you may not believe me, but i used to say all of this to some of my intelligent classmates in undergrad classes. and the same applies to islamic schools.
this is what sadru'sh shariah said. ==== to summarise - graduating from a seminary only makes you capable of reading books; the rest you need to keep reading the rest of your life.
FTA: "But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fade-out: Human beings have trouble retaining knowledge they rarely use. Of course, some college graduates use what they’ve learned and thus hold on to it—engineers and other quantitative types, for example, retain a lot of math. But when we measure what the average college graduate recalls years later, the results are discouraging, to say the least." this is similar to what sadrush shariah said and our ulama have always said. merely graduating from a seminary doesn't make you a scholar for life. one ought to be continually involved in reading, teaching, discussing, researching books to retain what you might have read so even if a person graduated top of the class from a famous madrasah 40 years ago, unless they were involved in activities related to knowledge - or at the least they kept up reading - they will have come down to the level of the laity.
I have said that one of the biggest threats to Sunnism is the lack of available and placement ready Masjid Imams. There needs to be a watered down version of the larger Alim Courses tailored towards this need where we can produce and deploy Masajid Imams so that we take back ground from wahabis and deos. I would advocate someone who knows Tajweed, enough Hifz to lead Salah, basic Fiqh. A one or two year intensive crash course should be enough for this need but it means we would produce many fit for purpose Imams. Anyhow, something similar needs to be undertaken I feel if not something like what I propose.
we don't even have any objective surveys, any critical appraisals of the madrasah system from insiders - to the best of my knowledge. all insiders swear by it - it may not be perfect, some of them concede, but it's the best we have - and of-course the only one, for that matter. all too many outsiders are mostly prejudiced and dogmatic in favor of the western education system - and so their criticisms are discarded - and rightly so - but what goes out with the bath water is the innocent baby. in a completely changed socio-political-economic-technology landscape, the madrasah system stubbornly remains an ancient anachronism resisting change and ignoring ground realities - unless it's a change in the wrong direction. "modernization" of madrasahs typically betokens setting up of a computer lab which doesn't teach much further than basic computer skills - it's impossible to leverage the complete power of the internet unless one knows reasonable amount of English - another area we are lagging behind in. one common lament is lack of funds - but that seems to be more of a symptom than a cause of the underlying problem which bedevils most of our institutions. when a whole gathering of scholars and muftis (which comprise a madrasah) cannot come up with a solution to a persistent problem - well we have a problem. perhaps it's only a reflection of our overall state that our seminaries are not upto the challenge of the whirlwind of changes that the last two centuries have unleashed upon us. the world isn't faring too much better - but at least there are those who acknowledge the problem and speak up. let's hear some of our ulama say that our seminaries need more than a cosmetic revamp... ---- there might be notable exceptions I haven't heard of - so please excuse my ignorance. please don't misread this as a dismissal of all the good work that our madaris are doing in safeguarding people's imaan and aqeedah - the lament is that we need more efficiency and relevance for better results - which no one can disagree are grossly inadequate. And Allah ta'ala knows best.
