Today it has become a common saying that education is being given but upbringing (tarbiyat) is not. Perhaps you too have heard it or said it. The basic meaning of this sentence is that people have plenty of opportunities to acquire knowledge and they are learning, but they are not acting on how a human being ought to live.
If this sentence and the assumption behind it are analysed in depth, the matter is not so simple. Learning and acting are different things, but their spheres are not separate from each other; they are connected, so some measure of action is always included in learning. Let us understand this issue in detail.
The things a person learns relate to many different subjects, and their purposes also differ.
The most fundamental knowledge concerns belief ('aqidah). Through it a person learns his own reality, the essence and attributes of God, his own relationship and the universe's relationship with God, and the purpose of life.
Today, all modern educational institutions, which stand on the creed of modernity, either teach ignorance in all these matters one-sidedly, or teach some correct things alongside the ignorance so that its effect can be offset. In the first case, children are learning only ignorance, so how will they find knowledge in their lives? In the second case, they learn both knowledge and ignorance, with ignorance greater in both proportion and duration, and so they fall into conflict at the level of belief.
The second subject of knowledge is what a person should do and how he should do it, that is, the teaching of fiqh. We acquire hardly any teaching of fiqh either. An important point is that fiqh (law) is always built upon belief.
The third subject is tazkiyah: what our inner self should be like, and which of our emotions and feelings are good and which are bad. This too is built upon belief and fiqh; nothing can enter it that contradicts belief and fiqh.
Likewise, there is the subject of morals and manners (akhlaq and adab), which is really part of tazkiyah and is also connected with social life. These manners and morals are taught in their own ways by the family and in school gatherings. Here too, the knowledge acquired is usually not built upon fiqh and tazkiyah but upon a social custom mixed from modernity and Islam, which often produces contradictions. For belief is influenced by modernity; in law one is bound by the state, and the state too is built on the values of modernity; and tazkiyah and tasawwuf are regarded as futile and a cause of failure, so manners and morals based on Islamic custom also seem futile.
Likewise, there is the subject of livelihood (ma'ash). This is the real subject for which school education exists. Education from pre-school to the PhD is essentially tied to livelihood, and the system for livelihood is the capitalist system. So, to make the skills learned for a livelihood useful, one has to learn capitalist morals and manners, which today are taught among us through leadership and soft-skills programmes, and much of which clashes with the principles of Islamic tazkiyah.
The purpose of this long introduction was to make clear: are we really acquiring even the knowledge we ought to acquire? Does learning only matters related to economic activity from books, under a research methodology, prove that we are truly learning, and that only upbringing is lacking?
Our children learn two parallel creeds, one Islamic and one based on modernity. Under the Islamic creed, God is the Creator, Lord and true Agent of everything. Under modernity, the universe runs on mechanical laws: either it has no creator, or if it has one, he wound it up like a clock and left it, so that it runs by itself while God watches from afar with no active relationship. Because of modernity, it is this creed that grows strong in the subconscious, not the Islamic creed that God has an active relationship with the universe, that everything depends on God, and that nothing in the universe happens without His permission.
When belief is influenced by modernity, how can Islamic fiqh feel meaningful, when it is fiqh that, through action, connects a servant at every moment to an active Creator, Master and the One worshipped? When belief is weak and fiqh is not meaningful, tazkiyah will feel like an obstacle to progress, and capitalist morality will feel more attractive than Islamic morality. In short, upbringing and action are connected to each other. For upbringing, belief and fiqh must be made meaningful. Moral gatherings and advice will have no effect until the foundations on which morals and manners are built are set right.