Are Islamist schools a threat to U.S.?

From the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, the U.S. funded and encouraged the creation of militant Islamist schools in Pakistan to help combat Soviet expansionism. Today, these institutions inculcate thousands of students with an ideology of intolerance, violence, and hate. With Saudi backing, similar establishments are proliferating all over the globe.

In "Education and Indoctrination in the Muslim World: Is There a Problem? What Can We Do About It?," Andrew Coulson, a senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Midland, Mich., details the threat posed by militant Islamist schooling. Recognizing the gravity of that threat in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. has adopted a two-pronged strategy: encouraging governments in the Muslim world to moderate the curricula employed by radical schools and funding the expansion of free public education to attract families away from those institutions.

However, Coulson concludes that neither approach is likely to succeed. All past efforts to moderate these teachings have failed and, even if these institutions modernized their curricula, they likely would remain ideologically extremist. What's more, the public schools in countries like Pakistan can be as guilty of fomenting religious intolerance as are the radical Islamist ones.

According to the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, a Pakistani think tank, the nation's public school textbooks "tell lies, create hate, incite jehad [sic] and shahadat [martyrdom in the name of Allah], and much more." The U.S. is spending $100,000,000 over five years to draw more children into these public schools.

As an alternate to current policies, Coulson proposes throwing open the door to trade with developing nations so that more families can earn enough to pay for their own children's education. Moreover, he strongly suggests redirecting some of America's $30,000,000,000 in international private giving (which dwarfs U.S. government aid) toward start-up capital and operating subsidies for fee-charging schools.

Private fee-charging institutions exist throughout the developing world, and usually are the most academically effective, responsive, best maintained, and efficiently run options available--and the least likely to attempt to indoctrinate their students with militant views. Programs that partially or temporarily subsidize fee-charging schools already dramatically have boosted girls' and boys' enrollment in some of the poorest and most religiously conservative areas of Pakistan. Channeling the U.S's vast private contributions into similar programs would do more to break the cycle of terrorism, Coulson argues, than any current U.S. policy.

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