Jadid - Educational Reform

Educational Reform

One of the Jadid's principal aims was educational reform. They wanted to create new schools that would teach quite differently from the maktabs, or primary schools, that existed throughout the Muslim areas of the Russian empire. The Jadids saw the traditional education system as "the clearest sign of stagnation, if not the degeneracy, of Central Asia." They felt that reforming the education system was the best way to reinvigorate a Muslim society ruled by outsiders. They criticized the maktabs' emphasis on memorization of religious texts rather than on explanation of those texts or on written language. Khalid refers to the memoirs of the Tajik Jadid Sadriddin Ayni, who attended a maktab in the 1890s; Ayni explained that he learned the Arabic alphabet as an aid to memorization but could not read unless he had already memorized the text in question.

The traditional education system was not the only option for Central Asian students, but it was far more popular than the alternative. Beginning in 1884, the tsarist government in Turkestan established "Russo-native" schools. They combined Russian language and history lessons with maktab-like instruction by native teachers. Many of the native teachers were Jadids, but the Russian schools did not reach a wide enough segment of the population to create the cultural reinvigoration the Jadids desired. Despite the Russian governor-general's assurances that students would learn all the same lessons they could expect from a maktab, very few children attended Russian schools. In 1916, for example, less than 300 Muslims attended Russian higher primary schools in Central Asia.

In 1884, Ismail Gasprinski founded the first "new method" school in Crimea. Though the prominence of such schools among the Tatars rose rapidly, popularized by such thinkers as Ghabdennasir Qursawi, Musa Bigiev, and Gasprinski himself, the spread of new method schools to Central Asia was slower and more sporadic, despite the dedicated efforts of a close-knit community of reformers.

Jadids maintained that the traditional system of Islamic education did not produce graduates who had the requisite skills to successfully navigate the modern world, nor was it capable of elevating the cultural level of Muslim communities in the Russian Empire. The surest way to promote the development of Muslims, according to the Jadids, was a radical change in the system of education. New method schools were an attempt to bring such a change about. In addition to teaching traditional maktab subjects, new method schools placed special emphasis on subjects such as geography, history, mathematics, and science. Probably the most important and widespread alteration to the traditional curriculum was the Jadids' insistence that children learn to read through phonetic methods that had more success in encouraging functional literacy. To this end, Jadids penned their own textbooks and primers, in addition to importing textbooks printed outside the Russian Muslim world in places such as Cairo, Tehran, Bombay, and Istanbul. Although many early textbooks (and teachers) came from European Russia, Central Asian Jadids also published texts, especially after the 1905 Revolution. The physical composition of new method schools was different as well, in some cases including the introduction of benches, desks, blackboards and maps into classrooms.

Jadid schools focused on literacy in native (often Turkic) languages rather than Russian or Arabic. Though Jadid schools, especially in Central Asia, retained a religious focus, they taught "Islamic history and methods of thought" rather than just memorization. Unlike their traditional predecessors, Jadid schools did not allow corporal punishment. They also encouraged girls to attend, although few parents were willing to send their daughters.