Love your children, those little terrors

[bemildred]

---

Confronted with the competitive dynamos of China and an emerging India, Islamic societies have to run many times as fast just to catch up with these juggernauts. Failure to do so will only produce more disaffected youth, which is a prime ingredient in the recipe for global terrorism.

That many of these societies have not even peaked demographically yet adds a layer of both opportunity and urgency to this issue. Countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan are not expected to reach their demographic peaks in the foreseeable future, which means the production of young people with precious little to do will be a structural rather than transitional problem for these societies. This is very different from the experience of China, which has already peaked, and India, which will peak in the next 10 years.

---

Thus while India may well have a lower literacy rate than a typical Islamic society in the Middle East, its educated are more likely to have employable skills, where the products of Islamic education systems are often overly reliant on religious studies. This makes them useful for employment in religious schools, but not IT (information technology) companies. The subject of education is an important one for Islamic societies to ponder, particularly given their opposition to the teaching of many modern scientific theories such as Darwin's theory of evolution/natural selection.

Second, too often Islamic societies do not provide the right means for people in general, and youth in particular, to communicate with their governments. The absence of democracy in Islamic societies is well documented; existing autocracies run by military-religious leaders all too often do not have the foresight or the moral courage to implement educational reforms, nor provide the scope for social reforms that could provide the basis for improving education.

Asia Times