knowledge Group (Degani & Degani, 2012) conducted in Israel over 600 participants (200 teachers, 200 parents of children aged 8–18, and 200 students aged 13– 18), 12% of the teens reported having been harmed on Facebook (8% of the abuse being verbal curses or insults, 3% being subjected to the spread of false rumors, and 3% had an insulting photo uploaded to Facebook). 21% of youths in Israel saw a video or photo on Facebook showing one of their friends or teachers in an awkward or humiliating situation (14% saw a video/picture of a friend, 5% saw a video of a teacher, and 3% saw a video/photo of both a friend and teacher). 13% of teachers responded that they'd received a request from parents or students regarding the abuse of their students through Facebook. 19% of the teachers indicated that they or one of their peers had experienced an assault by a student through Facebook (10% experienced insults, 7% were cursed at/verbally abused, 4% were humiliated, and 3% saw uploads of insulting images of themselves). The UK Teachers' Organization (NASUWT) published survey results in 2007 (Coughlan, 2007), according to which 45% of teachers had received an email attack, 15% had received threats, and 10% were concerned about messages written about them on websites. This organization presented about 100 cases in which teachers had fallen victim to online mobile phone and email hacking, as well as malicious slander and accusations on websites and social networks (Keates, 2007). These events can adversely affect teachers' health, safety, well-being, self-esteem, and even their careers (NASUWT, 2009). The organization has subsequently issued a public call for the UK government to take urgent action against online abuse and to protect the interests of teachers and other staff in the educational institutions who had fallen victim to this bullying (NASUWT, 2009).

Another important issue is information privacy. At all levels of the educational hierarchy, information can be collected, documented, and analyze in ways and on scales not previously possible. Information related to students (e.g., achievements, academic activity, hours of operation, frequency of activity on the learning site, student comparisons, sensitive personal information) requires security but also raises questions about its impact on teachers' student evaluations. Through information management environments, parents and teachers can monitor students and strengthen their control. Principals can also monitor teacher activity in class and outside of the school boundaries. Since 2006, social networks, especially Facebook, have invaded the lives of both teachers and students.

Israel has an educational program for "safe surfing" (IMECS, 2012), the goals of which are to maintain children's well-being and safety both in real and online environments, as well as to provide them with tools for intelligent conduct in cyberspace. This program generally deals with teachers' exposure to the online environment and in particular to children's world; parents' exposure regarding the importance of being involved in their children's surfing habits; students' being educated to behave wisely online while maintaining ethics and safety, control, caution, intelligence, responsibility, honesty, and respect toward others and toward information; copyright protections; respect for privacy; and specifically being alert to dangers. Furthermore, the program provides behavioral and technological tools for dealing with online environments. Content deployment includes behavioral norms, cyberbullying, privacy, copyright, collaboration, online discourse culture, offensive content, online communication, and healthy lifestyle management while surfing the net. The program also includes guidelines for teachers and parents, activities, and tailored teaching and learning materials. The program exposes teachers to the subject but does not require them to acquire in-depth knowledge for assimilating it.

The study conducted in the United States by the National Cyber Security Alliance (2011) found 91% of the 1,000 teachers who participated in the study to have thought that ethics and safety should be taught in school while only half had thought their school to have prepared students properly. A little more than half of the teachers reported being willing to teach their students about ethics and safety online, but when asked what they actually taught in their classrooms, the most common answer was nothing. The issue of plagiarism was unusual, with about half of the teachers reporting to have talked to their students about it. The survey by the Geocartography Knowledge Group (Degani & Degani, 2012) found 25% of teachers to think the Ministry of Education should provide information or raise awareness about the harm done through Facebook, 15% to think that educational classes should be held on the subject, 6% to think that students should be punished for harm/abuse through Facebook, 22% do not know what the Ministry of Education should do, and 8% to think that the Ministry of Education is unable to do anything about it.

Discussion and Conclusion As argued within this chapter, the massive change online teachers have experienced has had an impact on how they work and perceive their role and is described as part of the personal, professional, social, and cultural changes that ICT introduced into twenty-first-century life. As a result of the increasing and ongoing use of technology, teachers nowadays have to deal with a wide range of events and occurrences involving ethical issues in which the educational community is deeply involved. Although educators generally show a high level of ethical literacy (Frolova et al., 2020), the analysis of the literature shows that teachers find themselves to have broken the law (Johnson & Simpson, 2005) when their actions are related to technology being applied in education. Following Shin (2015, p. 181), "Participants' awareness of critical, ethical, and safe use of information and communication technologies was raised through activities for evaluating and discussing the selection of instructional materials and the lesson activities associated with them." Therefore, a training program specifically designed for raising teachers' awareness of ICT, evaluating digital content, and learning the legal issues surrounding the use of technology for educational purposes could prove to be beneficial. Gudmundsdottir et al. (2020) stated that the ability to evaluate online digital content has a positive relationship with perceived competence in privacy issues. This means that specific training could help to improve their awareness not only of ICT and the legal uses of technology in educational settings but also of how it can impact their personal area. The mix of embarrassment and apprehension involved in teachers' need to deal with technological issues and educate students on the proper use of ICT and online behavior should drive the development of ethical awareness.

Mât,a ( ˘ 2021, p. 44) stated, "The use of new technologies has the potential to generate numerous ethical dilemmas." Mass access to information has had humans take on the new role of an intelligent and active user who is responsible for personal information and should take care of information security and privacy. However, this also raises ethical decisions about what information to disclose and to whom, as well as what actions to take following the use of information. All this is especially important when teachers who must raise specific awareness on ICT usage, what it can or must not be used for, and how to teach ethical issues to their students regarding technology. Teachers are therefore responsible for educating students on how to intelligently use ICT, which entails safe surfing on the Internet (Rotem & Avni, 2011). Watty et al. (2016) showed one great challenge to not be technology itself but educators' ability to embrace the technological revolution. Even more so, teachers are responsible for educating their students on online ethics, though many teachers have yet to adopt technology as part of their work routine (Avni et al., 2010). Online teachers operate in different worlds, use different languages, apply different teaching and learning materials, and hold different positions regarding integrating technology into teaching, as well as which norms and values to involve (Koehler & Mishra, 2008). Proper understanding not only of the benefits and challenges but also of the drawbacks and possible risks that technology places all on us is one of the main concerns of the political agenda of international institutions (e.g., UNESCO, 2006). Thus, training teachers in ethical issues regarding the use of technology should be also the priority of international educational policies to assure a better and more secure use of information for all.

## References

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Velmer, T. (2011). Student's answer on civics test: Death to Arabs. *Ynet News*.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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## Education in The Context of New Culture and Society Conceptions

# Shifting Cultural Paradigms in Global Education: Toward Decolonizing Knowledge

## *Harun Rasiah*

The body of scholarship on the intersections of education and culture has branched into multiple subfields in education studies. The move away from cultural deficit models, which on one hand blame low achievement on students' culture and on the other on the problematization of Eurocentric approaches, has brought new approaches to the fore that consider the question of differences, especially as they relate to gender, race, ethnicity, language, and religion. This chapter offers an overview of current discussions and discourses on cultural sensitivity, multiculturalism, and interculturality in education before focusing on the significant parallel development of decolonization.

Education as a practice and academic discipline has universal application. Knowing, thinking, learning, teaching, and studying have occurred in myriad ways and settings over time and across geographies, sharing much in common. The human lifespan itself is biologically organized for progressive learning that appears to diminish surprisingly slowly with age.

© The Author(s) 2022

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H. Rasiah (B)

California State University, East Bay, Hayward, CA, USA e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Y. Alpaydın and C. Demirli (eds.), *Educational Theory in the 21st Century*, Maarif Global Education Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9640-4\_5

A multitude of learning practices has been designed for all ages; in addition to primary, secondary, and tertiary education, the notion of lifelong learning has received growing attention. At the same time, education is no longer viewed as a neutral activity that can be replicated universally. Despite their commonalities, the ways in which educational activities are configured, expressed, and theorized differ. In its most bureaucratic form, education remains enmeshed in cultural practices, even if they have been rendered invisible. The rise of mass schooling in the modern era, closely connected to the ascendancy of Western countries and market economies, has prescribed education as a key index of civilization, development, and democracy. Having emerged from Enlightenment ideas, modernity has conceived of education in universal terms with some variation while centering on certain modes of thinking (empiricism), as well as values and goals (individualism, secularism). Modernization policies have implemented these goals by way of mass education as state directives with support or in contention with the global doctrines issued by Westernbased multilateral agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, and UNESCO. However, contestations around the cultural content of educational policies occur at all levels, from ministries of education to classrooms. Education simultaneously remains a vehicle for reproducing culture as well as a site of resistance to hegemony. Teachers and students remain important actors in reinterpreting curriculum and questioning the efficacy of policies. Consensus on the normative claims of Western education collapsed long ago, and alternatives from the global South and minoritized groups in the metropole have been on the rise since the era of decolonization. Like other academic disciplines, the field of education in the metropole was slow to acknowledge this shift in thinking but has moved to the forefront today thanks in large part to indigenous scholars (McKinley & Smith, 2019; Smith et al., 2018; Watahomigie & McCarty, 1994).

# Liberalism: Cultural Sensitivity,

Multiculturalism, Interculturality A *longue durée* view with respect to decolonizing perspectives, drawing chiefly on Césaire, Dussel, Fanon, and Wallerstein, provides depth for understanding the context of educational debates around culture. A centuries-long evolution saw elite tutelage give way to mass schooling; the liberal arts curriculum of classical Western education, based on the trivium and quadrium, expanded and diversified to include more subjects aimed at the broader section of the population in working-class occupational structures. As a key arena of the modern state's interface with its citizens, education has been a crucial force in cultural reproduction and hegemony. Groups that have been historically marginalized in society (i.e., women, working classes, and ethnic minorities) have also sought access to and representation in public education while pressing for inclusion and the transformation of educational paradigms. Contestation of power in the political order echoes in the social sphere as a site of struggle for recognition.

With regard to religious values, the rise of the modern nation-state (at least since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648), and the Enlightenment, as well as the liberal political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Marxist revolutions, and state-led planning in the socialist bloc have promoted secularism as a central value of the West. With the post-Enlightenment divergence of reason and belief, the role of the church gradually diminished and was replaced with state power. The church-state separation confined religion to a severely limited sphere in terms of political power, while the state's expansion into social and private life effectively replaced the authority of religion, particularly in regard to intellectual production as clerical authority shifted to universitytrained experts. In the late modern era, educational discourses have retained a secularist outlook while making culturally appropriate adaptations that take into consideration a plurality of groups and recognize complexities derived from colonial histories and economic imbalances rooted in unequal power relations. International mandates for development as the ideology of modernization in the postwar era have sought to make more efficient rational bureaucracy located at the state and regional levels while designing a social order receptive to Western political and economic interests. Eventually, the tendency to assign more value to local culture has been aided by technological advances after trending toward decentralization in development policy. Today, cultural competence and respect for indigenous knowledge and heritage are key features of development models, but are not without their share of critics suspicious of modernizing agendas from above.

In Western countries, liberal approaches to the relationship of education and culture are premised on tolerance and strive toward inclusion as a key policy. Cultural sensitivity, multiculturalism, and interculturality seek to level the playing field or create a place at the table, as is said in the language of inclusion. In other words, such policies welcome historically excluded or marginalized groups on an ostensibly equal basis. Cultural sensitivity aims to heighten awareness of differences and neutralize intolerant behaviors in curricula and educational settings. Used primarily in the education of nurses, counsellors, and service industries, as well as in private enterprise that relies on clients' trust, cultural sensitivity boils down to effective communication and the implementation of policies that take into consideration cultural differences.

Multiculturalism is an umbrella term for policies that dispense with overt Western (Euro-American/white supremacist) assumptions and engage different cultures in turn; this is seen in the recognition of heroes and holidays at one end of the spectrum, and state support for autonomous culturalist organizations at the other. Multiculturalism seeks to integrate long established minorities and recently arrived refugees and migrants into the social, economic, and political order. Its logic of assimilation without imposing uniformity is seen as an antidote to social problems related to alienation and poverty as well as to segregation and separatism. Inclusion policies have also created a backlash from conservative groups that valorize the heritage of the majority, into which they insist ethnic minorities should be enculturated.

Interculturality has a theological background and practices direct engagement through dialogue based on the impetus to learn about the "other" and to forge mutual recognition around commonalities and differences. Due to its missionary origins, intercultural dialogue arouses suspicion of an ulterior motive of religious conversion. In the case of the first two approaches (i.e., cultural sensitivity and multiculturalism), criticism has been aimed at the framework in which inclusive practices are situated. The overarching structure is rarely called into question; rather, previously excluded groups are integrated into the existing order on presumably equal footing. The problem, however, is that the normative frame of secular liberalism does not challenge the roots of inequality and systemic racism. Instead, one has a seat at the table without any food, to paraphrase Malcolm X (1992, p. 97). Aside from psychological or symbolic effects, material deprivation has not been addressed adequately, let alone been ameliorated. The liberal project has lofty ideals and humanist values, but limited resources of critique as it is invested in a set of ideas that fundamentally privileges Western understanding and history. Particular notions of the individual, mind–body duality, materialism, empiricism, and other implicit assumptions filter into codified methodologies. In this respect, acceptance of difference occurs on a qualified basis. With invisible boundaries one must not cross, the politics and policies of tolerance only extend so far.

Another issue concerning multiculturalism is its definition of cultures as static rather than fluid, mutable, and nonessentialist. As a corrective, interculturality focuses on interaction instead of multiculturalism's approach of co-existence. Interculturality, which has competed with multiculturalism since the 1980s, also identifies a different dynamic (Coulby, 2006, pp. 246–247). Proponents of multiculturalism offer a diagnosis, while those of interculturality offer a cure (Aman, 2017, p. 3). Some have stressed coexistence to represent living side by side rather than a deeper engagement: living with versus living in (Antonsich, 2016, p. 470). Others, however, have not detected any significant differences between the two approaches (Meer & Modood, 2012).

As a policy, multiculturalism fell from favor in a number of contexts, sparking predictable backlash from the right and criticism from the left. Perhaps no better example is found than the experience of the United Kingdom, which has become bitterly disunited over matters of cultural policy, immigration, religion, and education. In the 1990s, the Greater London Council implemented a policy of multiculturalism to offer institutional support to ethnic organizations. Since the 2000s, Muslims have also come under attack for immigration policies and multiculturalism gone wrong. Some of the responses to recent waves of immigration, including from Eastern Europe, have included the rise and mainstreaming of the far right, a governmental Hostile Environment policy meant to instill fear in immigrants, the Windrush scandal that threatened Afro-Caribbeans long resident in Britain with deportation, and the ongoing Brexit imbroglio. Of course, all of this cannot be laid at the feet of multiculturalism. Yet the reaction to cultural diversity has moved the national discussion to the right, wherein groups on the extremes of public debate have moved into the mainstream. In light of these developments, the shift of messaging from multiculturalism to interculturalism may have had an evasive aspect in jettisoning the old term and its associated baggage. The institutionalization of multiculturalism also led to a shift from solidarity across minoritized groups, once identified by the collective political label as "Black," against a common enemy of racism to an archipelago of identities often competing for attention and resources. The late Ambalavaner Sivanandan of London's Institute of Race Relations and other activists and academics also lamented the new approach as a postmodern surrender to capital. They argued that working-class struggle and ethnic solidarity remain the most important strands of identity with which to forge "communities of resistance." Multicultural policies emblematic of Tony Blair's New Labour led to "navel-gazing" identity politics (Sivanandan, 1990, p. 28). While warning of proto-fascism and the racism inherent in the conception of Fortress Europe, the left critique of multiculturalism did not predict the extent of the reaction to Muslim immigration in the following decades. While the left critiqued the policy, its stakeholders did balkanize to an extent, with minority groups pursuing agendas independently of one another. Coalition politics never vanished, however, and efforts to defeat the extreme right (English Defense League, Nigel Farage, and the Brexit Party) have breathed new life into activism at all levels.

The experiments of the 1980s and 1990s came to an end with the upheavals of the new millennium. With the War on Terror, the new liberalism focused on the issue of integration (i.e., assimilation into dominant society) to the extent of banning visible characteristics of Muslim culture in the case of hyper-secularist nations like France. Proponents of Islamophobia have converged into a powerful, well-financed network that privately monitors and vilifies Muslim groups and individuals, while the state's surveillance apparatuses have also exercised coercive programs like Prevent (from the UK Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015), in which educators are required to report suspicious Muslim students to the government. Widespread concerns exist that such policies weaken free speech in the classroom, and more generally civil liberties and due process. In the United States, the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act have enabled the US military to detain citizens indefinitely without trial on the basis of secret evidence, effectively overriding 800 years of legal history. With the election of Donald Trump in the US, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction on the part of the establishment to support judicial independence and civil rights, which again united liberal, moderate, and traditional conservatives alike against the new popular rightist tendency.

The charge that multiculturalism leads to an illiberalism fundamentally incompatible with democratic order is usually furnished by a set of tropes, of Muslims immigrants speaking native languages only in "no-go" areas, where the hijab is worn, students attend madrasas, many mosques are found, halal restaurants abound, and the community supports terrorism to the extent of sending recruits to participate in jihad. In this scenario of multiculturalism gone wrong, the redundant Sharia law is right around the corner just past the kebab shop, and not far behind an Islamic state is viewed as the end game of immigration. In such projections, multiculturalism thus enables a fifth column by which Muslims are colonizing European countries; this has been proclaimed without irony or reference to the actual conquests, colonization, or military interventions that have historically driven migration. The appropriation of policies on pluralist tolerance for an illiberal agenda has had little bearing on reality; based on majoritarian discrimination, minorities actually face barriers to participation in many social arenas, including education.

Critiques of liberal and illiberal multiculturalism have advanced progressive perspectives that center on human rights, gender, and social equality and wish to make substantive changes to structural inequality. More radical approaches that oppose capitalist models of development or even the notion of development itself have also gained momentum (see Arturo Escobar, 2011; Lakshman Yapa, 1996). Renewed research into indigenous models have built upon the ideas of Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon in taking a decolonizing approach to the problem of colonial difference as it relates to education.

Eurocentrism and Decolonization Discourses around education and culture have evolved from the era of brute conquest and destruction of knowledge, archives, arts, and appropriation of culture and transfer of heritage to civilizing mission and the subsequent imperatives of development and democratization. On the surface, these modernization narratives emerge from humanitarian justifications for intervention and increasingly recognize individual human rights and collective self-determination. At the same time, practices that marked the formation of modernity have also continued, understood once as neocolonialism and more recently with some additional nuance as "coloniality of power." The global designs that accompanied colonization are intertwined to the extent that modernization and colonization are indistinguishable to the subjects of colonialism in what is today called the global South. Thus, initial calls for independence from direct or indirect colonial rule have also sought dramatic change in the spheres of economy and education. With national independence, many schools and universities have continued to replicate a European model, even while striving to create a new nationalist culture in sync with the modernizing drive.

Within Western societies, the presence of ethnic minorities, particularly those groups that have experienced displacement from their ancestral lands as indigenous people or as a coerced labor force, remains a paradox for the state. Based on myths of progress and equality, the practice of extermination and exclusion has yielded to the expectation that minorities assimilate into the dominant order. However, these groups often face severe discrimination from the same bodies that require them to integrate into society. The modernity narratives of settler colonial states (Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, USA) provide justification for conquest while also disguising histories of the expropriation of land and resources, as well as exploitation of labor and culture, inhibiting the understanding of minority and majority alike.

Challenges to colonial practices and their associated narratives have been issued since their inception and have gained increasing force as global norms are called into question. Insurrections and social movements have challenged both the unequal dynamics of power as well as representations of marginalized groups. In the arena of education, ethnic groups have demanded control over schooling to teach history and culture, creating a new self-image and forging solidarity to change society. Steven Biko, student leader and founder of the Black Consciousness Movement in apartheid South Africa, stated that "the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." In *Decolonizing the Mind,* Ngugi wa Thiongo explained the rationale for writing in Kikuyu, arguing for Swahili as the *lingua franca* for Africa as opposed to French, English, or any other European language. Pioneering interventions such as these have gained force in the ensuing decades. In the United States, students successfully mobilized to demand ethnic studies in 1969, a struggle that continues today as K-12 schools and universities implement this curricular reform. From South Africa the Rhodes Must Fall student movement has spread globally and morphed into Fees Must Fall, pressing for decolonization of universities and state-subsidized tuition while changing the configuration of the cultural landscape. Of late, social movements in Western countries, made up largely of university and high school students, have also led the charge against overt racism and its symbols, calling for decolonization and an end to structural racism.

# Islam, Culture, and Education

Multiculturalism draws attention to the histories of communities, while interculturality and cultural sensitivity respectively stress interreligious and interpersonal dynamics. As an example of a cultural paradigm of education, Muslim schools has been a source of intense debate in a number of contexts, chiefly for unsettling norms of modernity. The majority of Muslim pupils remain in public education in most countries; however, a parallel madrasa system largely depends on endowments (*waqf, awqaf* ), local membership, and state support. In spite of the attention to Pakistani madrasas, only 0.3%–7.8% of students attend. At one time as a measure to promote girls' education, *madaris* in Pakistan received USAID and World Bank funding. Policies since the military interventions in the Muslim world after 9/11 have focused on madrasas as a "breeding ground for radicalization" (Sas et al., 2020, p. 6). The introduction of the madrasa system or variants of it into Western contexts provokes anxieties about the limits of cultural pluralism. Islamic education is often viewed as a foreign, antimodern culture in Western (European and North American) contexts, while being regarded as a living tradition that has been localized throughout the Afroasiatic world. Over a wide expanse of the globe, Islam has provided a robust foundation for organizing formal and informal education in numerous arrangements, including variations of the *halaqa*, *maktab*, *madrasa*, university, and *hawza*. Muslim educationists assert that Islam since its inception as a coherent theological and cultural system has valued learning for all, particularly through the written word. It has the reputation of a rich textual tradition (Hirschler, 2011), mass literacy (Wagner, 1993), female education (Sayeed, 2013; Bano, 2017), translation movements (Gutas, 2012), endowed colleges (Makdisi, 1981), revival of science (Huff, 2017), and intellectual rebirth in Europe that, somewhat ironically, prefigured the concepts of modernity (Makdisi, 1990). In modern times the return to the sources of the Qur'an and Sunnah have been used as a blueprint for fomenting resistance to both colonial rule and postcolonial regimes, and for indigenizing education. The multifarious attempts to accomplish these aims have sometimes meant conflict between Western and Islamic education; however, it has often been the graduates of Western universities that have gravitated toward Islamic thought as an ideology.

With regard to advanced learning, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the foremost experiment in creating a new society, culture, and educational values based on particular scriptural readings and historical experience of Islamic scholarship. A focal point of resistance to the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–1979), the teaching establishment in Qom (*hawza-yi 'ilmiyya)* continues to specialize in Islamic law as well as numerous fields in the traditional disciplines. Since the Iranian Revolution a significant expansion of colleges and institutes and an increase in enrollments have been seen; it made an impact on the international stage, with Islam becoming increasingly integrated with governmental authority to an unprecedented degree. Also closely aligned with the state is Al-Azhar in Cairo, which has long been the most prestigious center of learning in the Sunni Muslim world despite the challenges from the reformist approach of Medina, Saudi Arabia. Hybrid institutions such as Islamic universities seek the best of both worlds by integrating traditional religious learning alongside conventional approaches to the disciplines using a modern arrangement. The Islamization of Knowledge project has established universities and institutes in Malaysia, Pakistan, and the United States (Abaza, 2002). The post-secular revival in Turkey has seen the proliferation of religious schools and organizations dedicated to Islamic instruction like Diyanet and other foundations that have been remarkably successful.

The search for new models or third ways has led a variety of actors (clerics, politicians, scholars, activists, missionaries, students) to posit religious belief as a comprehensive ideology that offers rejoinders to agnosticism and atheism. The global resurgence of Islam serves as an alternative to secular liberalism, ethnic nationalism, scientific materialism, and traditional conservatism. The process of seeking truth that is involved in embracing faith can be understood as an educational activity unto itself. Promoting varieties of Islam such as Salafism, Shi'ism, and Sufism, proselytizing individuals and entities compete for adherents and spur debates on the nature and scope of interpretation and enculturation. If Islamic orientations toward culture are attached to the Qur'an, hadith and scholarly tradition, then to what extent one reinterprets these sources also depends on the overall goals. For Arkoun (2002), Kadivar (2008), Madjid (1994), Soroush (2002), and T. ¯aha (1987) and others, modernist approaches borrow heavily from Western thinkers. The approach of decolonization also imports categories from the Western experience, albeit non-European sources such as ethnic studies, and brings them into conversation with Islamic ideas. Thus "Islamic feminism," a recurring theme in progressive and decolonial interventions, provokes epistemological questions of practice regarding Westernization from the left side of the political spectrum. The argument that feminism is intrinsic to Islamic theology shifts the onus from acquiring a new orientation based on external influence to rereading sources for a new understanding of endemic traditions.

While not a serious competitor with public schools in many Western countries, Islamic education is thought to pose a challenge to the normative secular orthodoxy. However, Muslim schools have been incorporated into a semi-private network through faith-based initiatives within the mainstream that redirects public resources by way of charter schools, vouchers, and other neoliberal reforms in state education that promote school choice. From this angle, Muslim schools might serve as less of a force for Islamization than that of privatization. Meanwhile, in conventional state schools (e.g., in the United Kingdom), accommodations for religious attire and the provision of halal meals and facilities for prayer have made education accessible to Muslims and thus modified school culture if not the content and delivery of curriculum. At the tertiary level as well, one can take courses in Islamic studies and attend university as an observant Muslim, participating in Muslim student unions or other organizations. The integration of Muslims into mainstream institutions marks an evolution in societies toward accommodating differences without necessarily addressing inequality in the communities from which they hail. Tatari (2009) used a dynamic compound framework to explain the state accommodation of Muslims that draw on several theories such as resource mobilization and political opportunity structure theory.

The questioning of nation-states and the inter-state system as colonial impositions to divide and conquer with lasting ethnic divisions has led to the formulation of "border crossing" as a political, cultural, and disciplinary practice (Anzaldúa, 1987, pp. 10–13). Traversing the border subverts the fixed territorialities of colonial projects. Because culture cannot be confined to a nation-state, the frame of diaspora provides another way to explore how people maintain connections to a homeland, while recreating and hybridizing culture from the vantage point of their dispersal. Moreover, South-South linkages decenter Western hegemony and remove the hegemonic power as authority and arbiter.

The decolonial turn in education has yielded incisive studies on curriculum, pedagogy, and literacy (Hernandez-Zamora, 2010; McLaren, 2000; Paraskeva, 2016). Looking from afar has brought nuance to concepts such as *interculturalidad,* "to break out of the prison-house of colonial vocabulary" in the Bolivia of Evo Morales and the grassroots movement that elected him (Aman, 2017, p. 12). That decolonial concepts emerged in the Caribbean and Latin America provides a rationale for "creolization" of theory, a fusion of ideas grounded in experience that uses "new methods and noncanonical interpretations" (Gordon & Roberts, 2014, p. 3). A locus of critique beyond the metropole has facilitated paradigm shifts that depart from Eurocentric models. While intercultural approaches privilege dialogue on the basis of equality of cultures, the rediscovery of precolonial ways of education has problematized multiculturalism and highlighted epistemic decolonization. These scholars and practitioners question narratives of modernity, the Enlightenment, and progress in both the capitalist West and the socialist East, seeking a "third way" that does not reinforce categories borne of European experience. In this way the periphery produces knowledge of the center. It is imperative too that the cart does not come before the horse; in other words, traditions that have withstood the colonial onslaught and survived into the present should not be reduced to a unidimensional framework of decolonization in which one size fits all.

Conclusion Theorizing the intersection of education and culture has implications for all aspects of organized education, including curriculum, learning, pedagogy, administration, and policy. In spite of modernizing tendencies, education itself is not a neutral practice, but a cultural form embedded in sociocultural practices, languages, histories, and power relations. As with ideology, culture shapes systems at multiple levels rather than operating as a discrete variable. Like teachers in the classroom, actors within educational systems require a self-reflective ethos to meet contemporary challenges, paying particular attention to the ways in which schools reproduce inequality. While some ideologies have taken an instrumentalist view of culture that identifies it as superstructure, neoliberal policies have leveraged the idea that cultural models possess an internal dynamic of its own, which can be employed in strategies of privatization.

Returning to its etymology, culture conveys cultivation and is closely related to education and refinement. Classical liberalism offers a broad framework that aims to provide a balanced curriculum extolling virtues of understanding, reason, and tolerance as exemplified in the liberal arts. It remains the enduring approach to education and is based on assimilating difference by way of understanding into existing frameworks. However, in spite of recognition of minoritized groups, dominant frameworks tend to preserve established historical narratives of progress and order and thereby the grounds for perpetuating inequality. Challenging the myths of the majority, minorities voice uncomfortable truths by presenting counternarratives to that of the nation-state. A range of responses to such challenges include reinforcement of the dominant view by rejecting other voices (cultural backlash) or by establishing autonomous spaces for their expression (multiculturalism). The approach of interculturality offers relief from essentialist or primordial accounts of culture that on one hand may reject Eurocentric universalism or alternatively the contribution of minorities, including indigenous people whose societies prefigured the establishment of the modern state. Another approach currently riding a wave of popularity is found in the decolonial turn that has reframed debates, asserting coloniality to be the underside of modernity. Situating conceptual modernity in the age of the Iberian conquest of the Americas, rather than during the Enlightenment, contextualizes epistemic violence as the condition of possibility in the Western intellectual tradition, as well as the many responses to it. It raises the issue of epistemology (i.e., knowledge, theory, and methodology) and attempts to recover cultures of resistance to colonialism and coloniality without falling into nativism or primitivism. A new generation of scholars, educators, and activists has promoted decolonization in education by highlighting third (African, Arab, Asian, Islamic, Latin American) and fourth (indigenous, Pacific Islander) ways that yield new theoretical and practical engagements by questioning culture and education. In response to decolonial critiques, proponents of multiculturalism, interculturality, and cultural sensitivity are reinventing liberal discourses. More widely, public pressure to address legacies of colonialism and racism in educational organizations, theories, and methods has held forth the promise of reassessing conceptualizations of culture in future policy and research agendas.

## References

Makdisi, G. (1990). *The rise of humanism in classical Islam and the Christian West*. Edinburgh University Press.

Malcolm, X. (1992). *February 1965: The final speeches*(S. Clark, Ed.). Pathfinder.

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# Does Religious Education Have a Future in 21th Century? An Anthropologist on the Continued Relevance of Islamic Education

*Mohammad Talib*

Religious education in different faith traditions combine the theoreticalmoral and technical-practical sides of knowledge either in a single or a range of kindred institutions. The two sides of knowledge have seldomly been disunited as noticeably as one finds in the modern-postmodern contexts. Modern professions that dominate production and management of goods and services can easily dispense with moral-ethical skills that link a producer with co-workers as a community in the common universe of belief, belonging, and the broader collective living.

The present article focuses on Islamic education and how its tradition was able to provide vital moral resources that made material civilization possible. This chapter analyzes the tradition of Islamic education and its interconnectedness to other sites of the wider world where the symbolic resources of faith are routinely produced, circulated, and meaningfully

M. Talib (B)

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© The Author(s) 2022

Y. Alpaydın and C. Demirli (eds.), *Educational Theory in the 21st Century*, Maarif Global Education Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9640-4\_6

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Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

appropriated in the making of the ideological and the material commons for collective living. For a start, one may refer to Norenzaya (2013, p. 59) quote from Jean Ensminger (1997, pp. 7–8) on how Muslim traders had a non-material interest in honoring their contracts that lowered transaction costs, boosted long distance trade, and crossed cultural barriers across the Sahara and the rest of Africa.

The moral and the technical-practical side of education resulted from a massive disjunction under colonial rule. This was the juncture where Islamic education was held to account for its relevance in the making of modern professions. At this point in the history of Muslim civilization, the tradition of education became stereotyped and demonized. This paper examines the modern popular discourse on reforming Islamic education as well as its critiques and limitations.

In considering religious education between Islamic tradition and its future, the present article seeks to unpack two contrasting scholarly imaginings of the issue: First, Islamic education has been imagined as part of the state-led discourse on curricular reform. The literature explicating this view seems to suggest that the madrasa system (an equivalent of religious seminaries in other faith traditions) through their curricula appeared to produce a mentality fostering faith-induced politics in the contemporary world. In this imagining, tradition is held to be part of the problem and modernity is where the problem is likely to be redressed.

The second imagining refers to the social and historical reality of Islamic education beyond the modern discourse reforming Islamic education. The word "beyond" here is about the realm outside the fold of the popular discourse, which is mostly in the observer immediate field of vision. It is about the institution of religious education and the kindred wider culture that exists within its social context, mostly anchored in its local constituencies.

When the two contrasting ways of being human in tradition and modernity stand face to face, an analyst is expected to resist viewing the two positions over an evolutionary or hierarchical period. To privilege modernity over tradition in matters of dealing with Islamic education is to ignore at least two aspects of the tradition of Islamic education: one is the variety of internal and external symbolic goods it produces, and the other is the equally diverse sites where these goods have been appropriated for varied outcomes. One way forward is to maintain conversation between the Islamic education and those of other religious traditions regarding their common challenges in modern times and how a conceptual engagement of Islamic education can be used to make sense of the predicaments in modern times that its graduates are likely to face.

# Contemporary Discourse

on Reforming Islamic Education This paper selects the emphasis of the popular discourse on reducing the content of religious sciences and substituting these with instrumentalsecular studies. This is then reflected onto the global discourse on the reform of Islamic education, in particular the madrasas as the historic institution in the transmission of valued knowledge. This reform is focused on mainstreaming the curriculum. One hallmark of mainstreaming is how it replaces religious subjects with non-religious ones. The low employability of madrasa graduates in modern professions is raised as a serious issue. The proposal for remedying this is to develop skills that are supposed to match the requirements of the modern market. The discourse on mainstreaming madrasas assumes the religious curriculum to be ill-equipped for supplying the required aptitudes and skills that would enable madrasa students to secure productive roles in the modern industrial market. The view on employment in relation to the modern state and market sector is seen in a purely instrumentalist sense. A skill is considered relevant if it can be exchanged for a wage in the modern market. The instrumentalist relationship between the skill of a worker and employment is evident in the job's wage. Skills are supposed to be instrumental in bringing about certain productive outcomes like marketized goods or services. Does the popular discourse seeking to reform madrasas make a distinction between the process of doing work and the achievement of certain targets in the production of goods? The simple answer is that employment is strictly conceived in productive terms, namely in terms of pure outcomes without adequately recognizing the processes of skilled and spiritual engagement with the material. Philosophically speaking, the distinction between doing and making an article for exchange is predominantly ignored in the commercial-business world.

In contemporary times, the stereotyping of Islamic education is especially focused on madrasas, the way these exist as an institution, their curricular content, and the assumptions that their social relevance is questionable. The social science literature on the reform of madrasa education is limited to answering how the institution ought to become more adaptable to the urgencies and requirements of the modern society and economy. Such a modernist reading of existing madrasas is focused on identifying certain knowledge deficits in the curriculum that render them obsolete in the modern market. Following this recognition, steps are taken to overcome this deficit by bringing the institution closer to the employment market as well as to the secular mainstream of modern society. In this manner of thinking, Islamic education is regarded as a passive entity that must adapt to the wider mainstream of society.

What follows is an analysis of one epitome of Islamic education: the madrasas as viewed from afar to see how the institution has responded on its own terms to contemporary challenges.

The stereotyping of madrasas acquired a global stature after 9/11. Its echo has been heard in the policy idioms for reforming or modernizing madrasas. Like the complex imaginings of Orientalism, the stereotype about madrasas is not merely a passing idea but a pervasive discourse. These ideas have been embedded in institutional frameworks and propagated through high circulation among like-minded mutually networked scholars. Scholarly preconceptions on madrasas are produced from a distance in the local contexts where they are applied. Applying the stereotype to a concrete case of a madrasa is not for validating its representations but for exercising policy regulations. As an ideational construct, the stereotypical madrasa scarcely equates to the institutions as they actually are.

A madrasa that produces militancy in its popular discourse is not about a concrete institution of Islamic education but a consequence of others' application of rules and sanctions to a party that is assumed to be deviant. Here, the religious institution is not what it believes, practices, or prescribes but what it has been labeled or imputed to be. The stereotype is not potent on its own, but it does acquire power to regulate, transform, and even demolish madrasas in certain contexts when factors such as state policy or the covert methods of powerful global actors come into play.

The institutions of Islamic education in the third world exist in an uncertain relationship with their governments that struggle to remain afloat in the strategic globalized mainstream. Most of these governments are caught up between compulsions of underdeveloped economies and the recurrent need to seek a popular mandate for internationally directed policies on reforming Islamic education. In contrast, the modal reality of the Islamic education is located on the margins of the state and the market. This accords a relative institutional and cultural autonomy to the Islamic education that is helpful in anchoring it into its community of beneficiaries for its legitimacy and survival. This autonomy removes the pressure from modal Islamic education to compare their courses with the national curricula or their economic status with state-maintained schools and universities. As part of the rural and tribal economies in the countries with a Muslim presence, madrasas tend to subsist on what a peasant and tribal economy offers in terms of its agricultural produce to support their students, teachers, and the larger institution.

An Islamic education that is so-called "good" from the policy lens of a secular state is one that has reformed its curriculum by teaching subjects like sciences, social sciences, mathematics, English, and computer literacy. In fact, the meaning of reform boils down to how far Islamic education has departed from the traditions of its own curriculum and allowed modern subjects into its syllabus. This argument forms the main thrust of the International Development Department Report (Nair, 2009) on the state and madrasas in India. Modernizing the madrasa curriculum is imagined in terms of having madrasas include modern courses and Islamic education being brought within the state's regulation.

The stereotypical view of a problem-riddled Islamic education is described in terms of its curriculum's lack of modern courses. The assumption remains that the absence of modern subjects fails to provide the required skills for its graduates in the modern labor market. The second motif is Islamic education's institutional non-dependence on state. According to this view, this non-dependence produces a mentality that cuts off a sizeable population from the mainstream of society. Finally, the third motif is the dubious independence possessed by a madrasa whose source of funds is not channeled through the state.

Analyzing these motifs of a problem-riddled madrasa is possible in terms of at least two supportive myths. The first myth refers to the fact that a student brought up on the curriculum of modern subjects is eventually absorbed into the ranks of the supposedly universal class (i.e., the middle class) and supported by industrial-bureaucratic institutions. Contrary to this stereotypical expectation, neither the middle classes nor the modern education system have the property of universalism. The stereotypical view of Islamic education flows from the classical Pygmalion<sup>1</sup>

<sup>1</sup> This analogy is based on George Bernard Shaw's play *Pygmalion*, filmed as *My Fair Lady*, a story of a language professor who undertakes to reform the speech of a flower selling girl who, when dressed suitably, can pass for a cultured member of high society.

syndrome: the mind-set of a professor of linguistics convinced of their ability to teach people with poor dialect to talk like ladies and gentlemen. The principle of *Pygmalion* transposed on modern scholarship gives birth to an observer who expects a school in Islamic education to conform to the template of a modern institution. According to this expectation, Islamic education should deal with modern subjects, impart computer literacy, and allow for programs to be watched from satellite TV.

According to the myth, if madrasa graduates are unable to find a place in the modern job market, it is because they have done *fiqh* instead of physics. Those familiar with developing economies would know that the nature of teaching subjects on their own does not always create jobs in the market. A state policy on reforming madrasas should be informed of their varied ethnographic contexts to avoid painting a madrasa with a single brush. Talib (2018) is seen to have furthered the line of this argument. Islamic education equips its students' lives with symbolic reserves for coping with life crises and organizing their collective lives through religious services and ceremonies. Madrasa education needs to be part of the division of labor between the sacred and secular spheres of a community. Ammar's anthropological account of growing up in an Egyptian village describes admission to the madrasa as a rite of passage in a peasant society (1966).

One must also be critical about the idea that reforming Islamic education through modern curriculum, as it may not always have the magical outcomes as imagined in policy. Science can be taught through rote learning (e.g., memorizing the periodic table by heart). Such a science becomes even more irrelevant in informing learner's experiences or creating skills for employment. Thus, the repeated reference to science subjects is usually not with awareness of the history of the modernization of traditional societies, where imitation rather than creative learning is what had dominated their teaching.

The second myth seems to say that Islamic education instills intolerance among its students because its traditional curriculum fails to produce the universal public sphere that respects democracy and secularism. On this point, taking the example of a typical madrasa as a category of thought seems to have been included in the latest version of Orientalist thought. In the popular discourse, Islamic education distinguishes the international "us and them" (i.e., the societies of the global powers contrasted with the communities in the Muslim world and deserving to be reformed).

The negative stereotyping of madrasas in policy discourse is neither as recent as 9/11 nor the end of the Cold War. Rather, it has a long prehistory, perhaps as old as the history of colonialism in the Muslim societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East when madrasas were questioned over the criteria of their utility of knowledge. For purposes of illustration, I will share one example from South Asia.

In 1824, the champion of the notion of useful learning, James Mill, termed learning in an Islamic seminary to be "frivolous" (as cited in Zaman, 2002, p. 64). The 1835 policy of English education under William Bentinck in British India snapped the relationship that had existed between Islamic education and jobs in the public services. This established at least two elements of the stereotype on madrasas, that they were neither producing scientific rationality nor generating employable skills for entry into the modern market.

The notion of utility comes handy in dismissing the traditional Islamic education. But rarely is utility as a cultural category recognized as not necessarily confined to its extrinsic merit alone. Utility has deeply intrinsic merits that require journeying into the madrasa narrative with its own terms. The notion of *al- ilm al-nafi* [useful knowledge] (Zaman, 2002, p. 65) figures in the discourses of medieval scholars, who among other things referred to knowledge that supports virtuous acts. Mufti Jamil Ahmad Thanawi, who hailed from the prominent madrasa in Lahore, Jamia Ashrafiyya, listed 30 useful purposes madrasas fulfill in society. According to Thanawi, useful knowledge is only religious knowledge to a madrasa (Zaman, 2002, p. 81).

For researchers who consider the institution's own perceptions on Islamic education to be vital, probing into internal conversations among its stakeholders is important. One observer on the well-known historic Madrasa Darul Uloom Deoband in North India, Maulana Manazir Ahsan Gilani (1943, p. 275) commented on how one of the founders of the institution, Maulana Qasim Nanotawi, had spoken about the issue of acquiring basic skills in modern subjects while continuing to study religious sciences. One worry was about borrowing modern sciences as if it were a *pewand* [patch] over the *manqulat* [revealed Islamic sciences] and *ma'qulat* [rational sciences] in the madrasa curriculum. Adding books on modern sciences to the madrasa curriculum is not without its own problems. Rather than changing the madrasa curriculum, another way was suggested for allowing students to pursue modern sciences after completing their madrasa degree. Maulana Nanotwi considered different combinations of religious and modern subjects, side by side and consecutively. He clarified that the exercise must not assume the 'ulama to be devoid of reason. Assessing the debate, Gilani indicated the issue of reform to be able to be resolved by keeping in view the knowledge outcomes expected of a curriculum. One may later investigate obstacles that prevent the achievement of the chosen goal. Reform must not be likened to someone talking about a person's *kurta* [loose collarless shirt] made of coarse cotton and proposing to replace it with silk while forgetting that the purpose of wearing kurta was to cover the body. Therefore, while blending the religious sciences with the secular studies, one must not lose sight of the Islamic seminaries' wider purposes of imparting the valued knowledge.

The narrative of the Islamic education in its own terms recognizes its institutional site to be imparting sacred knowledge while also engaging in self-interpretation of its practices and communicating them to its relevant community. For instance, a madrasa graduate taking up a job in a village mosque is routinely consulted in various matters specific to everyday life and its breakdowns. The cosmology madrasas produce extend into the social logic of living in a community.

The discourse on reforming Islamic education that steers through the proponents of modernization subsists on who has the privilege to diagnose the problem in the existing curriculum. Neither the community fostering an institution of Islamic education nor the state modernizing it should be privileged over the other. In most Muslim societies by and large, the community-based Islamic education and those under state recognition are currently separated by asymmetrical relations of power. A lasting condition for curricular reform lies in a democratic relationship between the community and the state. While the community should be able to disseminate its valued knowledge, the state's policy should enable madrasas to educationally develop organically in continuity with its tradition and with respect to what the wider society expects of it within a democratic framework.

# The Future of Islamic Education:

The Relevance of Its Past In thinking about the future of Islamic education in continuity with its past, the present analysis selects one modernist critique of Islamic education, the critique that its graduates have grim prospects of employability in the modern market. Here, modern jobs refer to the professions and occupations that are vital to the world of work, market, and trade. In the following sections, this paper argues the Islamic educational tradition to groom its graduates into an ethical self-fashioning that ensures a moral continuity between learning and work, and the construction of a wider community of common belonging. The contemporary reformist discourse proposes to inject instrumental sciences into the curriculum of Islamic education so that an individual competes with others in disaggregated tasks. In contrast, the tradition of Islamic education sought to create the necessary symbolic-moral competence in their schools or seminaries that was vital to the material basis of shared existence. In modern parlance, such a belonging is equivalent to citizenship. This moral competence formed the backbone for an individual to be useful, virtuous, and responsible toward the needs of collective living.

The universalist urges of Islamic education addressed the particularity of a given context where ethical self, moral conduct, the social role of learning, and work were seen in a continuum. This is opposite to the top-down policy universals where Islamic education is considered homogenized while remaining indifferent to the specificities of a particular context. The world-making impulse of Islamic education evokes parallels in the emerging modern critique of alternative education. The tradition of alternative education addresses the deep moral crisis of the instrumentalist and individualistic modes of modern schooling and the transmission of knowledge. Among the notable references in the wider field of education, one may invoke Georg Kerschensteiner for stating how learning and work are viewed as a source of self-fulfillment, character formation, self-discovery, and spiritual enlightenment as well as community building (Refer Winch, 2006, pp. 381–396).

In conceptualizing the universe of Islamic education, one clarification is in order: the institutional producers and disseminators of Islamic education are imagined in a maximalist sense, where maximalist refers to the entire field of religious education both formal and informal as well as explicit and implicit. Each of these sites produce a world-view where the bearers and consumers of Islamic education are connected through the chain of symbolic value in the making of civilization. This consists of Islamic education within or beyond the madrasa tradition, Sufi orders, and related sites of market (craft guilds) and civil society that draw upon the valued and sacred knowledge which the tradition of Islamic education produces within the common symbolic ecosystem. For understanding the efficacy of the product of religious education, this paper employs examples of moral conduct on the site of learning or in the context of their use in the wider world. This section gathers together evidentiary fragments from various parts of the Muslim world, from India, some countries in Africa, and Ottoman Turkey to suggest that Islamic education not only schooled its learners in the tradition of valued knowledge but also instilled moral virtue and an ability to engage in sacred cosmology as active members. This allowed the acquired scholarly knowledge, skills and dispositions to have a positive bearing on trade and commerce, symbolic world-making, and the work ethos of the artisanal craft as well as civil and military services. In the imagining exists an inter-relationship between sacred knowledge and the performance of vocation, trade, artisans, and crafts. The vital presence of Islamic knowledge and moral virtues is evidently supportive of various productive roles. In the context of a waning religious tradition, its various segments belong to the scattered milieus, making it difficult to connect these into some semblance of an integrated world. The symbolic resources of faith and sacred knowledge were variedly produced not only within the fold of Islamic education but outside of it as well in a range of kindred institutions. These belonged to the division of labor in a common social order.

The graduates groomed in Islamic education in the general universe of madrasa education, embody the religious cosmology and codes of conduct that are consummated in various contexts of collective living. Wherever the graduates fill productive roles in trade, artisanal workplaces, or craftsmanship in the making of objects of aesthetic and practical use, there is evidence of the religious orientations and attitudes toward productive roles. This helps dispel the myth implicit in the policy initiatives that the curriculum of Islamic education needs to be modernized for greater relevance to the modern world of market and statecraft. The presupposition in the modernization of Islamic education is that its excessive emphasis on revelatory sciences at the expense of instrumental and scientific subjects disjoints it from the scientific ethos of the modern world. The modernization argument holds that Islamic education has little demonstrable potential for building the modern world. In contrast, the historical evidence regarding Islam and the arts of the Ottoman empire clarifies how Islamic art was not merely about mosques, religious texts, and artefacts but to also have extended prominently into secular arts produced for the states, rulers, and dynasties that followed the Islamic faith. Islamic art includes many media, materials, and functions such as the art in worship, in trade and commerce, in historical, scientific and government documents, in items of personal adornment, and in metal arts, ceramics, woven textiles, and carpets (Asian Art Museum Education, 2020).

What follows is an attempt to survey selected literature from the history of the Islamic education and to understand how its spiritual resources and related intellectual reserves had helped build diverse fields in the production, distribution, and exchange over long distances of material goods. The disparate sites of the vital engagements that employ religious conceptions offer ample testimony that ethical and spiritual resources remain vital in the making of the secular world. The role the institutions of Islamic education have in the supply of the religious conceptions and cosmologies attendant upon the making of the material goods and services in the surrounding world is currently available in scattered sites. These may be gathered together in scholarly representations to retrieve the interconnections that may be inferred either in the presence of a salient religious orientation in places of production or in the existence of the institutions of Islamic education and Sufi lodges as part of the common ecology in the domain of religious and cultural reproduction or sites of civilizational creation. This just as much requires a close-up exploration to identify the sources of the continuous supply of religious conceptions in various productive institutional settings beyond the framework of Islamic education. The modernist discourse proposes that, with an injection of modern secular sciences, a curricular reform should enhance the employability of graduates of Islamic education in the contemporary market. This paper inverses the curricular reform argument to say that the symbolic resources of Islamic education have been vital in the making of the material civilization. This is akin to saying that the material world has always subsisted on the symbolic resources of Islamic education and that its reform for modernization can scarcely afford to discard the traditions it seeks to reorganize.

In taking account the scattered milieus working with the blends of Islamic values and productive ventures, the present analysis critically distances itself from the mega-narrative of the modernity-tradition hierarchy wherein the tradition plays a subordinate role in explaining the emergence of the modern world. The attendant policy perceptions view religious traditions to be either playing second fiddle or simply receding into their socially privatized spheres. The possibility of critically distancing from the grand narratives of the modern-tradition dichotomy lies in viewing Islamic education to be integral to the production of the secular world and far removed from being merely an insular site of the transaction and inculcation of valued knowledge.

The institutions of Islamic education are viewed to be a part of the assembly of kindred fields whose product of internal goods of knowledge, moral virtue, and cosmological imagination have helped build the wider world. Islamic education is not about some knowledge-packed curriculum as modern reform initiatives believe. The salient emphasis of the institutionalized form of personal transmission of valued knowledge between the teacher and learner has made the embodiment of knowledge possible. Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud elaborated upon this view through the Javanese Islamic scholar Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (2009). Al-Attas' dwelled on the notion of *Ta 'dib* [discipline] to be the foundation that has made the personalized transmission of knowledge possible between teachers (*mu'addib*) and students. The author claimed *Ta'dib* to have enabled the making of distinguished professionals and authority figures in various walks of collective life in history from the Umayyads to the Ottomans. The term *ta'dib*, enabling the development of senses, intellect and morals, expands pure knowledge into the persona of a learner. Its success as part of learning outcomes includes an indelible mark of spirituality in the students' personality alongside knowledge and wisdom.

Here a distinction needs to be drawn between internal and external goods (MacIntyre, 2007) that an institution and its implementations produce. This distinction is drawn from philosophy to say that Islamic education and spirituality formed the cornerstones for framing various institutions of state, civil society, and market to cohere into a common moral order. The upshot of this distinction is that the internally produced culture was vital for maintaining the standards of excellence and cooperation among actors in the production of civilization goods and the related world. The element of virtue and spiritual disposition a person acquires in Islamic education are believed to produce the values of courage, justice, and honesty: courage when facing risk and loss in performing one's role, justice in being both accurate and fair when performing one's productive role, and honesty when transferring the learned skills and aptitudes to the designated outcomes and products. West (2018, p. 29) examined MacIntyre's conception of these virtues and their bearing on business ethics. To be virtuous and spiritual (i.e., being a craftsman or an artist) means to ensure the quality and standards in the practice of one's vocation. Virtue is about the internal good that wards off the corruptions of power and commerce and the temptations of profiteering.

The ethnographies from Africa show how the spread of Islam had enabled artisans to labor together in work communities and combine patterns in producing and performing their ethnic and religious lore. Trimingham (as cited in Dilley, 1987, p. 247) described how the performance of craft involved the transmission of hereditary lore, where the belief in supernatural powers was reinforced and the ritual participation combined the spiritual and mystical understanding through the occupations being practiced and the material being handled (1959, p. 137). Dilley's ethnography shows how Islam had expanded through the variety of Muslim artisans plying their skills as ironworkers, goldsmiths, and weavers quite broadly throughout West Africa had a veneer of religious faith. This is further reiterated in an illustration from *Bilad al-Sudan* (Loimeier, 2013, pp. 103–104) where the Qur'anic schools were not limited to memorizing the sacred text but also provided skills and social knowledge that could be meaningfully translated into social competence.

The artisanal culture in the Muslim world appeared to have blended artisanal skills with spiritual resources for maintaining craftsmen's high motivation to pursue their craft with diligence and attentiveness. Accounts of artisans and craftsmen support the view how engaging with the sacred text of the Islamic tradition (e.g., reciting the Qur'an) was linked to gaining focus and mental poise in the hand–eye coordination needed to produce material artifacts to perfection. At the same time, the spiritual dimension also took care of the contingency and periodic collapse of the familiar meanings and life supports. Thus, a semblance of mental fortitude was routinely fostered for dealing with the conditions that made the world of craft possible.

For this, one needs to unpack the component of *adab*, the paramount skill whose context of deployment doesn't distinguish between the socalled secular or religious domains.

Ahmad Shalaby (1954) wrote on the importance the early period of Islam laid on understanding at least a given selection of verses from the Qur'an. Having students learn 10 verses until they knew their meaning and implemented what the verses enjoined became customary. Quoting Ahmad ibn Hanbal's al-Musnad, Shalaby (pp. 19–20) wrote how Ibn 'Umar had spent eight years learning Surah al-Baqarah and that the Companions had said, "The man who was able to read *al-Baqrarah* and al-Imran seemed a great man amongst us." Furthermore, Shalaby observed how learning the Qur'an preceded everything, and religious instruction came next. Shalaby quoted from Al-Jahiz's (Vol. II, p. 92) *al-Bayan* that the curriculum drawn up by 'Umar ibn Khattab had an instructive suggestion for people in various parts of the Muslim world:

Teach your children swimming, horsemanship, famous proverbs, and good poetry. The main subject taught in children' schools was Adab so that the schools of children were called Majalis al-Adabs. During the time of the Umayyad's era, those who had to be schooled to join the state offices travelled to Bedouins' encampments where they lived for a specified duration for learning reading, writing, religion, the art of war, and athletics. The objectives of such education were to produce what was called at that time the "Well-Rounded Man. (Semaan, 1966, p. 194)