Essay On Islamic Education In Malaysia

Islamic schools have always been part and parcel of the Malay-Muslim communities, even long before the British came to shores of Malaya. The traditional Islamic schools are known as pondok and were the only mode of knowledge transmission existed before mass education was introduced by the British. Pondok education, which still exists until today, revolves around a teacher, who attracts students by the dint of his reputation (this is an exclusively male domain). Its educational objective is primarily to inculcate students with the values needed in becoming a good Muslim, with nary an emphasis on real world practical knowledge. In the 1920s many Malay graduates from the Middle East, particularly Al-Azhar University in Cairo, came back imbued with reformist ideals to seriously revamp the pre-existing Islamic education. Muslim reformers (known collectively in Malay as Kaum Muda) such as Shaykh Tahir Jalaluddin and Sayyid Shaikh al-Hadi established madrasah (literally meaning school in Arabic) that employed modern pedagogical techniques and introduced secular subjects such as Math, Science and English on top of the normal religious curriculum. It was also around the

These schools mainly differ in the portion of religious instruction in their curriculum, management, and funding sources. National schools and national religious secondary schools are directly under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education, while state religious schools are managed by their respective state Islamic agency and the people’s religious schools are established by the local community (using combination of funding from federal and state agencies and private donations) and overseen by board of