Our experience of a Quran Memorization Insitute

It has been a very different year for us, it is our 3rd year homeschooling but we decided that because I was expecting with my third child, it would be better to enroll DD into a Quran institute so that it would take the main responsibility off me for a short while until I was ready to start hifdhs again with her. So on the day she turned 5 I reluctantly went to the school open day, I say reluctantly because I didn't want her to enter the school system yet, I wanted to keep my princess safe at home with me and have a flexible schedule and not have to worry about being restricted to time.

The institute is better known as Rayaheen tahfeedh school, Rayaheen is the name of the school and tahfeedh in Arabic is translated to 'memorization' in English more specifically referring to the Noble Quran. The school was a attached to a masjid and the building itself was a converted villa, and its well known for its tahfeedh program catered for boys and girls aged between 4 to 6 years old.
The girls and boys were segregated in separate classrooms. They are taught by only women and classes are divided by the level of the child rather than the age. When I first walked in to enroll my child and hand over a wad of money for tuition fees, I wanted to get a feel and look around the classroom and school, which didn't take long as it was quite a small building. I was surprised that the hallway walls and classrooms didn't have much displayed on them and looked very uninspiring, and there were no shelves for educational toys or material, just four plain walls tables and chairs and that's all. My initial thoughts were the reason for their plain and drab looking school was that they must be redecorating for the new semester. However, I was wrong, the walls are quite often left empty and plain and there are no shelves for boxes full of colourful educational materials and toys or books like you would expect at a elementary school. Rather the school had purposely did this so that there would be absolutely no distractions in the classroom and the only purpose of attending the school was for memorization which they spent from 7.30 am to 11 am doing. And memorize they did!!

She started on an intensive memorization program, by which children aged 4 to 6 learn either 5 juz or 10 juz by the end of the schools 2 year program. This is a huge amount to memorize and expect from a small child, but surprisingly DD was able to keep up and the other children that attended, their memorization was also exceptional. It was actually more difficult on my part to keep up, with her revision and preparing for her tests that they have every week for that portion of Quran they were working on and then a big monthly test which was testing the memorization of one juz a month. The teacher's method of teaching the children was to recite new 10 lines a day and repeat and repeat and repeat so that your ears become familiar with the surah and your tongue starts correcting itself and pronouncing the words more accurately whilst following the teacher, and the next day would be to review and add another 10 lines the would perharps spend a one and a half hours a day doing this. Then spend the other portion to memorize ahadith, famous poetry, they learn how to read and write Arabic and learn about the foundations of Islam. It is very intensive but the child are guided through it step by step of the way. By the end of the semester of 14 weeks they had been able to complete surah al jinn to surah al mujaadilah. And she enjoyed reciting and learning new surahs which was the best outcome of all.

In Saudi, if the school is far from your home, and rarely you will find a suitable school walking distances, since the scorching heat of the sun makes any distances too far to walk. So, the kids travel by bus, they are picked up from outside their home and dropped off, the nice thing that the bus driver does, is miss call you to let you know he is on his way, so that you don't have to wait outside for too long and he wife comes along to be the bus monitor and help the children with their heavy bags to get on and off the bus. I was apprehensive to send my daughter at 5 years old on a bus with strangers to a building full of strangers all speaking their native tongue Arabic and she is the only foreigner in the class and then anxiously wait to see her again 4 hours later. Many wild thoughts would race through my head from all the horror stories I was told by other expats living here. However, I read my supplications upon her and blew on her, trustful that Allah will protect her from any harms. Although she was the only English speaker in her class and her teacher or classmates didn't understand English and she had no idea what they were saying, she still managed to make a couple of friends but she was reserved, reluctant and shy to play with other children. She would tell me that when it cam to play time she would avoid joining in with the group games or play areas that had a lot of children like the trampoline or climbing frames, instead she would opt to queue up for the swing that was supervised by a teacher and wait her turn. In the classroom the teacher does not allow the children to speak to each other or go through their bags or wonder around, they have to sit at their desks and the time is all dedicated to memorizing Quran or Islamic texts. But at break time when children have their snacks, my DD would get teased for her healthy breakfast I had lovingly prepared for her the night before. The kids would stick out their tongues and say "urrrrgh" and say something in Arabic that she didn't understand but probably assumed wasn't something nice. So this simple act of teasing made her stop eating her snacks and the poor girl the only thing she would have eaten that morning was at home of cereal and water, then wait til she would return home to have lunch with the family. I find even though it was light hearted teasing, for a 5 year old never having been exposed to such behavior and being in the comfort of her own home and surrounding by people who only love her is a huge deal. It starts off as teasing then as it persists it wouldn't be classed as teasing anymore I was class it as bullying, being victimized from the rest of the classmates and being the target of their jests. And she would pick up and learn bad behaviors from the children at school then act out at home. The final straw was when I picked her up from the school bus, where she would sometimes have a sullen face, and head titled to the side from being picked on at school, but this time she fled into my arms crying her eyes out, this broke my heart even more. It was difficult to get her to explain to me what had happened which was always the case when coming home from school. She had told me she was smacked in the face by another girl on the bus. This might not be a big deal for some parents, fair enough it wasn't a fight or abuse, but for my family hitting is not allowed. What comes with this type of behavior is that the child who hits thinks its OK to cross this personal boundary of another person and do not respect another person's feeling, they lack social manners and lack empathy for causing harm to another or thinks it is funny to poke fun at someone else's expense. In this culture where we live in it is sad that an unacceptable thing has become the normal, and they learn such behaviors at a young age. Bullying starts off small, with little actions that the bully does to see what they can get away with and then they take one step more to test the waters and another step, each step is a little more damaging than the next. I did my best to communicate with the teachers in Arabic, and the problem was controlled to a degree as long as the teacher was under their supervision, and credit to them. Unfortunately, although the teachers were great and the program was amazing, our concern was with the children that went there, that was out of our control. So, I decided to not continue after the semester had finished. Even though it was early days, it was a decision I made because education is not gained at the sacrifice of a child's well being, learning and memorizing the Quran is a noble thing to go to school for, but it was spoilt because she was subconsciously learning bad behaviors like, stealing, lying, picking on people and not respecting each other or the teacher, it was undoing all my hard work I invested in her. I believe learning manners at this young age is more important.

IMAM MAALIK SAID:

“LEARN MANNERS

BEFORE

KNOWLEDGE.”

HILYATUL AWLIYAA 6/330

They are very influential at a young age, I do my best as a mother to train my child to, be compassionate to others, not hit, be considerate and helpful and respect and honor your elders. I wanted to protect my child. Maybe now I understand better why in Islam, formal education begins much later at 7 years old, when the child is more adept and able mentally and emotionally to handle and deal with these unfavorable situations you may experience in life. Because they have a strong character uninfluenced by peer pressure, they are trained and conditioned to be confident in what they stand for and believe that is true and just. They become more confident in their abilities and rely less on a teacher to guide them every step of the way. At a young age they don't have this advantage and their peers who know no better become their teachers and their teachers are their surrogate mothers, looking for support, comfort, guidance and seeking their pleasure.

So, the aftermath wasn't too bad, after a few weeks she was back to her lovely self that I was happy with, the past is behind her and she has never mentioned it again, up until a couple of days ago at the dinner table she mentioned that she was slapped on another occasion for peering into another girls book that she was showing to everyone else except for her, so the girl slapped my daughter because of it. I'm not sure if its just that my daughter that doesn't tell these incidents to me because her communication skills aren't as developed and they can't express themselves very well or something else. But, the conclusion is that we both prefer homeschooling than going to school.