BETWEEN SECULAR PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND QUR'ANIC PRIVATE SCHOOLS: THE GROWING EDUCATIONAL PRESENCE OF MALIAN MEDERSAS

Religious schools in Mali are playing an increasingly visible and influential role in the schooling of Malian children. As mainstream public schools have struggled over the past decade with issues of class size, over-crowding, and limited quality, parents have turned in increasing numbers to the expanding religious school sector as an alternative. Mali is almost 95 percent Muslim (World Factbook 2013), and there are a variety of types of Islamic religious schools that coexist in the country, including Qur'anic schools, Franco-Arab schools, medersas, and others. Qur'anic schools concern themselves principally with facilitating memorization of the Qur'an; Franco-Arab schools teach in French but offer Arabic study; medersa is the name used to describe schools that are private, have a religious mission and/or affiliation, are registered with the government, and follow the government curriculum. The word medersa is a Malian/West African variation of the Arabic word madrasa.

This article is concerned with medersas, a particular subset of Islamic schools in Mali that have been steadily attracting more pupils over the past three decades (Brenner 2007). These schools use Arabic as the language of instruction and teach a program of religious studies alongside other core subjects. In 2010, medersas constituted approximately 16 percent of the schools in Mali (but not necessarily the same share of students) and they have been growing at a rate of 13 percent to 15 percent annually from 2007 to 2010 while the growth rate of public schools in the same time period was between 4 percent and 6 percent according to the Ministry of Education Alphabetization, and National Languages (MEALN 2009). The percentage of medersas in Mali is very much in line with—albeit slightly higher than—those cited by Tsimpo and Wodon (2014).

At the time when the research for this article was conducted (during the 2008/2009 school year), some 240,579 Malian students were enrolled in medersas. The article presents an overview of the development and evolution of medersas in the educational sector in Mali, documenting their expanding role, describing the teaching and learning that happens in the medersa, and discussing how their mission, role, and pedagogy have both retained and lost some of the age-old features of Islamic education. The data come from a national-level research initiative undertaken by the Mali USAID/PHARE Program¹ (Programme Harmonisé d'Appui au Renforcement de l'Education), in partnership with the MENL statistics between March and May of 2009.²

Types of Islamic Schools

Qur'anic schools have been a fixture on the Malian educational landscape since the advent of Islam in the region in the 8^th century. Their purpose was and still is to educate children belonging to the community in the ways of Islam and teach them to recite some of the Qur'an, a critical element of being able to pray:

One meaning of the word Koran is “recitation,” and for Muslims, prayer is usually interpreted to mean the recitation of the Koran. Thus, the teaching of proper recitation through the memorization of the Koran has been a central feature of Islamic education. (Wagner 1991, 265)

Qur'anic schools have typically been very local organizations, run and operated by community members, particularly parents who usually paid the teacher (often in kind) and maintained the school space. The pedagogy and modalities of learning in Qur'anic schools were generally based on individual tutoring, memorization, and recitation. Epistemologically, Brenner characterizes their pedagogy as “esoteric” and related to spiritual development, meaning that knowledge had to be passed “through personal transmission from persons who are qualified, and have been authorized, to transmit it” and that “the acquisition of Islamic knowledge is intimately related to devotional praxis” (2007, 218). The modality of learning was copying and memorization, meant to help children “embody” the Qur'an as a first step on the road to understanding, which was considered a lifelong learning process (Boyle 2004). Qur'anic schools that exist in Mali today still operate along these same lines, with the same pedagogy and learning modalities; one still commonly hears pupils reciting Qur'anic verses and sees whitewashed copy boards drying in the sun near local Qur'anic schools in most regions of the country.

This article focuses on medersas (or madrasas), a type of school originally developed as a more advanced form of schooling, to train older, talented students in the complex interpretation of Islamic texts for legal and administrative purposes in newly converted areas, as the Islamic empire grew. While expanding their curricular focus, these early madrasas generally adhered to the pedagogical practices and learning modalities of the Qur'anic schools—highly relational and based on a good deal of memorization and copying, although other skills such as interpretation were introduced.

The French, who colonized Mali from 1892 to 1960 (originally as part of what was called Soudan Français) influenced the path of formal school education in Mali as they established schools, mainly for the children of elites (which they actually also referred to as medersas) to teach French, which had become the language of administration and business. They were not terribly popular with the local population. Their pedagogical orientation and the type of learning they encouraged resembled French schools, which parents feared would separate their children from Islam. These schools had a more encyclopedist orientation toward schooling and learning, based on the principles of rationalism, universality, and utility. Despite their lack of popularity, after independence, the Malian government opted for the creation of a network of Franco-Arab schools that resembled the French medersas. The Franco-Arab schools used (and continue to use) French as the language of instruction for all subjects but Arabic and have an exclusively secular curriculum (Brenner 2007, 213–214).

Malian medersas were constrained under the French but grew quickly post-independence. In contrast to the Franco-Arab schools, medersas stayed with Arabic as the language of instruction, but offered French as a subject. The choice of Arabic was partly in response to the ascendency of “French education” post-independence and the desire to find a more homegrown form of schooling that could nonetheless prepare students for global participation. These new medersa-founders sought to modernize medersa pedagogy and provide education on a larger scale than had their more traditional precursors (Brenner 2007).

In 1985, all medersas teaching a hybrid curriculum (secular and religious) were officially declared subject to the authority of the ministry of education via Governmental Decree 112. This essentially meant that medersas were encouraged to bring their non-religious curricula into line with the official government curricula; if they did so they were “registered” and registration brought with it official recognition of certificates as well as credentials. A child from a medersa could graduate from ninth grade for example and continue on to a public secondary school with no official or legal barriers. Registration occurs at the Centres d'Animation Pedagogique (CAP) level; registered schools are regularly counted in district statistics and, in theory, are included in local education budgets (i.e. for textbooks) and ministry training programs.

Almost 30 years after the decree, and although French is still the official language of instruction in Mali, the central MEALN has an Arabic section³ to advise the medersas, there is a baccalaureate in Arabic, and the École Normale Supérieure and the Teacher Training College of Hegire offer an Arabic course of study for those wishing to teach in medersas (MEALN 2010).

Research Methodology

In March of 2009, according to MEALN records, there were 1,058 registered, functioning medersas. The PHARE project, which was working to improve the teaching and learning of reading in Malian primary schools, launched a descriptive study of these medersas in part to better adapt project materials to their needs, since they were serving a substantial number of pupils and did fall under the MEALN auspices.

Mali is divided into 15 educational regions called Académies d'Enseignement (AEs). Each AE is divided into several districts or CAPs. Within each AE (except Kidal where there were only two medersas), the research team selected CAPs to participate in the study, according to the following criteria: those with the largest numbers of medersas; those accessible to the researchers, without exposing them to undue hardship or danger⁴; proportional geographic representation; and proportional representation across linguistic groups (i.e. selecting CAPs that represented the diversity of Mali's many languages and ethnic groups) (MEALN 2010, 13). The CAPs selected for the study were home to 885 of the 1,058 medersas registered with the MEALN, or 83 percent of the total number of medersa schools.

Within the CAPs, medersas were randomly selected for participation in the study; alternates in each CAP were also randomly selected.⁵ The target was a 10 percent sample or 101 medersas. The final sample contained 98 medersas, representing 9 percent of MEALN medersas nationwide, as even with alternates, some of the selected medersas were closed or unavailable for a research visit. Research teams of two people visited each school for one to two days depending on the distance and the size of the school.⁶

Data collection instruments developed and tested by project staff and used by trained researchers included oral questionnaires, a school infrastructure checklist, a classroom observation protocol, a parental focus group protocol, and individual interview protocols to collect data from a variety of respondents attached to the medersa system, including school directors/proprietors, teachers, Arabic language teacher supervisors (CPAs), parents, students, ‘ulema (Malian Muslim intellectuals or thought leaders), the Union Nationale des Medersas du Mali (UNMM) representatives, and officials from the Arabic section of the MEALN. The next sections describe: (1) the levels of study and curriculum, (2) enrollment patterns, (3) financing, (4) infrastructure and resources, and (5) teachers and teaching found in Malian medersas.

The medersas surveyed served primary school-aged children by and large. Almost all of the medersas (96.9 percent) offered the full first cycle of primary school (the sum of rows 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 10 in Table 1). A small percentage (3.1 percent—row 7) offered only half of the first cycle of primary school (grades 1–3). In addition, almost 43 percent of the medersas offered both the first and second primary cycles (the sum of rows 4, 5, 9, and 10). A large majority of medersas did not offer preschool (86.7 percent—row 6) and only about 10 percent offered secondary education (10.2 percent—the sum of rows 5 and 10). Overall, the majority of the schools (52 percent) offered the first primary cycle and no preschool (row 8), while at the other end of the spectrum only 4.1 percent offered the full course of study from preschool through secondary school (row 5).

Table 1. Levels of study offered by medersas (%).

1	Preschool only	0
2	Preschool + first half of primary cycle (grades 1–3)	0
3	Preschool + primary, first cycle	3.1
4	Preschool + primary, first and second cycles	6.1
5	Preschool + primary (first and second cycles) + secondary school	4.1
6	No preschool	86.7
7	No preschool + first half of primary cycle(grades 1–3)	3.1
8	No preschool + primary, first cycle	52
9	No preschool + primary, first and second cycles	25.5
10	No preschool + primary (first and second cycles) + secondary school	6.1

Source: Author, using data from MEALN (2010, p.23).

Table 2. Average student enrolment over three years.

	MedersasrespondingN = 98	Averagenumberof pupils
Average number of studentsin the medersa, 2009	92	243
Average number of studentsin the medersa, 2008	87	223
Average number of studentsin the medersa, 2007	80	205

Source: Author, using data from MEALN (2010, p.24).

The growth in the medersa sector has been at the primary level, in particular the first cycle. Further, this growth and the subsequent graduation of pupils from grade six spurred the expansion of offerings for the second cycle of primary and secondary school, which are not yet at the same level as the first cycle offerings. However, the trend is upward and it is likely there will be increasing numbers of medersas offering the second cycle of primary and secondary school. All of the medersas included in this study teach Arabic, Islamic Studies, French, Social Sciences, Mathematics, and Science. A large majority (85 percent) of directors declared that their institution followed Mali's official program of study for medersas.

Enrolment, Financing, and Resources

The average student population in the medersas across all of the grades combined was 243 students per school, of whom on average 41.9 percent were female (Table 2).⁷ The range of enrollment, however, was broad, encompassing one school with 13 pupils and another with 1,535. No medersa in the sample had a female enrollment of less than 35 percent. In general, in rural areas, there were more boys enrolled than girls; only in the district of Bamako Rive Droite did girls’ enrollment substantially surpass that of boys’ with almost 60 percent of the pupils being female. Over a three-year period, the number of medersa pupils increased steadily, with more entering than graduating or dropping out. Interestingly, the schools with the highest numbers of pupils on average were from the urban and semi-urban AEs of Bamako, Kayes, and Segou. These data are interesting in that increasing numbers of parents in urban areas, where public schools are generally available and accessible (and free), are choosing medersas for their children.

Since the project was not in a position to do full household surveys for pupils in the medersa sample, information on pupil socioeconomic status came from the school owners and/or school directors.⁸ Most either owned or have managed their medersa for at least 10 years and lived in the surrounding community. Sixty-nine percent of directors categorized the majority of their students as coming from poor families. Sixteen percent of the directors responded that poor and middle-class children constituted the majority of the school population. Five percent of the directors stated that they had a mix of rich and poor students in their schools. Only one director responded that his students were, in the majority, rich and only one director stated that his students came from all socioeconomic categories. While it seems reasonable to conclude that medersas serve poorer populations in the majority,⁹ it is worth noting that overall 22 percent (16 percent+5 percent+1 percent) of directors reported that their school population was from a mixed socioeconomic background, suggesting that these schools are expanding their appeal beyond the lower income strata.

The medersas are primarily financed by school fees that parents pay to enroll their child in that school. Almost all (93 percent) of medersas charge school fees and 68 percent of school directors cited these fees as the most important source of financing for their school. Only 6 percent of medersas did not cite payment of school fees as being obligatory. As might be expected, the size of the school fees varied from region to region. Fees in Bamako were the most expensive and those in Tombouctou the least expensive.

These fees are not the medersas’ only source of revenue. One-fifth (20 percent of school directors) reported receiving financial support from sources other than the parents of the students. These sources generally fell into three different categories: (1) donations from Malians living in Mali (including prominent community members/prominent philanthropists, school alumni, and Malian NGOs); (2) donations coming from those outside of the country (expatriate Malian philanthropists originally from the community, school alumni, or international Islamic charities/NGOs),¹⁰ and (3) limited support in-kind offered by the government (books and materials, occasionally some in-service training, or perhaps salary support for a French teacher). The fact that the directors declare that they spend an appreciable proportion of their time (close to 15 percent) looking for financing suggests that the supplementation of school fees from other revenue sources is primarily a function of the director's initiative and the ability to cultivate relationships on behalf of his school.

Most of the schools were housed in single story buildings divided up into classrooms that were sometimes separated by simple dividers or, less often, by real walls. Generally, the equipment and installations available were inadequate for the number of people working and studying in the space. In several medersas, the lack of space to store, stack or organize materials, the lack of school supplies, of water, and of electricity were shocking to the research teams. In particular, there were practically no separate toilets for the women and girls in the medersas.¹¹

Medersas also lacked textbooks in sufficient quantity for the number of students they served.¹² Malian textbooks were present most frequently in medersas in Bamako, Mopti, and Sikasso, where between 65 and 95 percent of the schools actually had them, albeit fewer than were needed. In Gao, Segou, Kayes, and Koulikoro, fewer than 30 percent of the medersas had any Malian textbooks at all. A small minority of medersas had pedagogical and classroom materials that came from outside of Mali. As the language of instruction in the medersas is Arabic, and since the MEALN produces and distributes relatively few materials in Arabic, it is not surprising that many medersas would import resources from other places. Other types of materials (children's story books and visual aids) were absent.

Medersa Teachers

¹³Traditionally, medersa teachers have been male and that trend continues with an average 7:1 male to female teacher ratio. In terms of qualifications, 41 percent of the teachers held a Dipl^ome d'Enseignement Fondamental certificate which indicated that they had completed the first 9 years of public school. (Public schools now require a baccalaureate or higher to become a teacher, although there are still teachers in the system with only the Dipl^ome d'Enseignement Fondamental (DEF) certificate.) Thirty-seven percent of the medersa teachers had a baccalaureate (a high school degree) and only 7 percent had some university education. The remaining 14 percent of the teachers had either a 6th-grade leaving certificate or had not studied in the public school system, although it is likely that they attended Qur'anic school. Bamako has the highest percentage of teachers with baccalaureate degrees, followed closely by Gao and Sikasso, where more than 50 percent of the teachers surveyed hold a baccalaureate.

The medersa school directors and Arabic supervisors from the CAP were very frank in declaring that medersa teachers receive very little, if any, initial training for their jobs. The teachers surveyed also almost unanimously decried their lack of pre-service professional training. A lack of in-service training was also apparent among the medersa teaching corps. Fifty-seven percent (57 percent) of teachers said that they had never received any in-service training and 40 percent said that they had received a little in-service training offered by an NGO, the UNMM, or the CAP. Those who had received some in-service training described it as primarily focused on pedagogy and lesson preparation.

Teachers in the medersas taught for 5.6 hours per day, not counting lesson preparation and grading time. By and large, there were two types of teaching plans. In some cases (34.7 percent of the time), one teacher taught all subjects to one group of students in the same grade. The second type of plan was more common, with one teacher teaching the same subject in several grade levels. This is often the case for the French teachers as not all of the medersa teachers speak French. Arabic/Islamic studies teachers outnumbered French language teachers by about 6 to 1. Class size in the medersas seemed reasonable—and much better on average than those found in Mali's public schools—at a mean of 32 pupils per 1 teacher. The region with the largest ratio was Mopti with 40.5 pupils per teacher. World Bank figures for 2011 put the public school student/teacher ratio at 48/1 overall and at 52/1 for primary school.

Medersa teachers were not well paid. According to the data from the teachers, they earned “on average, 23,602 FCFA per month, which is less than the Minimum Guaranteed Interprofessional Salary (SMIG), set at 28,460 francs per month” (MEALN 2010, 48). The sum of 23,602 FCFA (francs of the Communauté Financière Africaine or African Financial Community) was equal to $46.7 in May of 2009 when the data were being collected. Teachers’ median salary was 25,000 FCFA per month, which means that 50 percent of the teachers earned less than the minimum wage. Across the board, female teachers were paid less than the male teachers. Finally, there was a positive and significant correlation between the level of education of the teachers and his/her salary; the higher a teacher's level of diploma, the more money he/she earned per month. Experience teaching in a medersa also had a positive influence on a teacher's salary, but not in as decisive a fashion as their level of education.

Researchers observed 345 complete lessons in 345 different classrooms across the 98 medersas in the study, looking for the presence (or absence) of 19 observable instructional behaviors and practices listed in Table 3.¹⁴ Seventeen were generally accepted “best practices” and two were practices commonly associated with Islamic schools (memorizing and copying). We ranked the behaviors from most frequently observed to rarely observed.

Table 3. Classroom observation results.

	Teacher practicesand behaviors^a	Percentage ofteachers exhibitingpractice orbehavior	Range ofscores
1	Effective use of the blackboard	79.9	70–100%
2	Mastery of the subject matter	76.0
3	Equal attention paid to both genders	75.0
4	Teacher–student interactivity	70.6
5	Positive learning environment for girls	68.4	50–69%
6	Clear explanations of content presented	66.5
7	Appropriate teacher behavior	60.9
8	Teachers seek out student participation	57.7
9	Student comprehension of content checked or verified	55.2
10	Teacher has students memorize content	51.0
11	Equality in seating placements between boys and girls	46.3	30–49%
12	Student-centered teaching evident	42.2
12	Students asked to practice or apply knowledge	41.7
13	Students asked to reason or problem-solve	36.5
14	Teacher has students copy material from blackboard	34.0
15	Teacher circulating in the classroom	30.2
16	Teacher offers individual corrections to pupils	29.7
17	Teacher makes use of didactic material	28.7	10–29%
18	Teacher helps students use material	16.1
19	Teacher facilitates student-to-student interactivity	12.8

Source: Author using data from MEALN (2010).

^aEach behavior was clearly defined for researchers via specific criteria and researchers were thoroughly trained to use the tools. Two researchers observed the same class, shared their detailed notes, and then jointly scored the teacher on whether the behavior or skill was in evidence during the lesson.

Over 70 percent of teachers consistently made effective use of the blackboard, demonstrated mastery of the lesson content, interacted with students (called on them, took questions, and spoke to them) and gave equal attention to boys and girls. Over 60 percent were observed consistently creating a positive learning environment for girls, providing clear explanations of the content presented, and demonstrating appropriate teaching behavior (i.e. being professional and patient, using appropriate language, not smoking, eating, or drinking in class, not leaving the classroom for long periods, etc.). Over 50 percent were observed encouraging student participation and regularly checking student comprehension. Data also suggest that teachers generally pay attention to both genders equally during instruction and the majority create a positive learning environment for girls. However, seating patterns tended to favor boys.¹⁵ On the other hand, teachers did not ask students to apply knowledge or practice what they were learning nor did they ask students questions that required reasoning and/or problem-solving skills. Over 50 percent were observed having students memorize lesson content.

Teachers did not generally offer individualized feedback to pupils or circulate to the back of the classroom regularly to check on students.¹⁶ Indeed, only 42 percent of the teachers were scored as using student-centered methods. The use of didactic material was also rare but this is probably due to the lack of pedagogical material, especially books, in the medersa classrooms more than the teachers’ inability or unwillingness to use the materials. Finally, student group work or interaction was practically nonexistent. In general, these results indicated that at its heart, medersa teaching is largely teacher centered; in this sense, it is “modern” as it is not that different from what one finds in a Malian public school. It is certainly different from what one would find in a traditional Qur'anic school, with more individual teacher coaching and peer group work, although traditional Qur'anic schools would certainly emphasize memorization.

Discussion

These findings have implications for the educational sector in Mali and also offer important insights into the evolution of the culture, practices, and the very definition of what it means to be an Islamic school in Mali. Issues related to access, quality, and finally language and religion are discussed below.

Consider first the issue of access. Mali, like many countries, is striving to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which focus in part on the completion of primary school. Medersas are contributing to Mali's drive to meet the MDG targets. They were educating almost a quarter of a million students according to MEALN data from 2010 and their growth rate was substantial, at between 13 percent and 15 percent per year. Since they offer the government curriculum, those enrolled in or graduated from medersas contribute to Mali's national enrollment and graduation totals.

Further, medersas are likely a sustainable solution to increasing access because they rely primarily on their own resources and are thus less costly to the government than public schools. The MEALN does not have to pay all of the teachers in the school, and it does not have to pay a school director salary or maintain the school premises, as it must with public schools. The government does provide some instructional oversight at the CAP level (the Arabic pedagogical counselors) and it does fund the Arabic section in the central MEALN, but the number of people funded is relatively small, especially if compared with the cost of establishing and fully staffing over 1000 schools, which the ministry would need to do without the medersas. Similarly, as medersas absorb more children, they may also reduce some of the enrollment pressure on public schools, ostensibly contributing to less crowded public school classrooms, while not reducing the overall number of pupils enrolled in school.

Moreover, there is potential to leverage medersas specifically to improve girls’ enrollment, especially in rural areas where it was only between 30 percent and 40 percent. While these percentages need to rise, they are still an encouraging sign that parents do value the education of girls and are willing to pay for them to attend medersas. Advocacy from the MEALN and the UNMM could push those percentages to parity.

Consider next the issue of quality. Class size, efficiency, and teacher motivation are areas where the medersas may demonstrate high quality in comparison to the public schools. As enrollment has increased in Mali, it has put great strain on the public school system. Teaching in early grade classrooms with more than 50 pupils can be more about maintaining classroom order than about truly teaching and this can be seen in Mali, where many children do not learn the basics, particularly how to read and write well. One key element of quality control that medersas have been able to maintain, whether by fiat or design, is a reasonable class size.

While teaching quality observed was not stellar in relation to either the traditional “esoteric” or the more modern encyclopedic pedagogical frameworks, teachers themselves were motivated. While medersa teachers were not well paid, they reported satisfaction with their jobs and often conveyed a sense of mission and commitment. While not lucrative, the job allowed them to contribute to the upbringing and education of the next generation of Malian Muslim leaders—and to attract to themselves some “barakat” or blessings for their work. Although certainly not as acclaimed and respected as they were a century ago or more, being an educated person—particularly in Islam—is admired in Mali and in the Islamic world in general. There are various sayings, attributed to the Prophet or his companions, which praise scholars, such as: “One who wishes to see those who are safe from the Fire of Hell should look at the seekers of knowledge” (Imam Reza S.A. Network 2014). Further, although educational levels in the medersas were low, teachers had something else—besides a baccalaureate or a diploma—that conveyed a sense of erudition to parents, pupils, and the community—namely, the ability to speak Arabic and to teach in Arabic, something greatly admired in Mali.

Also in terms of quality, medersas operated with high efficiency, as is typical of private schools needing to cover their costs, raise funds, and attract pupils. While the schools were extremely resource-poor, school directors conveyed a purposeful and intentional sense of both resource management and entrepreneurship. Indeed, school proprietors counted themselves as educators, as benefactors, and in some cases as carriers of a family legacy or tradition. However, it was clear from the interviews that one of the most common roles in which they saw themselves was that of businessman. Proprietors saw the transformation of Qur'anic schools into medersas as a good business opportunity. As the following statement indicates, the proprietors were pleased with the product they offered and saw it as filling a real demand and market niche:

Islamic schools are more and more attended because before, people were living in obscurity and they did not understand the Qur'an and the Hadith. The public schools profited because of this unfortunate reason. The medersas have made people understand the good news that they can have both worlds by means of medersa study. (Tombouctou)

Although they followed the government curriculum, medersas also operated in closer alignment with community preferences and demands. Parents were certainly not blind to some of the medersa shortcomings, including the need for better French instruction, but, as paying clients, they had influence and options. Conversely, medersa school directors had some leeway to solve problems in ways public school directors did not. For example, medersas’ directors could import Arabic language instructional materials if they did not get enough of what they needed from the MEALN.

Consider, finally, the issue of language and religion. Quality can be considered as a multi-dimensional concept and for parents in Mali it encompassed both the learning of secular subjects and exposure to the holy texts of Islam in an Islamic environment. In terms of the language of instruction, since French is the language of the government, administration, and commerce in Mali, one can imagine that medersas take a risk in offering instruction in Arabic. While Arabic is much more widely spoken in Mali than in many West African countries, it is by no means a national language and many professions (and universities) do require a high level of French proficiency for employment or admission, respectively. That medersas elected to use Arabic as their lingua franca is a strong statement of their religiosity and commitment to educating children in the seminal texts of Islam in their original form. The parents paying to send their children to the medersas clearly value this as it is part of what distinguishes a medersa from a public school.

But as Brenner points out and our data further confirm, the medersa pedagogy has changed dramatically from a more rarified “esoteric” and traditionally Islamic mode of transmission to one suited for mass education and the production of global citizens, albeit religious ones. Brenner (2007, 221) commented that in medersas, “The learning process loses its sacred and initiatic character, religious and secular subjects are taught side by side, and all knowledge is equally available to everyone (at least in theory).” While it does seem clear that the more relational or initiatic features of Islamic pedagogy are not present in the medersas, parents, ‘ulema, teachers, and others expressed in various ways that for them, the schools did retain some of the devotional aspects of traditional Islamic education. The following are typical parental sentiments, from the research focus groups:

We have sent our children [to the medersa] in order for them to receive instruction because we were not instructed and we do not want our children to be like us and in order for them to come to worship God. (Kati)

They receive a good moral education because before they do not greet their parents but now they do it every morning, they did not pray and now they do; this, this is good conduct. (Kati)

These replies are strikingly similar to those reported by Gemignani, Shojo, and Wodon (2014).

Consistently, parents expressed approval for the traditional and more devotional aspects of Islamic behavior that they saw in their children and which they attributed to the medersa. This is to say that proprietors, parents, ‘ulema, and others felt they had found a third way that did not completely abandon the distinguishing Islamic features of education but rather kept some and jettisoned others. In short, the use of Western or even French pedagogy to teach Islamic devotion and secular subjects, using a hybrid mixture of learning modalities (memorizing but also explaining content and seeking out student participation) represents a new type of Islamic education. Medersas stand in contrast to Qur'anic schools and public schools in Mali.

Given the stated aim of the medersas to provide Malian children with an education that is both traditional and modern, to prepare them for 21^st century life, political participation, and economic development, one question to be asked is whether they might have done better to have retained some of the traditional pedagogy (one-on-one attention, peer tutoring, pair work) and decreased the use of traditional learning modalities such as memorization and copying. Public school organization and pedagogy seem to be the models to which these medersas aspire as they modernize and reform Islamic education. Whether this will truly improve the quality of teaching and learning of all subjects is not yet clear.

Conclusion

The rapid growth of medersas shows the power and appeal of marrying the religious and the secular in an educational environment in Mali. In an era of globalization, medersas strongly anchor children to traditional Muslim values in locally established schools while offering them the opportunity to study global subjects such as science and foreign languages. Minus the religious subjects and the use of Arabic language, the schools would be more or less the same as public schools. Public schools do not charge fees and they would be a more economical choice for parents. The religious nature of the school—the Arabic and the religious subjects offered—is a distinguishing factor and steadily increasing numbers of parents are willing to pay fees for their children to attend medersas, even as the schools themselves are fundamentally changing the nature of Islamic schooling in Mali.

Additional information

Helen N. Boyle, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the College of Education and the Center for International Studies in Educational Research and Development at Florida State University. Dr. Boyle conducts research on education in developing country contexts, with a particular focus on Islamic educational institutions in North and West Africa. She has 20 years of experience in the field of international development education and has provided technical assistance to education projects in the Middle East and Africa.

Notes

1. This study was conducted by the USAID/PHARE program in collaboration with the Directorate of Fundamental Education (DNEF) of the Malian Ministry of Education, Alphabetisation, and National Languages (MEALN) and in collaboration with the National Directorate of Pedagogy (previously the National Center for Education). The study was completed, thanks to the participation of the regional and district MEALN offices where the research took place, as well as the directors and teachers in the medersas in the sample. The study was conducted with the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under Contract no: IQC #EDH-I-00-05-00031-00, Order no: EDH-I-03-05-00031. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of USAID or of the government of the United States.

2. The author of this article led the research and instrument design for the above-referenced medersa study and was the lead writer of the 2010 research report for the project, entitled “The Medersas of Mali: Organization, Administration and Pedagogy.”

3. Albeit a small and under-resourced section.

4. Transportation was challenging in Mali, even for local data collectors, and there was some conflict in the north at the time of the study

5. Alternates were selected in anticipation of some gaps in the MEALN records regarding schools that moved or closed; likewise, we did not assume all selected medersas would be willing to participate in the study.

6. The project had 9 research teams for a total of 18 data collectors. All data collectors spoke, read, and wrote Arabic fluently, had solid written and oral French skills and spoke Bambara—a national lingua franca in Mali, in addition to one other local language. Most had prior research experience (although minimal) and some background in education. All were rigorously trained by the project for the data collection.

7. A few of the schools were girls only or boys only.

8. They were at times one and the same person.

9. Medersas do charge school fees; while they serve low-income families, it is unlikely that they are serving the poorest of the poor who would not be able to afford school fees in addition to the other basic costs of sending children to school (i.e. uniforms or smocks and school supplies).

10. All in all, of the 98 directors, only 2 mentioned exterior donors that were not a part of the Malian expatriate community in France: the Libyan Association for the Worldwide Call to Islam and Saudi Arabia. In the case of the latter, the contribution (to build a classroom) most likely came from a charitable organization or an individual donor in Saudi Arabia. Many Malian ‘ulema study in Saudi Arabia so there are connections between the two countries.

11. The lack of separate toilets for female teachers could in part account for the low numbers of female teachers in the medersas.

12. There was nowhere near a one-to-one (ideal) or even two-to-one ratio of pupil to textbook.

13. Between one and three teachers per school (242 in total) participated directly in the study via a questionnaire and/or an interview.

14. Each class was observed by two researchers who scored the lesson, compared scores, and came to an agreement on the presence or absence of each item according to the observation criteria. The observational data constituted a “snapshot” in time of medersa teaching.

15. Pupils are commonly gender segregated in medersa classrooms (seated in gender groups) so the observers were looking at whether both genders had a clear view of the blackboard, were able to see and hear the teacher, were not in excessive shadows or excessive sunlight, and were not all in the back of the room or the front of the room.

16. Classroom space is sometimes very small and filled with pupil desks and benches, limiting the teacher's ability to circulate within the classroom.