Emotional dysregulation has always been my hardest ground. Diagnosis did not settle it. Stimulant medication did not settle it. It is the thing I worked on all through my academic journey, right through the master’s, on two tracks at once: as private work at the individual level, and as institutional accommodation within the services my university provides.

For a long time I read that as a personal failure. The literature reads it differently. In Russell Barkley’s model, the self-regulation of emotion is not a character trait sitting somewhere beside ADHD. It is the fifth executive function to develop, the one he calls the mind’s heart, and it is one of the functions the disorder directly weakens. In his own studies, 98 per cent of adults with ADHD reported major problems with emotional control, against 7 per cent of adults in the general community. That is not a rounding error. That is the condition itself.

Medication matters, and mine does help. But Barkley is careful about what it can and cannot do. Stimulants improve behaviour in as many as 75 to 92 per cent of cases and normalise it in roughly 50 to 60 per cent, and only for as long as the medication remains in the brain. It is a temporary correction of a neurological substrate, not a cure and not a character transplant. Which is why the accommodations were never optional extras alongside the tablets. Barkley’s argument is that executive function deficits are disorders of performance rather than of knowledge, so support has to be inserted at the point of performance, in the actual place and moment where a person is failing to use what they already know. Once a week in a counselling room is not where my life happens. My life happens in the seminar, in the deadline, in the corridor, in the hospital ward.

The news

Receiving the news that my brother had been diagnosed with cancer was a huge shock against what was meant to be a dull, slow summer. I had no plan to travel back to Malaysia this year, no annual working road trip.

Coming back to emotional dysregulation: my boss was worried that if something bad happened to my brother, I would be carrying a difficult burden into September, when my PhD starts. She knows me very well. She insisted I must go home and be with him. She was 100 per cent correct.

Two weeks

Two weeks taking care of him in the hospital, supporting his wife and the rest of the family, was both soothing and painful. I love each and every one of my siblings, and watching my brother deteriorate into a worsening delirium, day by day, was hard.

One afternoon he was at his worst. He could not work out how to stand still or how to sit down, because neither eased the pain. I held him and rubbed his back softly. He was crying, whispering into my ear that he was scared, that he could not handle it, that this pain was different from anything he had experienced in his life. Then he said, “thank you for being a good brother to me.”

I had to kill the waterfall of my own sadness. I swallowed everything and kept supporting him, with no tears, giving him nothing of how helpless and hopeless I felt.

That is emotional self-regulation, exactly as Barkley describes it: soothing yourself in the middle of an extreme reaction, using images and words to pull your attention off what has set you off, and deliberately choosing a more moderate emotional tone because it serves something more important than your own relief. It is the ordinary machinery of adulthood. It is also the precise machinery my brain runs badly.

And it is not free. Barkley draws on the research on self-regulatory strength to describe a limited pool of effort that every act of self-regulation depletes, and which stress and illness deplete faster still. Laura Knouse puts the same finding more plainly in her work with Barkley: self-regulation takes energy, and for people with ADHD, engaging willpower may burn through the reserve faster than it does for others. Living well with ADHD, she writes, is a marathon and not a sprint.

I did not feel like an athlete in that room. I felt like a man running on an empty tank and refusing to admit it.

The brother nobody assessed

His impairment is worse than mine. More obvious. More disabling. He never had the words for it and he never had the paperwork.

With help I managed to secure from an NGO, funding was directed to him for an assessment. He was worried about his child, so he used it for the child’s assessment instead.

That decision makes complete sense to anyone who knows how heritable this is. Barkley puts the genetic contribution to variation in ADHD traits at 75 to 80 per cent, with some studies above 90 per cent, higher than the genetic contribution to personality or intelligence. Nearly one in three siblings of a child with ADHD will also have it. Between 30 and 54 per cent of the children of adults with ADHD will have it too. My brother was not being irrational. He was reading his own family correctly. He simply chose the next generation over himself, which is the most predictable thing he has ever done.

So my brother lived a far longer stretch of a miserable life than I did, undiagnosed and unaccommodated. What soothed him, he told me, was my diagnosis, my advocacy, everything I have written about ADHD. Somebody had finally put a name to the thing that had been eating him since childhood, even if the name arrived through his younger brother rather than through a clinic.

I was hoping that my appointment as a co-researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at UKM might open a door for him. An assessment. A diagnosis. A file with his name on it.

But this cancer brought a different story.

Ten thousand kilometres

I am now ten thousand kilometres away from him, and he is fighting his final battle.

Day to day I absorb the updates from home while maintaining my function here, with the PhD about to start. The exhaustion is not metaphorical. It is the depletion Barkley describes, running continuously, with no gap in which to refill. I know what the literature says I should do. Exercise. Breaks. Three minutes of stillness after the hardest moments. Externalise what my own head cannot hold. I do some of it. Some days I do none of it.

I can only ask for one thing.

Ya Allah, soothe my brother and grace him in his final days. Welcome him back to You in all goodness. Amin.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil | www.hasrizal.com

References

Barkley, R. A. (n.d.). The important role of executive functioning and self-regulation in ADHD [Guest column]. russellbarkley.org

Barkley, R. A., & Benton, C. M. (2021). Taking charge of adult ADHD: Proven strategies to succeed at work, at home, and in relationships (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press.

Knouse, L. E., & Barkley, R. A. (2025). Living well with adult ADHD: Practical strategies for improving your daily life. The Guilford Press.

Anyone who observes education closely, or who simply works within it with any degree of reflection, notices changes that are difficult to put into words. The sense is rarely of a single dramatic rupture. It is more often a slow accumulation of small differences:

• a class that takes longer to settle,

• a queue at the toilet door that did not exist a decade ago,

• a lunch tray returned untouched,

• an instruction that must be repeated three times rather than once.

Teachers describe it in staffrooms with a kind of embarrassed vagueness, because the observation feels both obvious and unprovable. Children are supposed to arrive at school having been formed in the small world of the family, ready to be extended into the larger world of society. Increasingly, teachers report that this readiness is not arriving with them. The question this conversation asks is whether that intuition survives contact with evidence, and what follows if it does.

THE UK

The most quoted body of evidence comes from the United Kingdom, where the charity Kindred Squared has run an annual school readiness survey since 2020. Its sixth wave, conducted by Savanta with 1,076 primary school staff and 1,004 parents of the 2025 Reception intake, found that staff judged an average of 37 per cent of children to be starting school without the readiness expected of them, up from 33 per cent the previous year. The charity’s chief executive, Felicity Gillespie, described a cohort “arriving at the school gate without the basic life skills needed” to engage with the curriculum (Kindred Squared, 2026). The component findings map almost exactly onto the domestic practices examined earlier in this book:

• 26 per cent of children were not toilet-trained, rising to 36 per cent in the North East;

• 28 per cent could not eat or drink independently;

• 25 per cent struggled with basic language; and

• 32 per cent became overly distressed when separated from a parent.

More than half of staff, 52 per cent, judged that the proportion of unready children had risen again this year. What is striking is not any single figure but the pattern: the deficits cluster in exactly those capacities that are formed at home rather than taught at school.

Yet a perception survey commissioned by an advocacy charity, however carefully polled, is not a measurement of children. It records what teachers believe they are seeing, which is valuable but not the same thing.

AUSTRALIA

For harder evidence we should turn to Australia, where the Australian Early Development Census provides something closer to a national census of child development. Its 2024 cycle covered approximately 288,000 children in their first year of full-time school across some 7,400 schools, with a participation rate of 94.6 per cent, the highest since the instrument began in 2009 (Australian Government Department of Education, 2024).

The trend it records is unambiguous.

The proportion of children developmentally on track across all five domains fell from 54.8 per cent in 2021 to 52.9 per cent in 2024, while the proportion developmentally vulnerable on two or more domains rose from 11.4 per cent to 12.5 per cent, the highest level recorded in the census’s history.

Vulnerability reached record levels in three domains in particular:

• social competence,

• emotional maturity, and

• physical health and wellbeing.

Because the AEDC applies a consistent instrument at three-year intervals across fifteen years, it offers what the perception surveys cannot, namely a defensible claim that children are in fact arriving less developmentally on track than they did a decade ago, and that the deterioration is sharpest precisely in the social and emotional domains.

Why these domains matter is well established in developmental science. The capacities at issue fall under what psychologists term executive function, conventionally decomposed into inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility (Miyake et al., 2000). These are not peripheral skills.

Moffitt et al. (2011) followed a birth cohort of 1,037 children to the age of thirty-two and found that childhood self-control predicted adult health, personal finances and criminal outcomes, independently of intelligence and social class. Blair and Raver (2015) situate self-regulation at the centre of school readiness itself, arguing that the capacity to regulate attention and emotion is what makes formal instruction possible in the first place. When teachers report that children cannot follow instructions, wait, or manage separation, they are not complaining about manners. They are reporting the absence of the substrate on which teaching depends.

ESTABLISHING HONESTY

Honesty requires an immediate qualification, and it is a serious one. Teachers have been reporting exactly this for a quarter of a century.

In a foundational American study, Rimm-Kaufman et al. (2000) surveyed kindergarten teachers on the transition into school and found that close to half reported that at least half of their pupils lacked essential capacities, including the ability to follow directions. That finding predates smartphones, predates the pandemic, and predates most of the parenting shifts now blamed for the current alarm. It should temper any account that treats unreadiness as a recent invention. The more defensible reading is not that children were once uniformly ready and have suddenly ceased to be, but that a longstanding minority has grown, that the composition of the deficit has shifted toward the socio-emotional, and that expectations of what schools should absorb have risen alongside it.

There is a further complication that the Kindred data itself exposes. While staff judged 37 per cent of children unready, 88 per cent of parents said their own child was ready, and 35 per cent believed their child more ready than most (Kindred Squared, 2026). Two interpretations compete here and the evidence does not settle between them. Either parents are systematically misjudging their children, which would be significant in itself, or teachers and parents are applying different and incommensurable standards of what readiness means. Most probably both are true. The gap is worth dwelling on because it suggests that the problem is not simply that homes are failing, but that homes and schools no longer share a common definition of what a five-year-old ought to be able to do.

Whatever its cause, the burden lands somewhere, and it lands on teachers.

The Kindred survey estimated that primary staff lose an average of 2.4 hours of classroom time each day to the catch-up needs of children who are not school-ready, of which 1.4 hours is spent on toileting alone (Kindred Squared, 2026).

Fifty-five per cent of staff reported increased stress as a result, 28 per cent lower morale, and 19 per cent higher turnover in their setting. Even allowing generously for the imprecision of self-estimated time, a figure of this magnitude describes something structural rather than incidental. The school day has not lengthened. If more of it is consumed by functions once discharged at home, then something else within it has been displaced. This is the mechanism by which a domestic change becomes an educational one, and it is why the argument of the previous conversations cannot remain a matter of private family preference.

Which brings us to the first of the two questions this conversation must leave open.

THE FIRST QUESTION

If children are arriving less capable of regulating themselves, feeding themselves, separating from their parents and following instruction, and if this is visible across different countries, different instruments and different decades, then the obvious question is not what schools should do about it but what has happened in the homes from which these children come.

The evidence assembled here documents an outcome without explaining a cause. Something has changed in the ordinary daily practices of family life, in the division of household labour, in the structure of the evening, in the assumptions parents hold about what a child of four or five should be expected to manage alone.

What exactly has happened to parenting, and did we choose it, or did it happen to us while we were occupied elsewhere?

THE SECOND QUESTION

The second question is more uncomfortable, and it is the one this conversation has been circling from the beginning. Suppose the crisis is not confined to a single cohort of children but persists across generations. The children whose self-regulation was never scaffolded do not remain children. They become adults, and some of them become parents, and some of them become teachers.

Developmental science gives this concern a real foundation.

Bridgett et al. (2015), in the standard review of the field, document that self-regulation is transmitted from parent to child through both biological and social pathways, with parenting behaviour serving as the principal social mechanism. Deater-Deckard (2014) reaches the same conclusion regarding executive function and attentive behaviour within families.

If regulation is transmitted rather than spontaneously generated, then a deficit in one generation is not self-correcting. It is heritable in the social sense, and it propagates.

The uncomfortable extension is to the profession itself. Here the evidence must be handled with unusual care, because it is genuinely mixed and the temptation to lament is strong.

The most recent international teaching survey provides the sharpest datum.

In TALIS 2024, the proportion of recent graduates reporting high preparedness in subject content, subject-specific pedagogy, general pedagogy and classroom practices declined by roughly six to seven percentage points compared with 2018; only 33 per cent felt prepared to teach in multicultural and multilingual settings, and 44 per cent to support pupils’ social and emotional development. The OECD is careful in its interpretation, noting that this “does not necessarily imply that the quality of initial teacher education has worsened” and may instead reflect more demanding classrooms or a more critical assessment of preparation (OECD, 2025).

That caution is warranted and should be preserved. But the datum stands: young teachers today feel less equipped than young teachers did six years ago, at precisely the moment when the children in front of them are arriving less ready.

Structural pressures compound this. UNESCO and the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 (2024) estimate that 44 million additional teachers are required globally by 2030, and report that “seven out of ten teachers at the secondary level will need to be replaced” by that date. Primary teacher attrition roughly doubled between 2015 and 2022. Shortages of this magnitude exert a predictable downward pressure on entry standards through emergency licensure and out-of-field deployment, so that even where formal requirements are unchanged, the effective capability of the workforce may erode.

Meanwhile, the job itself has intensified.

Hargreaves (1992, 1994) argued three decades ago that teachers’ work was expanding in scope while contracting in discretionary time, and Apple (1986), drawing on Braverman’s (1974) labour process theory, described a parallel deskilling in which prescribed curricula and audit regimes separate the conception of teaching from its execution. Add the emotional labour that Hochschild (1983) first named and that Isenbarger and Zembylas (2006) traced specifically in teaching, and the picture is of a profession asked to do more, with less latitude, for children who need more.

And yet the honest case against the decline thesis is strong enough that it must be stated with equal force.

First, novice struggle is not new; it is one of the most durable findings in the field. Veenman (1984) catalogued the perceived problems of beginning teachers, Corcoran (1981) named the phenomenon “transition shock”, and Huberman (1989) described a “survival” phase in the professional life cycle. What TALIS records may be the perennial condition of the novice rather than a generational deterioration.

Second, where the academic calibre of entrants has been measured directly, the finding has sometimes run the opposite way. Goldhaber and Walch (2014) found that the average measured academic ability of new American teachers rose over the 2000s, moving from around the forty-second percentile of college graduates to approximately the forty-eighth, with the share of new science and mathematics teachers drawn from the lowest ability quintile collapsing over the same period.

Third, even were selectivity to fall, the link between paper credentials and classroom effectiveness is weak and inconsistent (Greenwald et al., 1996).

Fourth, the widely repeated claim that nearly half of new teachers leave within five years, associated with Ingersoll (2001), is contradicted by longitudinal federal data putting the figure closer to seventeen per cent (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015). The provocation, then, must be posed as a question and not smuggled in as a finding.

There is also reason for measured hope, and it should not be omitted merely because alarm is more rhetorically satisfying. Dicke et al. (2015) conducted a randomised controlled trial with ninety-seven beginning teachers and found that targeted classroom management training improved both their competence and their wellbeing, concluding that reality shock is modifiable rather than inevitable (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2015.01.013). The TALIS finding that only 22 per cent of novices had an assigned mentor in 2018 is dispiriting, but it also indicates enormous unexploited headroom.

On the child’s side, the evidence is more equivocal: interventions targeting executive function produce measurable gains, but meta-analyses caution that effects frequently fade and transfer poorly beyond trained tasks (Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2013; Kassai et al., 2019). The cycle is breakable, but not cheaply and not by exhortation.

So the second question stands, and it is sharper than the first. We have been asking, throughout this conversation, what happens when the home no longer forms the child and the school is asked to build foundations it was designed only to extend. But suppose the deficit has now run long enough to complete a full circuit. Suppose the children who arrived unready twenty years ago are the young teachers standing in front of today’s unready children, and the young parents raising tomorrow’s. If both the home and the school are weakening at once, then their deficits do not cancel; they compound, and the institution we habitually treat as the remedy becomes another site of the disease.

What, then, if the teachers themselves, and especially the youngest among them, are arriving less prepared for a task that is simultaneously becoming harder, and who is left to form the formers?

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
Director of Education
Khalifah Education Foundation

References

• Apple, M. W. (1986). Teachers and texts: A political economy of class and gender relations in education. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

• Australian Government Department of Education. (2024). Australian Early Development Census national report 2024. Commonwealth of Australia.

• https://www.aedc.gov.au

• Blair, C., & Raver, C. C. (2015). School readiness and self-regulation: A developmental psychobiological approach. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 711–731.

• Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. Monthly Review Press.

• Bridgett, D. J., Burt, N. M., Edwards, E. S., & Deater-Deckard, K. (2015). Intergenerational transmission of self-regulation: A multidisciplinary review and integrative conceptual framework. Psychological Bulletin, 141(3), 602–654.

• Corcoran, E. (1981). Transition shock: The beginning teacher’s paradox. Journal of Teacher Education, 32(3), 19–23.

• Deater-Deckard, K. (2014). Family matters: Intergenerational and interpersonal processes of executive function and attentive behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(3), 230–236.

• Dicke, T., Elling, J., Schmeck, A., & Leutner, D. (2015). Reducing reality shock: The effects of classroom management skills training on beginning teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 48, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2015.01.013

• Goldhaber, D., & Walch, J. (2014). Gains in teacher quality. Education Next, 14(1), 38–45.

• Greenwald, R., Hedges, L. V., & Laine, R. D. (1996). The effect of school resources on student achievement. Review of Educational Research, 66(3), 361–396.

• Hargreaves, A. (1992). Time and teachers’ work: An analysis of the intensification thesis. Teachers College Record, 94(1), 87–108.

• Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times: Teachers’ work and culture in the postmodern age. Cassell.

• Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

• Huberman, M. (1989). The professional life cycle of teachers. Teachers College Record, 91(1), 31–57.

• Ingersoll, R. M. (2001). Teacher turnover and teacher shortages: An organizational analysis. American Educational Research Journal, 38(3), 499–534.

• Isenbarger, L., & Zembylas, M. (2006). The emotional labour of caring in teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 22(1), 120–134.

• Kassai, R., Futo, J., Demetrovics, Z., & Takacs, Z. K. (2019). A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence on the near- and far-transfer effects among children’s executive function skills. Psychological Bulletin, 145(2), 165–188.

• Kindred Squared. (2026). School readiness survey 2025 (Fieldwork by Savanta). Kindred Squared.

• https://kindredsquared.org.uk

• Melby-Lervåg, M., & Hulme, C. (2013). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental Psychology, 49(2), 270–291.

• Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41(1), 49–100.

• Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H., Houts, R., Poulton, R., Roberts, B. W., Ross, S., Sears, M. R., Thomson, W. M., & Caspi, A. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693–2698.

• National Center for Education Statistics. (2015). Public school teacher attrition and mobility in the first five years: Results from the first through fifth waves of the 2007–08 Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study. U.S. Department of Education.

• OECD. (2025). Developing teacher expertise: Results from TALIS 2024. OECD Publishing.

• https://www.oecd.org

• Rimm-Kaufman, S. E., Pianta, R. C., & Cox, M. J. (2000). Teachers’ judgments of problems in the transition to kindergarten. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 15(2), 147–166.

• UNESCO & International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030. (2024). Global report on teachers: Addressing teacher shortages and transforming the profession. UNESCO.

• https://www.teachertaskforce.org

• Veenman, S. (1984). Perceived problems of beginning teachers. Review of Educational Research, 54(2), 143–178.

READ THE PREVIOUS CONVERSATION HERE:

The sociological account described in the first conversation is powerful, but it is deliberately silent on the questions that matter most to a believing parent. Functionalism can tell us how the home shapes the child and how the school widens that shaping into a shared national order, yet it treats the child as raw social material and the nation as the highest court of appeal. The Islamic worldview does not deny this mechanism so much as reposition it. Before the child belongs to a home, a peer group, or a nation, the child belongs to Allah, arrives with a given nature, and is being formed for a purpose that no society is authorised to define on its own.

That given nature has a name in the Islamic tradition, and it reframes the whole discussion of who forms the child. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said:

مَا مِنْ مَوْلُودٍ إِلَّا يُولَدُ عَلَى الْفِطْرَةِ، فَأَبَوَاهُ يُهَوِّدَانِهِ أَوْ يُنَصِّرَانِهِ أَوْ يُمَجِّسَانِهِ، كَمَا تُنْتَجُ الْبَهِيمَةُ بَهِيمَةً جَمْعَاءَ، هَلْ تُحِسُّونَ فِيهَا مِنْ جَدْعَاءَ

“There is no child but is born upon the fitrah. It is then his parents who make him a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian, just as an animal gives birth to a whole offspring: do you perceive in it any mutilation?”

(Sahih al-Bukhari 1358; Sahih Muslim 2658, muttafaqun ‘alayhi)

This narration both confirms and deepens the sociologist’s insight.

It confirms that parents are the decisive early shapers, echoing what Berger and Luckmann called primary socialisation, but it insists that they are not writing on a blank page. The child arrives already oriented toward truth and toward its Maker, a disposition the Qur’an calls fitratallah, the fitrah of Allah upon which He created humankind (Ar-Rum 30:30).

Formation, on this view, is therefore never mere construction from nothing. It is either the nurturing of an original orientation or its deviation. Where the sociologist sees a culture being installed, the Muslim educator sees a nature being either cultivated or bent, and that difference changes everything that follows.

If the child arrives already inclined toward knowing his Lord, then education is not a peripheral service but the first divine address to humanity. The opening words of revelation were not a command to fight, to build, or to rule, but a command to read:

ٱقْرَأْ بِٱسْمِ رَبِّكَ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ ۝ خَلَقَ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ مِنْ عَلَقٍ ۝ ٱقْرَأْ وَرَبُّكَ ٱلْأَكْرَمُ ۝ ٱلَّذِى عَلَّمَ بِٱلْقَلَمِ ۝ عَلَّمَ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ مَا لَمْ يَعْلَمْ

“Read, in the name of your Lord who created; created the human being from a clinging clot. Read, and your Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught the human being what he did not know.”

(Al-’Alaq 96:1-5)

That the revelation begins with reading, teaching, and the pen is not incidental. It signals that the knowing of the human being is bound up with his very createdness, and that learning is the arena in which he is dignified above the rest of creation, for Allah asks whether those who know and those who do not know can ever be equal (Az-Zumar 39:9) and promises to raise the people of knowledge in rank (Al-Mujadalah 58:11).

The Islamic tradition names this enterprise through three interlocking words: tarbiyah, the patient nurturing of growth; ta’lim, the transmission of knowledge; and ta’dib, the instilling of adab. Al-Attas (1980) argues that ta’dib is the most comprehensive of the three, because true education is not the filling of a mind but the forming of a person who recognises the right place of everything and acts accordingly. What we call life skills and what we call good character are, in this frame, not two separate problems but one: both are adab, the disciplined ordering of the self toward its proper ends.

KHALIFAH: BEYOND THE GOOD CITIZEN

The purpose of this ordering, however, reaches beyond the good citizen that functionalism aims to produce. Islam orients the child along two axes at once, and only one of them is horizontal.

The vertical axis is ‘ubudiyyah, servanthood, for humankind was created to worship (Adh-Dhariyat 51:56); the outward axis is khilafah and ‘imarah, the stewardship and cultivation of the earth for which Allah settled us upon it (Hud 11:61).

Read through the maqasid al-shariah, the higher objectives of the Law, education becomes the means by which the preservation of religion, life, intellect, lineage, and property is secured across the generations (Auda, 2008).

Where the functionalist bridge carries the child toward society as its destination, the Islamic worldview carries the child first toward Allah and then, as His steward, back toward the world. The nation is still served, but it is served as a by-product of a higher allegiance, never as the ceiling of a child’s becoming.

Within this architecture, parents are not one socialising agent among several but the first and primary educators, and their charge is heavier than any developmental checklist. The Qur’an frames it in the language of rescue:

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا قُوا أَنفُسَكُمْ وَأَهْلِيكُمْ نَارًا

“O you who believe, guard yourselves and your families against a Fire whose fuel is people and stones.”

(At-Tahrim 66:6)

To guard a family from the Fire is a task of formation, not merely of provision, and it cannot be discharged by feeding and housing alone.

Al-Ghazali captured its weight when he described the child as a trust, an amanah, in the hands of the parents, and the child’s heart as a pure and precious jewel that will take the imprint of whatever is engraved upon it (Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din).

The Qur’an offers the archetype of this engraving in the counsel of Luqman to his son, which begins not with etiquette or industry but with tawhid, warning against associating partners with Allah, before moving to prayer, patience, humility, and conduct among people (Luqman 31:13-19).

The sequence is instructive.

It runs from creed, to worship, to character, to social skill, which is very nearly the inverse of a readiness checklist that begins and ends with whether a child can hold a pencil or eat unaided.

The home, in the Islamic worldview’s visualisation, is the first madrasah, and what it teaches first is not competence but orientation.

This trust, moreover, comes with an answerability that cannot be delegated away. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said:

كُلُّكُمْ رَاعٍ وَكُلُّكُمْ مَسْؤُولٌ عَنْ رَعِيَّتِهِ، وَالرَّجُلُ رَاعٍ عَلَى أَهْلِ بَيْتِهِ وَهُوَ مَسْؤُولٌ عَنْ رَعِيَّتِهِ، وَالْمَرْأَةُ رَاعِيَةٌ عَلَى بَيْتِ زَوْجِهَا وَوَلَدِهِ وَهِيَ مَسْؤُولَةٌ عَنْ رَعِيَّتِهَا

“Each of you is a shepherd, and each of you is responsible for his flock. A man is a shepherd over the people of his household and is responsible for them, and a woman is a shepherd over her husband’s house and his children and is responsible for them.”

(Sahih al-Bukhari 893; Sahih Muslim 1829, muttafaqun ‘alayhi)

Here the Islamic worldview speaks directly to the outsourcing described in the first conversation. When the washing of dishes passes to a helper, when the setting of a bedtime passes to a screen, and when the shaping of character passes quietly to the school, the doing of formation is displaced, but the answerability for it is not. A shepherd who hands his flock to another has not ceased to be responsible for the flock.

This is the deepest divergence between the two frames.

Sociology can describe delegation as an adaptation to modern life; the hadith describes it as a trust that remains lodged with the one who was given it, whatever conveniences are arranged around it.

Schooling, then, is best understood in this worldview not as a replacement for the home but as the community’s shared discharge of an obligation that originates in the home.

The teacher inherits a portion of a prophetic task, for the Prophet himself was sent to recite, to purify, and to teach the Book and wisdom (Al-Jumu’ah 62:2), and the scholar who carries knowledge forward stands within that lineage.

The school extends and refines what the home has begun, much as the functionalist model described, but with a crucial difference in what is being extended.

When the home transmits fitrah nurtured into adab, the school receives a child oriented and ready to be taught. When the home transmits little, the teacher is handed not a formed child to be refined but an unformed one to be built, and is asked to carry an amanah that was never meant to rest on the school alone. The extra burden that teachers describe is, in Islamic terms, the weight of a displaced trust.

Taken together, the two conversations converge on the same sequence of home, school, and society, yet the Islamic worldview reorders its axis, redefines its subject, and relocates its responsibility. It reorders the axis by making the vertical relationship with Allah prior to the horizontal relationship with society. It redefines the subject by seeing the child not as raw material but as a being of fitrah, an amanah, and a khalifah in the making. And it relocates responsibility by binding it to the parent in a way that no delegation can dissolve.

What the first conversation could name only as a social decline, the second names more gravely still, as a neglect of a trust and a loss of the ends that formation was always meant to serve.

And so this conversation closes, as the first did, with two questions that will not let us rest.

The first turns on ourselves. We were once children shaped, well or poorly, by parents who carried this trust before us, yet almost none of us were ever trained to carry it in turn, least of all under the conditions we now inhabit, where helpers, screens, migration, and the relentless pace of dual-income life have quietly taken over the very tasks the trust asks of us. How, then, are we to evaluate our own readiness to shoulder an amanah for which no one prepared us, in a reality harder than the one that formed us?

The second turns on the child. If we were to lift our gaze and see our son or our daughter not merely as a child to be raised or a pupil to be schooled, but as a khalifah of Allah, a steward who will one day answer for a share of His earth, how differently would we then conceive the whole labour of forming them? What would change, in the home and in the school alike, if every child before us were treated not as a citizen in training, but as a khalifah in the making?

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
Director of Education
Khalifah Education Foundation

References

Qur’anic References

• Al-Baqarah (2): 30

• Hud (11): 61

• Ar-Rum (30): 30

• Luqman (31): 13-19

• Az-Zumar (39): 9

• Al-Mujadalah (58): 11

• At-Tahrim (66): 6

• Al-Jumu’ah (62): 2

• Adh-Dhariyat (51): 56

• Al-’Alaq (96): 1-5

Qur’anic translations are the author’s own renderings, cross-checked against M. A. S. Abdul Haleem (Oxford, 2004) and M. Khattab, The Clear Qur’an (2015).

Hadith References

• Al-Bukhari, M. Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Jana’iz [Book of Funerals], Hadith 1358; and Muslim, Sahih Muslim, Kitab al-Qadar [Book of Destiny], Hadith 2658. Grade: Sahih, muttafaqun ‘alayhi. https://sunnah.com/bukhari:1358

• Al-Bukhari, M. Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Jumu’ah [Book of Friday Prayer], Hadith 893; and Muslim, Sahih Muslim, Kitab al-Imarah [Book of Leadership], Hadith 1829. Grade: Sahih, muttafaqun ‘alayhi. https://sunnah.com/bukhari:893

Books and Scholarly Works

• al-Attas, S. M. N. (1980). The concept of education in Islam: A framework for an Islamic philosophy of education. Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM); later republished by ISTAC.

• al-Ghazali, A. H. Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din [The revival of the religious sciences], Kitab Riyadat al-Nafs wa Tahdhib al-Akhlaq [The Book of Disciplining the Soul].

• Auda, J. (2008). Maqasid al-Shariah as philosophy of Islamic law: A systems approach. International Institute of Islamic Thought.

READ THE FIRST CONVERSATION HERE:

No child arrives at the school gate as a blank page. Long before the first bell, the child has already been made: shaped by a mother tongue, a family table, a rhythm of waking and sleeping, and a set of quiet assumptions about who does what and why. Sociologists have long understood this earliest shaping as primary socialisation, the process through which the young are inducted into their first and most intimate social world. The home, in this account, is not merely where a child lives. It is where a child first becomes a member of society.

The distinctive power of the home lies in the fact that its culture is absorbed rather than chosen. Berger and Luckmann (1966) argue that primary socialisation is affectively charged and largely involuntary, since the child does not select the significant others who transmit the world but receives their world as the world, the only one there is. Language, manners, tastes, moral reflexes, and the small choreography of daily routine are internalised so early and so deeply that they come to feel like nature rather than culture. What is learned at home is therefore rarely experienced as learning at all. It is experienced as reality. This is why the values and practices of the family exert such quiet authority over the child, and why their absence proves so difficult to repair later.

The threshold of schooling marks the child’s first sustained encounter with a world not built for them alone. When formal schooling begins, the home-made self is carried into a crowd of other home-made selves, each bearing a different table, a different bedtime, and a different vocabulary of right and wrong. Children begin, often for the first time, to see their own upbringing reflected and refracted in the upbringing of others. The peer group becomes a second mirror and a second teacher, sometimes reinforcing the lessons of home and sometimes quietly contradicting them. Schooling, in other words, does not begin with the curriculum. It begins with comparison.

For the functionalist tradition, this meeting of many homes is not a problem to be managed but the very reason schools exist. Durkheim (1956) understood education as the methodical socialisation of the young, the means by which each generation transmits to the next the shared understandings that hold a society together. The school, on this view, takes the plural and particular cultures of countless families and works them into something common. In his lectures on moral education, Durkheim (1961) described the classroom as a small society in miniature, a space in which the child learns to submit to rules that are not their parents’ rules, to an authority that is impersonal rather than familial, and to a collective larger than the household. The school thus performs a task no single family can perform for itself. It converts the private morality of the home into the public morality of the nation.

Talcott Parsons gave this insight its sharpest institutional expression. In his account of the school class as a social system, Parsons (1959) described the school as the crucial bridge between the particularistic world of the family and the universalistic world of adult society. At home, the child is loved for who they are and judged by standards that apply to them alone. In the classroom, the same child is measured against a common yardstick, rewarded for achievement rather than affection, and gradually prepared to take up a place within a wider division of labour. The school, on this reading, both socialises and sorts, cultivating a shared civic character while allocating individuals to their future roles (Davis & Moore, 1945). Between the intimacy of the home and the impersonality of the nation, the school stands as the hinge.

Taken together, these accounts describe an elegant and reassuring architecture. The home forms the child; the peer group tests and widens that formation; the school refines the many into one, translating the private inheritance of the family into the shared baseline of the citizen. Each institution passes the child upward to the next, and the nation reproduces itself across the generations. This is how sociology has classically bridged the home and the school, not as rivals, but as successive chambers of a single, continuous process of becoming.

THE CHALLENGES

Yet the elegance of this model rests on an assumption that deserves to be named, because it is precisely the assumption our own moment has begun to strain. The functionalist bridge presumes that the home still does its part, that children arrive already formed enough for the school to refine rather than to build. But what happens when primary socialisation itself grows thin?

• When the family table gives way to separate meals at separate hours,

• when bedtimes dissolve into the glow of a screen, and

• when the small disciplines of the household are outsourced to a helper’s hands,

… the school no longer receives a formed child to be polished. It receives an unformed one to be assembled. The bridge, in such conditions, is asked to span a gap it was never designed to cross.

There is a second unsettling possibility, and it touches us more personally than any theory:

Each of us was once the subject of this order, shaped by parents and teachers into a baseline we did not question because we could not yet see it. Now we have become its actors, the parents and educators charged with transmitting that same baseline to those who come after us.

But the ground beneath the bridge has shifted.

We are asked to hand on a culture we are no longer certain we still possess, to reproduce a formation whose confidence has quietly drained away. When we were children, the order felt total and natural; now, as parents, we suspect it was fragile and made.

And here lies the question this conversation will not let go of:

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
www.hasrizal.com

REFERENCES

• Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Doubleday.

• Davis, K., & Moore, W. E. (1945). Some principles of stratification. American Sociological Review, 10(2), 242–249. https://doi.org/10.2307/2085643

• Durkheim, É. (1956). Education and sociology (S. D. Fox, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1922)

• Durkheim, É. (1961). Moral education (E. K. Wilson & H. Schnurer, Trans.). Free Press. (Original work published 1925)

• Parsons, T. (1959). The school class as a social system: Some of its functions in American society. Harvard Educational Review, 29(4), 297–318.

READ THE SECOND CONVERSATION HERE:

Purpose. To set out an evidence-based, defensible way of grading group tasks (lab reports, projects, presentations) so that individual contribution is recognised and non-contributing free riders face a proportionate consequence, without punishing the students who carry the work.

Key message

Group work should be assessed from more than one source. The teacher or lecturer grades the quality of the group’s product; that mark is then moderated for each student by a confidential peer assessment of individual contribution, with self-assessment used for reflection rather than for the mark itself. This is what the research calls multi-source or triangulated assessment, and it is the most reliable mechanism currently available for making group grading fair.

1. Why this matters

Free riding, known in the literature as social loafing, is common rather than exceptional. More than 65% of students report having experienced it in group work (Takeda & Homberg, 2014), and one longitudinal study identified a loafing problem in 15 to 20% of groups, with anecdotal rates higher still (Abril, 2016). The harm is not only to the free rider’s own learning: when marking is not trusted to be fair, even conscientious members reduce their effort and stop using the group as a resource for learning (Rosander et al., 2020). A fairness mechanism therefore protects the students who contribute.

2. What the evidence supports

The single most powerful lever against loafing is making individual contributions visible and evaluated. When contributions can be identified, whether by the teacher, by peers, or by self-report, loafing tends to fall sharply (Borrego et al., 2013). Building in individual accountability alongside genuine interdependence is what turns a group task into cooperative learning (Kao, 2013). In practice this is operationalised through an individual weighting factor: the teacher marks the group product, and confidential peer ratings generate a per-student multiplier that moderates each individual’s share of that mark. Established tools do exactly this, including SPARK (Freeman & McKenzie, 2002), WebPA (Loddington et al., 2009) and SPARKPLUS, which applies the formula Individual mark = Team mark x Relative Performance Factor (Kaminski et al., 2024). The strongest designs collect these ratings at several points across the task rather than only at the end, and dock a small penalty for missed submissions (Kiss & Webb, 2021).

3. What the evidence cautions

Three design cautions keep the scheme defensible.

First, self-assessment is the least reliable of the three sources and should not drive the mark. Low-achieving students tend to over-rate themselves while high achievers under-rate, and peer marks track teacher marks more closely than self-marks do (Langendyk, 2006; Sung et al., 2010). Contribution scores are fairer and more discriminating when there is no self-assessed component in the calculation and peer assessment is anonymous rather than open (Pratten et al., 2014). Self-assessment is best kept for reflection and feedback.

Second, peer assessment mitigates loafing but does not abolish it. Where peer evaluation fully determined the grade, effort shifted towards managing others’ impressions rather than disappearing (Jassawalla & Sashittal, 2017), and students are often reluctant to penalise peers directly (Coy & Adams, 2012; Jassawalla et al., 2008). This is the argument for keeping the teacher as moderator rather than delegating the whole judgement to students.

Third, peer ratings are reliable for comparing contribution within a group but weak for comparing students across different groups, so they should moderate relative contribution inside a team, not rank the whole cohort (Roberts et al., 2017). Reliability also rises with clear shared criteria and an adequate number of raters (Sung et al., 2010).

4. Recommended practice

1. Keep the teacher or lecturer as the anchor: grade the group product against explicit, published criteria.

2. Add confidential peer assessment of individual contribution against clear behavioural criteria (for example attendance, preparation, task completion, participation, communication, respect), collected at more than one point across the task.

3. Convert peer ratings into an individual weighting factor that moderates each student’s share of the group mark, typically bounded within a modest range (for example about 0.8 to 1.2).

4. Use self-assessment for reflection and dialogue, not in the moderation arithmetic; surface the gap between self and peer ratings as feedback.

5. Keep peer moderation within the group; do not use it to rank students across the class.

6. Retain teacher override for anomalous, collusive or unduly harsh ratings, and require a brief written reason for any mark that reduces a peer’s grade.

7. Publish the criteria and the method to students in advance; fairness perceptions and contribution both improve when the process is transparent and carries real weight.

5. Ready-to-use policy paragraph

Group tasks are assessed using more than one source of evidence. The teacher or lecturer assesses the quality of the group’s product against published criteria; this is the anchor mark. Each student’s share of that mark is then moderated by a confidential individual weighting factor derived from peer assessment of contribution (for example attendance, preparation, task completion, participation and communication), collected at more than one point during the task. Self-assessment is included to support reflection and feedback but does not determine the mark. The teacher or lecturer retains authority to moderate ratings that are anomalous, collusive or unfair, and any mark that reduces a peer’s grade must be accompanied by a brief written reason. This design protects students who contribute fully, gives non-contributing members a proportionate and transparent consequence, and develops the evaluative judgement that employers and professional bodies expect.

References

Abril, P. S. (2016). Reimagining the group project for the business law classroom. Journal of Legal Studies Education, 33(2), 235–262. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlse.12047

Borrego, M., Karlin, J., McNair, L. D., & Beddoes, K. (2013). Team effectiveness theory from industrial and organizational psychology applied to engineering student project teams: A research review. Journal of Engineering Education, 102(4), 472–512. https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20023

Coy, S., & Adams, J. (2012). Walking the talk: Continuous improvement of a quality management field exercise. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 10(2), 223–244. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4609.2011.00338.x

Freeman, M., & McKenzie, J. (2002). SPARK, a confidential web-based template for self and peer assessment of student teamwork: Benefits of evaluating across different subjects. British Journal of Educational Technology, 33(5), 551–569. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8535.00291

Jassawalla, A. R., Malshe, A., & Sashittal, H. (2008). Student perceptions of social loafing in undergraduate business classroom teams. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 6(2), 403–426. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4609.2008.00183.x

Jassawalla, A. R., & Sashittal, H. C. (2017). What students think and do in classroom teams when peer evaluations are highly consequential: A two-stage study. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 15(2), 219–247. https://doi.org/10.1111/dsji.12127

Kaminski, M. R., Raspovic, A., & Munteanu, S. E. (2024). Enhancing teamwork in higher education: Experiences of podiatry students using SPARKPLUS for self- and peer-assessment in group work. Journal of Foot and Ankle Research, 17(4). https://doi.org/10.1002/jfa2.70010

Kao, G. Y.-M. (2013). Enhancing the quality of peer review by reducing student “free riding”: Peer assessment with positive interdependence. British Journal of Educational Technology, 44(1), 112–124. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2011.01278.x

Kiss, A. A., & Webb, C. (2021). The Manchester perspective on using the design project to enhance the education of chemical engineering students. Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology, 96(6), 1453–1464. https://doi.org/10.1002/jctb.6725

Langendyk, V. (2006). Not knowing that they do not know: Self-assessment accuracy of third-year medical students. Medical Education, 40(2), 173–179. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2929.2005.02372.x

Loddington, S., Pond, K., Wilkinson, N., & Willmot, P. (2009). A case study of the development of WebPA: An online peer-moderated marking tool. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40(2), 329–341. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00922.x

McIntyre, K. R., & Crawford, L. E. (2022). Outcomes for group working: Contextualising group work within professionalism frameworks. Medical Education, 56(5), 551. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.14781

Pratten, M. K., Merrick, D., & Burr, S. A. (2014). Group in-course assessment promotes cooperative learning and increases performance. Anatomical Sciences Education, 7(3), 224–233. https://doi.org/10.1002/ase.1397

Roberts, C., Jorm, C., Gentilcore, S., & Crossley, J. (2017). Peer assessment of professional behaviours in problem-based learning groups. Medical Education, 51(4), 390–400. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.13151

Rosander, M., Forslund Frykedal, K., & Hammar Chiriac, E. (2020). Attitudes towards being assessed in group work: The effects of self-efficacy and collective efficacy moderated by a short educational intervention. Psychology in the Schools, 57(9), 1404–1416. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.22423

Author’s note and positioning

I write this article as a researcher whose work sits at the meeting point of inclusive education and Islamic ethical reasoning, and as a LaunchPAD Ambassador, a role that keeps me close to the lived realities of disabled students moving into and through higher education. My purpose here is not to deliver a verdict but to organise my own understanding of a development that I find genuinely worrying: the quiet but accelerating reversal, across universities in several countries, to invigilated, handwritten, and oral examinations as a defence against generative artificial intelligence. The worry is specific. A measure introduced to protect academic integrity may, if adopted as a blanket policy, undo hard-won gains in inclusion and return disabled and neurodivergent students to the disadvantage from which more flexible assessment had begun to release them. This article explores that tension through the available evidence, and then evaluates it through Jasser Auda’s al-tafkir al-maqasidi (maqasidi thinking), applied as a stated analytic procedure rather than an invisible worldview.

1. The problem, briefly stated

The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 confronted universities with an assessment problem they had deferred for a generation. The response, in many quarters, has been to reach for the format that generative tools cannot easily enter: the supervised room, the blank page, the spoken defence. This article argues that such a reversal, while understandable as a short-term integrity measure, is a poor long-term strategy, and that it carries an equity cost that its proponents rarely name. The stronger response, supported by regulators and assessment scholars alike, lies in building a culture of integrity among learners, upskilling educators in the pedagogy of AI, and redesigning assessment for authenticity and inclusion. Assessment format is never a neutral administrative choice. It distributes advantage, and a return to standardised timed formats redistributes that advantage away from the students least able to absorb the loss.

2. The reversal is real, and it is named

The retreat to traditional examinations is documented rather than hypothetical. In the United Kingdom, the law school at Birkbeck, University of London, reintroduced invigilated examinations after academics found themselves confronting large volumes of suspect work. Professor Stewart Motha described his department as having become unwilling to assess essays that, in his words, had for the most part “not been written by students,” and reported that the change generated “a very large number of academic misconduct allegations” (Motha, cited in Rowsell, 2026). At Durham University, Professor Andy Hamilton explained that he stood down from chairing a board of examiners because he “couldn’t tell any more which ones had used AI improperly and which ones had used it properly” (Hamilton, cited in Rowsell, 2026). Colleagues at Swansea have signalled a return to supervised formats, with one arguing that at least half of assessment should be supervised (Draper, cited in Rowsell, 2026).

The pattern extends well beyond Britain. In the United States, reporting traced a surge in examination “blue book” sales of more than thirty per cent at Texas A&M University and higher still at the University of Florida and the University of California, Berkeley, attributed directly to the AI-driven revival of handwritten examinations (Cohen, as reported in Fox News, 2025). In Ireland, the Higher Education Authority (HEA) has urged institutions to adopt oral verification, asking students to explain and defend their work in person rather than relying on take-home assignments or unreliable detection software (RTÉ, 2026). Institutional anxiety underlies these moves. A survey of higher-education leaders found that a majority believed cheating had increased since generative tools became widely available, and that many doubted their faculty could recognise AI-generated text (American Association of Colleges and Universities & Elon University, 2025). The reversal, then, is a considered response to a real problem, and it deserves to be met on its strongest ground before it is criticised.

3. The case for reversion, taken seriously

The most defensible argument for supervised examinations is not nostalgia but validity. Dawson, Bearman, Dollinger, and Boud (2024) reframe the assessment problem away from cheating, and towards the inference an assessment licenses: a credential matters because it warrants a claim that a named person can do something, and generative AI corrodes that warrant whether or not misconduct has occurred. On this reading, some secured assessment supplies defensible evidence that a student can perform independently. Corbin, Dawson, and Liu (2025) sharpen the point by distinguishing “discursive” changes, which rely on rules and declarations that students may simply ignore, from “structural” changes that alter the mechanics of a task so that integrity no longer depends on compliance. An invigilated examination is a structural solution in exactly this sense, which is what gives the reversal its intuitive appeal. Where the temptation to misuse AI is high and the stakes are significant, the argument that supervision offers a cleaner inference is a serious one, and any critique that ignores it is incomplete.

4. The inclusion cost the reversal rarely names

The difficulty is that the format now being restored was, for many disabled and neurodivergent students, a barrier before it was a safeguard. Around a fifth of United Kingdom domestic students report a disability, a figure that has risen steadily and that disability organisations attribute partly to greater recognition of neurodivergence, chronic illness, and mental health conditions (Times Higher Education, 2024). For these students, the standardised timed examination measures more than the intended learning outcome. It also measures handwriting speed, processing fluency, and composure under pressure, traits that have little to do with the competence being certified.

The empirical evidence here is direct. In a sociomaterial study of examinations and disability, Tai and colleagues (2023a) found that pandemic-era changes, including moving examinations online, extending time, and adopting open-book formats, “contributed to increased inclusion for most students,” who could work in spaces and with equipment adapted to their needs, often without recourse to their usual accommodations (Tai et al., 2023a, p. 390). Their conclusion bears directly on the present reversal: assessment flexibility enhances inclusion, and in some cases the most inclusive move is to reconsider the examination itself rather than to reinstate it. A return to standardised handwritten examinations does not merely decline to extend inclusion. It withdraws inclusion that students had already come to rely upon.

A second cost is the re-stigmatisation of accommodation. Nieminen and Eaton (2024) show that reasonable adjustments, which exist to secure access rather than advantage, are frequently reframed as a form of cheating, a suspicion they situate within a wider societal “fear of the disability con.” In an atmosphere already primed to detect illicit assistance, disabled students risk being doubly suspected: once for their AI use and once for the accommodations that make assessment accessible at all. Nor does technology offer an inclusive escape route, since remote proctoring reproduces the same harm by design, flagging as suspicious the very bodily and behavioural differences that disability produces (Center for Democracy and Technology, 2020). The equity problem, in other words, spans both the analogue and the digital forms of “locking down” assessment.

There is, finally, a legal dimension that sharpens the ethical one. In University of Bristol v Abrahart (2024), the High Court upheld a finding of disability discrimination where a university failed to adjust oral assessments for a student with social anxiety, and drew a consequential distinction between a genuine competence standard, which is exempt from the duty to make reasonable adjustments, and a mere method of assessment, which is not. The implication for assessment design is significant. Where speed or a particular examination format is not itself the competence being certified, reverting to a timed handwritten paper without interrogating what is actually being measured exposes institutions to discrimination risk. Inclusion here is not only a pedagogical aspiration. It is, in part, a legal obligation.

5. The alternative: integrity, upskilling, and inclusive design

If reversion carries these costs, the constructive question is what to do instead, and here the regulatory and scholarly consensus is clear. Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency cautions that banning particular tools offers “oversimplified solutions to a complex set of problems,” and warns that defaulting to familiar secure formats can reduce authenticity and deepen inequity (Lodge et al., 2025). The alternative is not unregulated AI but deliberate design. It combines an explicit culture of academic integrity, built with students rather than imposed upon them, with sustained investment in educators’ AI literacy, so that the profession is equipped to teach and assess in a transformed environment. It draws on authentic assessment, in which AI use is expected, declared, and scrutinised rather than merely policed (Ajjawi et al., 2023), and on evaluative judgement, which shifts attention from what students produce to how they discern quality (Bearman et al., 2024). Frameworks such as the AI Assessment Scale allow educators to specify permitted AI use along a graduated continuum rather than through a single prohibition (Perkins et al., 2024).

Universal Design for Learning offers the design grammar that ties these responses together. In its canonical formulation, UDL organises teaching around multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression (Meyer et al., 2014), the last of which implies offering varied ways to demonstrate learning rather than funnelling all students through one high-stakes handwritten paper. When paired with the wider programme of assessment for inclusion (Tai et al., 2023b), UDL reframes the problem entirely. The task is not to choose between integrity and inclusion but to design assessment so that flexibility is built in from the outset, reducing the need for individual accommodation and, with it, the suspicion that accommodation attracts. This is the third way that the reversal debate too often obscures: neither a defensive retreat to tradition nor an uncritical embrace of AI, but proactive inclusive design.

6. A maqasidi evaluation of the reversal

This section applies al-tafkir al-maqasidi, following Auda (2023), operationalised as eight analytic moves. The point of declaring the lens in this way is to make the reasoning examinable rather than assumed. Maqasidi thinking is treated here as a method, a disciplined way of reasoning from and towards the higher objectives of the Shariah, and kept distinct from Maqasid al-Shariah as descriptive content. The object of analysis is the policy of reverting to traditional invigilated examinations as a blanket response to generative AI. A maqasidi reading is warranted because the reversal presents itself as a formally valid solution while its ethical weight lies in its purposes and its consequences, which a purely procedural analysis would miss.

Move 1: Name the purposes at stake. Several objectives are engaged at once. The preservation of intellect (’aql), read developmentally as education and the countering of ignorance (Auda, 2008), is served both by the integrity of the credential and by the genuine cultivation of learning. Human dignity, Auda’s developed reading of the preservation of life (nafs), is engaged by the treatment of disabled learners, whose access to assessment is a condition of their access to education itself. Justice (’adl) is engaged by the fair distribution of assessment advantage. The integrity of the credential may reasonably be classed as a communal necessity (daruriyya), since a society whose qualifications certify nothing cannot order its professional life. Equitable access for disabled learners is at least a pressing need (hajiyya) and, where it conditions access to education as such, approaches a necessity for the individual. This classification is offered as reasoned judgement rather than settled ruling, and the argument does not depend on resolving it precisely.

Move 2: Read the particular through the universal. The choice of examination format is a particular (juz’i) that must be read in the light of the universal (kulli) aim it serves. That aim is the truthful cultivation of intellect for all learners, not the preservation of any single procedure. Reframed this way, the governing question is not “how do we stop AI cheating” but “how do we assess so that we both certify learning honestly and honour the dignity of every learner.” The reversal answers the narrower question while leaving the wider one unaddressed.

Move 3: Separate ends from means. The invigilated handwritten examination is an instrument (wasila), not an objective (maqsad). Its end is a defensible inference about a learner’s competence and integrity. In maqasidi reasoning a means takes the ruling of its end but remains revisable when it ceases to serve that end. When a format that once secured valid inference now systematically excludes disabled learners and measures traits irrelevant to the outcome, it has drifted from its purpose and must be reconsidered. This is precisely the logic that underlies UDL’s insistence on multiple means of expression, in which varied pathways are revisable instruments serving a fixed end.

Move 4: Separate the constant from the variable. What is constant here is the objective: a truthful demonstration of learning, and the dignity and equity of the learner. What is variable is the format, timing, medium, and modality through which that objective is pursued. The reversal treats a variable, the timed pen-and-paper format, as though it were a constant, which in maqasidi terms is a category error. Fidelity to the objective does not require fidelity to any one of its historically contingent instruments.

Move 5: Test the consequences (ma’alat). Judged by what it actually produces, blanket reversion generates outcomes that count against it. It reimposes demands of speed, fluency, and composure that disproportionately burden dyslexic, ADHD, autistic, anxious, and chronically ill students (Tai et al., 2023a). It intensifies the climate in which accommodation is read as suspicion (Nieminen & Eaton, 2024), and its technologised alternative, proctoring, reproduces exclusion rather than resolving it (Center for Democracy and Technology, 2020). It carries legal exposure where format is mistaken for competence (University of Bristol v Abrahart, 2024). A solution that is formally secure but produces exclusion and re-stigmatisation is, by the measure of its outcomes, deficient.

Move 6: Weigh and prioritise (muwazana and awlawiyyat). Three goods compete. The integrity of the credential serves intellect and justice; the dignity and access of disabled learners serve human dignity; administrative defensibility serves a lower-order interest. The maqasidi principle that averting a definite harm takes precedence over securing a contingent benefit is decisive here, because the exclusion of vulnerable learners is certain and falls on those least able to bear it, whereas the integrity benefit, though real, is obtainable by other means: authentic assessment, programmatic assurance across a whole programme, and a genuine culture of integrity. The priority, therefore, is to preserve inclusion while securing integrity through redesign, not to purchase integrity at the price of exclusion through a single blunt instrument.

Move 7: Check against universal values. Tested against justice, dignity, mercy, and wisdom, blanket reversion falls short. It fails the test of justice and dignity for disabled learners, and it reflects the defensive, closed posture that maqasidi thinking identifies as a disorder of reasoning rather than the open, value-anchored posture it commends. An inclusively designed approach honours all four: justice as equity, dignity as the standing of every learner, mercy as the removal of unnecessary hardship (raf’ al-haraj), and wisdom (hikma) as the fitting of means to ends and to the reality in which they operate.

Move 8: Audit the reasoning (naqd). The debate is habitually posed as a binary: either secure examinations or unchecked AI. Maqasidi thinking rejects this atomism and false framing, since the real option is a differentiated, programmatic model that secures some assessment points inclusively while redesigning the majority for authentic, AI-integrated demonstration of learning. One correction was made in the course of this analysis. An earlier framing risked treating traditional examinations as intrinsically illegitimate; this was corrected, since inclusively designed supervised assessment can be entirely legitimate. The object of critique is blanket reversion as a sole strategy, not supervision as such.

Maqasid–UDL cross-walk

The maqasidi moves are structurally cognate with the design logic of Universal Design for Learning, which is what allows the two frameworks to be placed in genuine dialogue rather than mere juxtaposition. Six of the eight moves pair with a specific UDL principle, and the pairing does analytic work for the present issue. The remaining two, moves 2 and 8, are listed for completeness but operate at the level of the argument itself rather than the design cross-walk: move 2 keeps the analysis tied to the wider aims of inclusive education, and move 8 is a reflexive audit of the reasoning, so neither maps onto a single UDL principle without distortion.

7. Synthesis and contribution

The maqasidi reading yields a clear judgement. Blanket reversion to traditional examinations mistakes a revisable means for a fixed end, and, judged by its consequences, it sacrifices a necessity, the dignity and access of disabled learners, in order to secure a benefit, credential integrity, that can be obtained by less exclusionary means. The maqasidi and UDL logics converge on inclusive design as the proper response, with Maqasid supplying the teleological and ethical anchoring that secular UDL tends to leave implicit. This is the article’s central contribution to my developing doctoral argument: that Maqasid al-Shariah and Universal Design for Learning are not merely compatible but structurally cognate, and that reading a live policy dispute through both at once produces a more defensible position than either framework reaches alone.

8. Reflexive closing

I began this article worried, and the analysis has clarified rather than dissolved the worry. As a LaunchPAD Ambassador, I take into serious consideration the students for whom an examination hall is not a neutral space, and as a researcher I am persuaded that the reversal now underway, if left unexamined, will quietly re-embed the barriers that inclusive assessment had begun to lower. The argument I have organised here is not that supervision is never justified, but that caution exercised without a purpose is not caution at all. The measure of any assessment reform is whether it preserves the truthful cultivation of intellect while honouring the dignity of every learner who sits it, and by that measure a blanket return to tradition asks the wrong students to pay for the sector’s uncertainty about AI.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
www.hasrizal.com

References

Ajjawi, R., Tai, J., Dollinger, M., Dawson, P., Boud, D., & Bearman, M. (2023). From authentic assessment to authenticity in assessment: Broadening perspectives. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(4), 499–510. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2271193

American Association of Colleges and Universities, & Elon University. (2025). Leading through disruption: Higher education executives assess AI in the curriculum. Imagining the Digital Future Center.

Auda, J. (2008). Maqasid al-Shariah as philosophy of Islamic law: A systems approach. International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Auda, J. (2023). Al-tafkir al-maqasidi: Muraja’at li-tartib al-’aql al-muslim [Maqasidi thinking: Reviews for reordering the Muslim mind]. Dar al-Mashriq.

Bearman, M., Tai, J., Dawson, P., Boud, D., & Ajjawi, R. (2024). Developing evaluative judgement for a time of generative artificial intelligence. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(6), 893–905. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2335321

Center for Democracy and Technology. (2020). How automated test proctoring software discriminates against disabled students. https://cdt.org/insights/how-automated-test-proctoring-software-discriminates-against-disabled-students/

Cohen, B. (2025, June). Schools turn to handwritten exams as AI cheating surges [As reported by Fox News]. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/tech/schools-turn-handwritten-exams-ai-cheating-surges

Corbin, T., Dawson, P., & Liu, D. (2025). Talk is cheap: Why structural assessment changes are needed for a time of GenAI. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 50(7), 1087–1097. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2025.2503964

Dawson, P., Bearman, M., Dollinger, M., & Boud, D. (2024). Validity matters more than cheating. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 1005–1016. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2386662

Lodge, J. M., Bearman, M., Dawson, P., Gniel, H., Harper, R., Liu, D., McLean, J., Ucnik, L., & Associates. (2025). Enacting assessment reform in a time of artificial intelligence. Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. https://www.teqsa.gov.au/guides-resources/resources/corporate-publications/enacting-assessment-reform-time-artificial-intelligence

Meyer, A., Rose, D. H., & Gordon, D. (2014). Universal design for learning: Theory and practice. CAST Professional Publishing.

Nieminen, J. H., & Eaton, S. E. (2024). Are assessment accommodations cheating? A critical policy analysis. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 978–993. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2259632

Perkins, M., Roe, J., & Furze, L. (2024). The AI assessment scale revisited: A framework for educational assessment [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09029

RTÉ. (2026, January 11). Over 500 students found using AI illegally in coursework. https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0111/1552530-ai-college-work/

Rowsell, J. (2026, June 29). Are universities returning to in-person exams to combat AI cheating? Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/are-universities-returning-person-exams-combat-ai-cheating

Tai, J., Mahoney, P., Ajjawi, R., Bearman, M., Dargusch, J., Dracup, M., & Harris, L. (2023a). How are examinations inclusive for students with disabilities in higher education? A sociomaterial analysis. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 48(3), 390–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2022.2077910

Tai, J., Ajjawi, R., Bearman, M., Boud, D., Dawson, P., & Jorre de St Jorre, T. (2023b). Assessment for inclusion: Rethinking contemporary strategies in assessment design. Higher Education Research & Development, 42(2), 483–497. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2022.2057451

Times Higher Education. (2024). Fifth of UK students report disability, true total likely higher. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/fifth-uk-students-report-disability-true-total-likely-higher

University of Bristol v Abrahart [2024] EWHC 299 (KB).

Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.

To Ustaz Qayyum, Principal of Khalifah Model School Secondary, to our teachers, to our parents, to our students, and to every guest who walked through our doors this morning: peace be upon you all.

Ustaz Qayyum, thank you for inviting me to speak. I am sitting seven thousand miles away in Ireland, and yet you made room for my voice in your hall. That is a kindness I do not take lightly.

Let me begin where all our work should begin.

وَإِذْ قَالَ مُوسَىٰ لِفَتَاهُ لَا أَبْرَحُ حَتَّىٰ أَبْلُغَ مَجْمَعَ الْبَحْرَيْنِ أَوْ أَمْضِيَ حُقُبًا

“Musa said to his servant, ‘I will not rest until I reach the place where the two seas meet, even if it takes me years.’”

Al-Kahf (18): 60

A Prophet of Allah. With scripture. With revelation. And still, the knowledge he was sent to find was not waiting for him at home. It was at the junction of two seas, and he had to walk there.

Notice that Allah did not send him a book. Allah sent him on a journey. An unusual journey. A difficult one. For years, if that was what it took.

Some knowledge will not come to you while you sit still. It has to be travelled into.

That is our Lifelong Learning Module. That is learning beyond the four walls of a classroom.

Why LLM is our signature

LLM has become the signature programme of KMSS. Not because no other school runs something similar. Others do. It is our signature because of where we place it: very close to our mind, and very close to our heart.

Every year it gets better. Every year our students look forward to it. And every year, the teachers raise the bar on themselves.

It is dear to our mind because LLM is curated deliberately, grounded in the learning sciences, and built on an experiential education framework.

So let me be precise about something. LLM is not co-curriculum. LLM is core curriculum.

In the classroom, our students learn reflectively and progressively as active learners. In LLM, the learning switches modes. It becomes hands-on. It becomes lived. Students see, feel, and experience how knowledge actually behaves once it leaves the page and enters the world. That is not an extra. That is the point.

It is dear to our heart because LLM is curated wholeheartedly, with one hope: that our students fall in love with learning, and then fall in love with it again.

Self-discovery. Hidden talent. An interest nobody noticed. A curiosity nobody had triggered. LLM activates all of it.

Yes, there are challenges. There is frustration, anger, exhaustion, the full thick and thin of any real journey. But it ends the same way every time. Students come home cherishing what they went through, and loving learning a little more than before.

To our six groups, by name

Now, to the students of LLM 2026. Let me name you, group by group.

Gen-Q Backpackers. You wrote the words of Allah in Braille, so that a child on Pulau Bait who cannot see the page could still read it.

Blend & Bloom. You took the used cooking oil that every household throws away, turned it into soap, and gave the handwash to the community at Sriti Kota Warisan. Waste into worth.

Guardian of The Earth. You crossed a border. You did a gotong-royong at Lake Toba in a language that was not your own. Khalifah is not a title. It is a walk.

Garden Chef. You composted, you saved seed, you harvested, you cooked, and then you handed sandwiches to strangers at Stadium Mini Sepang. Seed to plate, and plate to somebody else.

WoodCraft Wonders. You stood in front of a table saw at WISDEC, and you did not flinch. Somewhere in this school, there is furniture you built with your own hands.

Wiring and Technical Training. You wired a circuit, and a lamp came on. Amanah and ihsan can be learned holding a screwdriver, and you learned them.

All six of you, listen carefully. LLM is not a school holiday. It is not a school trip. It is your parents investing in you so that you can discover a version of yourself as a learner that you had not previously believed or imagined. Honour that. Make the most of it.

To everyone else in the hall

To our guests and the public joining us for the first time: you are genuinely welcome here. You are not visiting a showroom. You are walking into a school with its work on display, and you are free to look closely.

To parents considering KMSS for your child next year: watch our students today, not our banners. Listen to how they talk about what they did. That will tell you more about this school than any brochure I could write.

To our current parents: thank you for your trust, and thank you for your investment. I know exactly what this costs. The programme grows more expensive every year, and we fight hard to keep the figure as low as we honestly can. Please know that your money is treated as a trust, not a fee.

To our teachers: thank you for planning it, executing it, and making it possible again and again. LLM does not happen by inspiration. It happens because you carry it.

To the spouses and children of our teachers: thank you for lending us your husband, your wife, your daddy, your mummy, while LLM took place. We know the house was quieter and heavier without them. That patience is part of this programme, even though your names appear nowhere on the poster.

Make the most of it

So today, everyone, let us make the most of this exhibition.

How I wish I could travel back to Malaysia to be there with you. Since I cannot, let me ask this of you instead. Ask our students questions. Invite them to share their reflections. And do not spare us: we welcome your criticism and your feedback, with one intention only, which is to make learning happen, and to make it accessible to as many as possible.

May Allah bless our teachers, our students, our parents, and this school.

Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil is Director of Education at Yayasan Pendidikan Khalifah.
Naas, Co. Kildare, Ireland
www.hasrizal.com

Sitting alongside other fellow ambassadors, each carrying their own lived experience across different disciplines, disabilities and institutions, has reminded me that advocacy is rarely a solo act. It is a chorus, and I am proud to be one voice within it.

The picture emerging from our recent meeting is one of cautious optimism.

The number of postgraduate students with disabilities enrolled in Irish universities is rising steadily, yet they remain significantly underrepresented. The most recent AHEAD figures show that only 3.3% of the total postgraduate population engage with disability support services, compared with 9.3% at undergraduate level. That gap is our main take-home message.

The progress is real and worth celebrating, but the distance between undergraduate and postgraduate participation tells its own story about the barriers that appear the moment a disabled student decides to go further. Our work through the Voices in the Community report has given shape to those barriers, from inaccessible campuses and the hidden cost of disability to the exhausting labour of constant self-advocacy. Naming them is the first step. Dismantling them is the work that remains, and far more of it is needed before postgraduate study is genuinely open to everyone with the ability to thrive in it.

Alongside this, I hope to widen my advocacy into another universe entirely. I would like to work more closely with the Embassy of Malaysia in Dublin, the Malaysian High Commission in the UK, and Education Malaysia in London, to build greater awareness of inclusive education and to strengthen the support and wellbeing of Malaysian students across these regions. There is something powerful about carrying the lessons of LaunchPAD into a community that is close to my heart. Many Malaysian students studying abroad navigate the same questions of access, disclosure and belonging that our research surfaced, often without knowing where to turn, and I believe these relationships can open doors that neither advocacy nor academia could open alone. If inclusion is to mean anything, it has to travel across borders as well as across campuses.

On a personal note, I want to share a decision that means a great deal to me. Although I was registered with disability support during my M.Ed journey at Trinity College Dublin, I chose to apply for the Trinity Research Doctorate Award for my PhD through the School based route rather than the specific category I was eligible to apply under. It was my quiet way of making a statement. I will forever be an individual with ADHD, but with the right system, pedagogy, policies, culture and mindset, I am abled, just like every other student. My challenge was never ability. It was the format and the process, and when those are designed well, the barrier simply falls away. Applying on open, competitive terms was my way of demonstrating exactly that.

I want to thank TCD’s School of Education for welcoming my research proposal, and awarding me the TRDA for my PhD, which begins this September. It allows my academia and advocacy to intertwine in the most organic way possible, each one feeding and sharpening the other.

And to the amazing people of LaunchPAD, thank you. You have made this atypical journey feel less like a fight and more like a shared endeavour. I am genuinely blessed to have you all alongside me, and I cannot wait to see what the next chapter holds for our community.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
www.hasrizal.com

Last year, the day after I submitted my master’s thesis at Trinity, I expected to feel light. I had imagined relief, perhaps even a small celebration. Instead, a strange and awkward emptiness settled over me.

The assignments were gone.

The deadlines had cleared

And, in their absence, I felt not freedom but a hollow I could not name. It has taken me a while to understand that the hollow was not ingratitude, and it was not a failure of character.

I write this in June because I know I am not the only one sitting in it.

Many of my colleagues have just finished their own submissions, their theses, their reports, their long-postponed deadlines, and more than a few have described the same quiet that follows. For those of us who live with ADHD, that quiet has a particular texture. This is my attempt to make sense of it, not as a reporter observing the condition from the outside, but as someone who was diagnosed at forty-seven and has spent the years since learning, slowly, how my own brain is actually wired.

The most exhausting part of living with ADHD has rarely been the work itself. It has been the gap between intention and action.

You know exactly what needs doing, you genuinely want to do it, you are painfully aware of what your inaction will cost, and still you sit immobilised before the blinking cursor, the unopened post, the sink full of dishes.

In a culture that treats productivity as a measure of character and grit, this gap is quickly relabelled as laziness or a want of discipline.

The research, however, is consistent: ADHD is not a deficit of willpower but a challenge in the brain’s systems of self-regulation. Telling someone with ADHD to try harder is rather like telling a severely short-sighted person to squint harder at a sign a mile away. The effort is real, but the hardware is configured differently.

1. Self-regulation is a fuel tank, not a fixed trait

Professor Russell Barkley offers the most useful place to begin.

In his account of executive function, self-regulation is not a stable skill that a person simply has or lacks, but a depletable biological resource, a tank that empties with use. Every time we resist a distraction, follow a complex instruction, inhibit an emotional impulse, or force ourselves to begin a tedious task, we draw from that tank. For the neurodivergent brain, the reserve is often smaller, and it drains faster. This is why a professional with ADHD can be articulate and sharp in a board meeting at ten in the morning and yet, by six in the evening, find themselves paralysed, staring at the kitchen sink, unable to decide what to cook for dinner.

What matters here is that the depletion is metabolic, not moral.

Knouse and Barkley (2010) describe self-regulation as physically expensive, drawing heavily on the glucose burned in the frontal lobes, so that when the fuel is gone the system simply shuts down. Barkley (2012) goes so far as to call it a resource “depleted by the very act of using it” (p. 101).

Read this way:

The so-called laziness that arrives with the evening is nothing of the sort. We have not become weaker as the sun goes down. Our tank for self-regulation is empty, and an empty tank cannot be refilled by scolding.

2. Hyperfocus is a runaway train, not a superpower

Popular culture loves to call hyperfocus the ADHD superpower.

Those rare hours when the world falls away and the mind locks onto a single task with startling intensity. Pink and Emery (2023) are honest about its darker side.

Hyperfocus is not a tool we choose to pick up; it is an involuntary immersion, and it usually arrives with a bill attached. We sit down at nine to “quickly” fix a spreadsheet, and the next time we look up it is three in the afternoon. We have not eaten, not moved, not stood up. The work may be immaculate, but what follows is numbness and burnout rather than satisfaction.

Coming out of that state is rarely a smooth landing.

Pink and Emery (2023) describe the crash that follows, the heaviness and irritability that can linger for hours, and the reason is structural. Because the ADHD brain struggles to modulate the intensity of its attention, it tends to run all or nothing, and its task-switching machinery is genuinely impaired. The exhaustion that arrives after a burst of high productivity is therefore not a sign of failure. It is the predictable cost of an unsustainable sprint. Hyperfocus is not a luxury cruise. It is a runaway train that eventually runs out of track.

3. Mind-wandering is the architecture, not a distraction

We tend to imagine distraction as something done to us from outside: a notification, a noise, a passing colleague.

For the ADHD brain, the most powerful distractions are usually internal.

Excessive mind-wandering and emotional dysregulation are not side effects bolted onto the condition; they are part of its core architecture. The mechanism lies in the Default Mode Network, the system that hums into life whenever we are not fixed on a task, the daydreaming state.

In a neurotypical brain a kind of toggle flips when work begins: the Default Mode Network quietens and the Task Positive Network takes over.

In the ADHD brain, that toggle is unreliable.

The daydreaming network refuses to fall silent even as the working network tries to engage, leaving a constant background hum of tangents, memories, and sudden feeling.

The ADHD Experts material from ADDitude (n.d.) makes the point plainly: spacing out is a biological reality, not a shortfall of effort. When your mind drifts mid-conversation, it is not because you do not care. It is because the chatter inside your own head is, at that moment, louder than the world outside it.

Recognising this will not switch the network off, but it does strip away a great deal of the shame, and it points towards the tools that genuinely help: the external prompts and the quiet presence of another person working beside you.

4. The marathon, not the sprint

The all-or-nothing rhythm pulls many adults with ADHD into a destructive loop: work at full capacity until you hit the wall, collapse, and lose the days that follow to recovery.

Knouse and Barkley (2010) argue that the way out is to trade the sprint for the marathon, to manage energy proactively rather than reactively. The heart of this is the restoration break, and the crucial shift is one of timing. Most of us wait until we are already overwhelmed before we stop, which for the ADHD brain is far too late, because once the tank is dry the recovery is disproportionately slow. Restoration has to be scheduled before depletion, not earned after it. A break is not a reward for finishing. It is a precondition for continuing.

In practice this means a few unglamorous habits held with some discipline.

Working in timed intervals with genuine hard stops helps, twenty-five minutes followed by five, and the discipline lies in stopping even when we are in the zone, precisely so that there is fuel left for the afternoon.

It also means choosing restoration that actually restores: scrolling a phone is simply more input for an overloaded brain, whereas stepping outside, stretching, or sitting with our eyes closed gives the executive system a real chance to reset.

And because the frontal lobes are metabolically costly to run, steady blood sugar matters more than we like to admit, so small protein-rich snacks across the day keep the raw fuel flowing.

Treat life as a marathon and we stop trying to power through.

We start building a structure that respects the limits we actually have.

5. The weight of invisible shame

The heaviest thing many of us carry is not the symptoms but the shame accumulated across a lifetime of small failures.

Pink and Emery (2023) use the image of dirty laundry, the literal and metaphorical piles that feel like evidence of some basic inadequacy.

For an adult with ADHD, a full sink or an email left unanswered for three weeks is never just a task. It is a quiet indictment, a reminder of every deadline missed and every person let down. This is how shame becomes a second disability. It generates a constant low hum of emotional stress that drains the very self-regulation pool we are trying to protect, and so it makes the original difficulty even worse.

The clinical picture, reflected in the European consensus that ADDitude (n.d.) draws on, is that emotional regulation matters as much to managing ADHD as time management does.

Every hour spent berating ourselves for being neurodivergent is an hour of executive fuel burned on self-criticism rather than living. Lasting progress with ADHD asks for more than a better planner or a sharper app. It asks for a deliberate refusal of the shame attached to the laundry, and that refusal begins with understanding that the off-switch for our wandering mind is simply wired differently from most.

The emptiness after the deadline

Which brings me back to the hollow I felt the morning after I submitted.

I have come to think of a deadline as a borrowed executive function. While it lasts, it does from the outside what our own regulation cannot reliably do alone: it supplies urgency, it holds the toggle in place, it keeps the last reserves of the tank burning. It is external scaffolding, and for months it props us upright.

When it lifts, two things happen at once.

The tank, run down by a long sprint, is empty, and at the same moment the structure that was regulating us from the outside disappears overnight.

The hollow we feel is the sound of that scaffolding being taken away. It is not that we are ungrateful for the opportunity to rest. It is that the brain, suddenly unsupported, has to remember how to hold itself.

So to all fellow ADHD colleagues sitting in the June quiet, having handed in the thing that consumed you: the emptiness is not a verdict on our character. It is an empty tank and a missing scaffold, arriving together. The kinder and more accurate question is not “why am I failing to feel grateful?” but “what has drained me, and what would help me refuel?”

When we stop reading our exhaustion as a flaw and start reading it as biology, the way forward gets clearer, Insya-Allah.

The work, after all, was never the problem.

The recovery was simply never built in.

This season, perhaps, we can build it.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
www.hasrizal.com

References

• ADHD Experts. (n.d.). *How the ADHD brain works* [Expert eBook]. ADDitude.

• Barkley, R. A. (2012). *Executive functions: What they are, how they work, and why they evolve*. Guilford Press.

• Knouse, L. E., & Barkley, R. A. (2010). *Living well with adult ADHD*. Guilford Press.

• Pink, R., & Emery, R. (2023). *Dirty laundry: Why adults with ADHD are so ashamed and what we can do to help*. Vintage.

JUNE 2026 NOTE

The clearest line of support I find is the doctrine of rukhsa and the hajiyyat.

In Volume I, al-Shatibi argues that the law systematically removes hardship and intends facility, grounding this in the principle that "the basis of rukhsa is leniency for the subject and the removal of hardship for him" (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. 221), and in the Qur'anic warrant that "Allah intends every facility for you; He does not want to put you to difficulties" (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. 222).

Volume II then formalises this as a structural feature of the law rather than a concession, defining the hajiyyat as those purposes "required so as to attain facility and removal of constraints that usually lead to difficulty and hardship" (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 10).

I take this to be significant for my thesis because it gives barrier removal an indigenous theological standing.

UDL locates the barrier in a rigid environment and removes it by designing flexibility in from the outset.

Al-Shatibi, as I read him, locates facility in the very architecture of the law, as one of its three graded purposes, and not as a grudging exception bolted on afterwards.

The conceptual move I most need, the shift from reactive accommodation to proactive universal design, is already present in the maqasid: facility is anticipated and built in, not granted under duress.

NON-DEFICIT FRAMING

The second line of support I want to develop is the non-deficit framing.

When al-Shatibi notes that in worship "these are like light exemptions with respect to the hardship accompanying illness and journey" (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 10), the burdened person is not pathologised.

The standard demand is eased because of circumstance, and the easing is itself an act of the law fulfilling its purpose.

I see this as parallel to the social-model logic underneath UDL, where the learner is not the problem to be fixed and the design is.

I intend to argue that the maqasid carries an analogous stance: the mukallaf who is ill or travelling is met by a more accessible route to the same end, and that route is fully legitimate, not a lesser form of obedience.

REMOVING BARRIERS

The third line of support is the one that sharpens my "Beyond Compliance" framing in particular, and it is where I think al-Shatibi becomes more than a parallel and begins to do real conceptual work.

Barrier removal in UDL is not only about access through the door; the engagement principle reaches toward sustained, self-regulated, intrinsically motivated learning.

Volume I's eighth preliminary concept, culminating in "the third grade is for those for whom knowledge has become an established trait" (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. 27), describes exactly that internalised, self-directing disposition.

Volume II names the telos directly: the primary objective of the law is to free the subject from his own whims "so that he may be the servant of Allah by choice, just as he is the servant of Allah by compulsion" (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 135).

This is what lets me say something stronger than "UDL is compatible with Islam."

It lets me argue that a Muslim educator reasoning from the maqasid does not remove barriers merely to satisfy an inclusion mandate, but because the deep purpose of the law is to move the learner from outward compliance toward willed, internalised engagement.

That, in its own indigenous vocabulary, is my thesis.

METHODOLOGICAL WARRANT

Underwriting all of this, I find, is a methodological warrant. The governing rule that "it is, therefore, obligatory to consider the particulars in the light of the universals" (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. xviii) models how I want to show the Muslim educator reasoning about any single accommodation.

A given UDL adjustment is not an ad hoc kindness but a particular instance of a universal purpose, the removal of hardship in service of the necessities.

And the inclusive reach of the law itself, which "carries the masses with it, whether infirm or strong, and guides all, whether intelligent or obtuse" (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. xx), strikes me as close to a definition of the universal in Universal Design: one well-designed system navigable across the full range of human variability, rather than a system built for the average with exceptions appended.

CAUTION

I want to hold one caution close as I carry this into the chapter, so that any ‘devil’s advocate’ cannot turn it against me.

These are conceptual resonances, not claims that al-Shatibi was theorising pedagogy or disability.

Rukhsah concerns legal exemption from religious obligation; UDL concerns curricular and environmental design.

The bridge is the shared underlying logic, that is, anticipated human variability, designed-in facility, non-deficit accommodation, and an orientation to ease, and not an identity of domain.

Presented as a warrant informed by maqasid rather than as an anachronistic equivalence, I am confident that the parallel is valid and reinforces my central argument that the removal of barriers is, for the Muslim educator, a positive theological telos rather than a compliance burden.

The Reconciliation of the Fundamentals of Islamic Law: Al-Muwāfaqāt fī Uṣūl al-Sharīʿa, Volume I

Citation (APA 7)

• In-text: (al-Shatibi, 2012a)

• Reference: al-Shatibi, I. ibn M. (2012a). The reconciliation of the fundamentals of Islamic law: Al-Muwāfaqāt fī uṣūl al-sharīʿa (Vol. 1; I. A. K. Nyazee, Trans.). Garnet Publishing. (Original work composed 8th century AH)

• DOI: No DOI assigned (print monograph). ISBN-13: 978-1-85964-280-1.

• Publication date as printed: 2012 (revised edition).

• Skill-taxonomy tags: Maqasid al-Shariah; Islamic Education; Theory.

Key quotes

• “It is, therefore, obligatory to consider the particulars in the light of the universals” (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. xviii). Anchors the maqāṣid method of reading any particular ruling against the universal purposes.

• “it carries the masses with it, whether infirm or strong, and guides all, whether intelligent or obtuse” (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. xx). The law as inherently inclusive and accommodating, a conceptual parallel to UDL.

• “This is knowledge that leads to action and does not make the possessor susceptible to his whims and fancies in any case, rather it keeps him constrained within its requirements” (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. 26). Knowledge as self-regulating and conduct-forming.

• “The third grade is for those for whom knowledge has become an established trait” (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. 27). Internalised knowledge as a settled disposition; direct anchor for faith-driven intrinsic motivation.

• “The basis of rukhṣa is leniency for the subject and the removal of hardship for him” (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. 221). The exemption principle as accommodation.

• “Allah intends every facility for you; He does not want to put you to difficulties” (al-Shatibi, 2012a, p. 222). The law’s orientation to ease (Qurʾān 2:185 as cited).

The Reconciliation of the Fundamentals of Islamic Law: Al-Muwāfaqāt fī Uṣūl al-Sharīʿa, Volume II — The Book of Maqāṣid

Citation (APA 7)

• In-text: (al-Shatibi, 2012b)

• Reference: al-Shatibi, I. ibn M. (2012b). The reconciliation of the fundamentals of Islamic law: Al-Muwāfaqāt fī uṣūl al-sharīʿa (Vol. 2; I. A. K. Nyazee, Trans.). Garnet Publishing. (Original work composed 8th century AH)

• DOI: No DOI assigned (print monograph).

• Publication date as printed: 2012.

• Skill-taxonomy tags: Maqasid al-Shariah; Islamic Education; Theory.

Key quotes

• “These purposes do not go beyond three types, requiring that: first: the purposes be necessary (ḍarūriyya); second: the purposes pertain to needs (ḥājiyya); third: the purposes pertain to complementary norms (taḥsīniyya)” (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 9). The three-grade structure of the maqāṣid.

• “The necessities as a whole are five. These are: the preservation of the Dīn, Life, Progeny, Wealth and Intellect” (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 10). The five necessities, the organising spine of maqāṣid theory.

• “they are required so as to attain facility and removal of constraints that usually lead to difficulty and hardship” (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 10). Defines ḥājiyyāt as facility and the removal of hardship.

• “In acts of worship these are like light exemptions with respect to the hardship accompanying illness and journey” (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 10). Built-in accommodation for the burdened, a conceptual parallel to UDL.

• “The primary legal objective of the promulgation of the sharīʿa is to free the subject from the exigencies of his own whims so that he may be the servant of Allāh by choice, just as he is the servant of Allāh by compulsion” (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 135). Central anchor for faith-driven, willed (intrinsic) motivation.

• “Acts are determined by intentions, and for each person are what he intends” (al-Shatibi, 2012b, p. 255). Intention (niyya) as the determinant of the moral and legal value of acts.

During my time at UKM around 2013, my research focused heavily on Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s ideas regarding religious reform. Those were also my early years working as an educator at the Khalifah Education Foundation. Looking back at my subsequent training in inclusive education, it is fascinating to observe how Imam Birgivi conceptualised inclusive pedagogy long before it was formalised into the contemporary frameworks we recognise today.

Although the modern lexicon of “inclusive education” and “special educational needs” did not exist in sixteenth-century Ottoman discourse, Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s pedagogical framework demonstrates a profound commitment to expanding access, removing barriers, and enabling learning for marginalised groups. His approach to inclusivity was fundamentally rooted in his theological conviction that foundational religious knowledge (‘ilm-i hal) is a universal obligation necessary for salvation (Krstić, 2021).

To ensure this knowledge reached everyone, he addressed the democratisation of learning through socio-economic reform, linguistic vernacularisation, and pedagogical simplification (Ivanyi, 2012).

Overview: Schooling, Learning, and Children in the Ottoman Era

During the Ottoman period, a child’s connection to learning was primarily forged through a highly structured, religiously anchored educational system that sought to integrate cognitive acquisition with moral and spiritual formation. The foundational stage of this system was the sıbyan mektebi (primary school) or mu’allimhane, institutions that were established in nearly every town and village to teach young children the Qur’an, basic Islamic morality, reading, and writing. Within this system, particularly during the era of the influential sixteenth-century scholar Birgivi Mehmed Efendi (1523–1573), concepts akin to contemporary inclusive education, such as overcoming socio-economic barriers, fostering empathetic teacher-student dynamics, and ensuring cognitive accessibility, were systematically addressed through the waqf (pious endowment) system and innovative vernacular pedagogies.

Equal Access and the Removal of Socio-Economic Barriers

Birgivi tackled the fundamental issue of equal educational access by fiercely opposing the commodification of learning, which he viewed as an institutional barrier preventing the poor from acquiring knowledge. He argued that teaching the Qur’an and religious sciences was an act of worship intended to draw the believer closer to God. Consequently, he categorically condemned the practice of demanding or accepting wages (ujra) for these services (Zilfi, 1988).

By insisting that scholars and teachers must not turn religious instruction into a means of making a livelihood, Birgivi theoretically envisioned an educational landscape free of financial obstacles (Mandaville, 1979). In his view, monetising education corrupted the teacher’s intention and unjustly restricted the transmission of divine knowledge, which he believed was a communal right necessary for societal moral order (Ivanyi, 2012).

Overcoming Linguistic and Literacy Barriers

To overcome linguistic barriers and enable learning for those with reading difficulties, Birgivi recognised that the formal medrese system, operating primarily in Arabic, excluded the vast majority of the Ottoman public (Krstić, 2021).

He challenged this exclusionary structure by producing vernacular catechisms, most notably his Vasiyetname. Written in simple and clear Ottoman Turkish, this text ensured that the unlettered masses could comprehend the foundational tenets of their faith (Zilfi, 1988). He specifically targeted the ümmi, a demographic that encompassed individuals with limited fluency in learned Arabic and Persian discourse, as well as those who were entirely illiterate (Krstić, 2021).

By writing for the common people, Birgivi shifted the locus of education from exclusive colleges to the household and the local mosque.

Contextualising the Ilmiye: The Ottoman Religious Hierarchy

To appreciate the radical nature of Birgivi’s inclusivity, one must understand the institutional behemoth he was reacting against. In the mid-16th century, the Hapsburg ambassador Ogier de Busbecq famously remarked that in the Ottoman system, “each man carries in his own hand his ancestry,” implying a meritocracy where even a slave could rise to the summit of the ilmiye.

However, as Zilfi’s research demonstrates, this meritocratic ideal was being eclipsed by a rigid, stratified structure.

By the late 17th and 18th centuries, the “ancestry in hand” described by Busbecq had been replaced by a closed-loop aristocracy. Zilfi’s quantitative data provides a staggering indictment of this shift: between 1703 and 1839, 60% of the top ulema (112 out of 188) were the sons of “Great Molla” families.

The merit-based door had slammed shut, and the ilmiye had become the “patrimony of great families.” Dynasties like the Dürrizades and Ebu Ishakzades dominated the landscape, protected by what I call the “Three Pillars of Ulema Privilege”:

1. Freedom from Execution: High-ranking scholars were traditionally immune from the death penalty.

2. Freedom from Confiscation: Their wealth was safe from the state’s reach upon their dismissal.

3. Heritability of Wealth: These protections allowed the consolidation of vast, multi-generational fortunes.

This decay birthed the “Cradle Corps” (beşik ulemalığı), where infants of elite families were granted high-ranking diplomas (rüus) while still in their nurseries. While a child of the Dürrizades was initiated into the professorship in his cradle, the talented provincial student was increasingly “Mollazade-quoted” out of the career.

Inclusive Education Avant la Lettre: Birgivi vs. The Arpalık System

Was the Kadızadeli movement (Birgivi’s later followers) merely a fundamentalist reaction? Or was it, as the evidence suggests, a populist demand for educational transparency?

Birgivi’s focus on “popular religion” stood in direct opposition to the “Arpalık” system. This system turned provincial judgeships into “barley-money” or sinecures for Istanbul elites. As Zilfi notes, this practice “impoverished the countryside,” effectively creating an exclusionary education model where the best scholars remained in the capital while rural areas were left with under-resourced, temporary “deputies.”

Birgivi’s demand for ‘ilm-i hal was a demand for accountability. If the law was to be universal, its teaching had to be transparent, accessible, and inclusive of those outside the Istanbul “Great Family” bubble.

5. The “De-ulemaising” Fiction and Professional Integrity

The lengths to which the ilmiye went to protect its “corporate honour” are exemplified by the concept of “Hadd” (limits of conduct). When an alim (scholar) committed a crime, the institution faced a crisis: how to punish the man without admitting that the “holy class” was fallible?

The solution was a status-preserving fiction.

In 1807, the professor Abdüllatif was “de-ulemaised”, stripped of his robes and awarded a secular military title (Mirmiran), before his execution. This “institutional myth of immunity” allowed the state to shed blood without technically shedding “ulema blood.”

To a modern inclusive education specialist, this is the antithesis of the transparency and accountability required for a just system. It was an institution prioritising its own image over the universal application of justice.

Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s commitment to universalising ‘ilm-i hal is more than a historical footnote; it is a profound precedent for modern inclusive education. His 16th-century solution to the “abstruse” barriers of his time echoes the challenges we face today in ensuring every student, regardless of background, has access to foundational literacy.

Addressing Gender Inclusivity

Furthermore, Birgivi explicitly addressed gender inclusivity regarding foundational education. He unequivocally stated that the acquisition of situational knowledge (‘ilm al-hal), the specific legal and moral demands of one’s immediate circumstances, is an absolute individual obligation (fard ‘ayn) for “every Muslim, male and female” (Ivanyi, 2012).

Because women were largely excluded from the formal medrese establishment, vernacular religious primers like Birgivi’s became central to female education and piety (Krstić, 2021). Ottoman women were encouraged to read these texts or to have them read aloud at home, thereby bypassing the institutional barriers of the patriarchal educational hierarchy and actively participating in learning circles.

Cognitive Load and Pedagogical Enablement

Birgivi also demonstrated an acute awareness of cognitive load and learning difficulties by engineering his instructional materials to be pedagogically accessible. In his Arabic grammar manuals, Avamil and Izhar, he deliberately avoided the obscure and exhaustive theoretical disputes that characterised traditional linguistic texts, recognising that such complexity often frustrated or bored students (İmam Birgivî’nin Avâmil ve İzhâru’l-Esrâr’ının İncelenmesi, n.d.).

Instead, he structured these works using practical, memorable formulas and simplified sentence constructions to facilitate easier memorisation and comprehension.

To further enable learning, Birgivi embedded moral and theological principles directly into his grammatical examples. This allowed students to absorb ethical training simultaneously with syntax, streamlining the educational process and making the abstract rules of grammar highly relevant to their daily religious lives.

Systemic Accommodations for Diverse Learners

Regarding learners with severe cognitive impairments, physical disabilities, or specific sensory difficulties, historical sources do not contain evidence of Birgivi explicitly formulating a targeted “special education” pedagogy. Ottoman legal and social frameworks did address disabilities; for example, classical Islamic jurisprudence recognised that the legally incompetent, such as young children and the mentally impaired, were exempt from certain religious obligations (Artan, 2022). Jurists also issued rulings regarding the civic participation of individuals with deafness, blindness, or physical deformities.

While there is no direct equivalent in Birgivi’s corpus to modern differentiated instruction for specific modern cohorts, such as students with ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia or other specific learning difficulties, his overarching educational accommodations were incredibly progressive. They were primarily systemic and demographic, focused on breaking down the barriers of language, class, and gender to ensure that every cognitively capable believer had the practical means to engage with their education and secure their salvation (Ivanyi, 2012).

A Promising Area to Discover

Reflecting on that 2013 research at UKM, I see that the struggle for inclusion has always been a struggle against “Great Family” gatekeeping and the Arpalık-style neglect of the periphery. Birgivi reminds us that an educational system is only as strong as its ability to simplify, scaffold, and reach the “masses of the faithful.” True reform begins by recognising that knowledge is not a patrimony to be inherited, but a right to be democratised.

Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s educational ideas and practices, when examined across his diverse works, demonstrate a clear alignment with the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and inclusive education. His efforts to dismantle socio-economic and linguistic barriers, alongside his simplification of complex syntax in texts like Avamil and Izhar, reflect an early commitment to providing multiple means of representation and engagement. By intentionally reducing cognitive load and vernacularising theological concepts, Birgivi created flexible learning pathways that resonate closely with contemporary strategies used to support diverse cohorts, including university students with ADHD.

To fully grasp the depth of this pedagogical philosophy, it is necessary to situate it within the broader framework of Islamic Shariah and, more specifically, Maqasid al-Shariah.

While the literature is vast and diverse, and much more remains to be explored, the framework of maqasid and the common principles of Shariah provide a promising context for drawing such parallels. This is an area I continue to explore as I embark on my PhD journey in September, Insya-Allah.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
www.hasrizal.com

Further Reading:

• Artan, T. (2022). Patrons, painters, women. Brill.

• Chambers, R. L. (1973). The education of a nineteenth-century Ottoman alim, Ahmed Cevdet Pasa. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 9(4), 440-464.

• Çiçek, N. (2021). Beating is heaven-sent: Corporal punishment of children in the late Ottoman and early Republican era. In G. Yılmaz & F. Zachs (Eds.), Children and Childhood in the Ottoman Empire: From the 15th to the 20th Century (pp. 289-314). Edinburgh University Press.

• İmam Birgivî’nin Avâmil ve İzhâru’l-Esrâr’ının İncelenmesi [Unpublished master’s thesis]. (n.d.).

• Ivanyi, K. A. (2012). Virtue, piety and the law: A study of Birgivī Mehmed Efendi’s al-Ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Princeton University.

• Ivanyi, K. A. (2020). Adab, akhlāq and early modern Ottoman paraenesis: Birgivī Meḥmed Efendī’s (d. 981/1573) al-Ṭarīqa al-muḥammadiyya. In [Source Title Omitted in Excerpt] (pp. 49-62). Brill.

• Korić, E. (2021). Childhood and education in Ottoman Bosnia during the early modern period. In G. Yılmaz & F. Zachs (Eds.), Children and Childhood in the Ottoman Empire: From the 15th to the 20th Century (pp. 315-335). Edinburgh University Press.

• Krstić, T. (2021). You must know your faith in detail: Redefinition of the role of knowledge and boundaries of belief in Ottoman catechisms (ilm-i hāls). In T. Krstić & D. Terzioğlu (Eds.), Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750 (pp. 161-194). Brill.

• Mandaville, J. E. (1979). Usurious piety: The cash waqf controversy in the Ottoman Empire. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 10(3), 289-308.

• Martı, H. (2015). Birgivi Mehmed Efendi. In A. H. Furat (Ed.), Doğu’dan Batıya düşüncenin serüveni: Osmanlı’da felsefe ve aklî düşünce (pp. 635-667). İnsan Yayınları.

• Shafir, N. (2021). Vernacular legalism in the Ottoman Empire. Islamic Law and Society, 28(1-2), 32-75.

• Yenen, H. (2010). İmam Birgivî’nin Avâmil ve İzhâru’l-Esrâr’ının incelenmesi [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi.

• Zilfi, M. C. (1988). The politics of piety: The Ottoman ulema in the postclassical age, 1600-1800. Bibliotheca Islamica.

“Alhamdulillah, my daughter can count to one hundred.”

“Our son memorised ‘ayat lazim’ from the Quran.”

“They can sit quietly for half an hour completing worksheets.”

Any parent can connect with these stories, proud of how our children developed these excellent qualities early on.

On one occasion, I remembered asking a couple this one particular question: “When your child doesn’t understand something, what does he do?”

There was a pause.

“He waits for me to explain it,” the father said.

“And if you’re not there?”

A longer pause.

That exchange stayed with me, not because there was anything wrong with the parents’ effort or their son’s achievements. There was not.

But it revealed something worth examining.

When we talk about children being ready to learn, we tend to reach for the most visible things.

Can they count?

Can they recite?

Can they sit still?

These are real accomplishments. But they are not what make a child a genuinely good learner. A child who waits passively for the answer to be handed to them, who has no strategy for the moment when no one is there to explain, who has never been helped to sit with the discomfort of not knowing — that child, however talented, has not yet become a learner in the fullest sense.

This article is for parents of young children, particularly those in the preschool years — broadly, the first six years of life. It is not a guide to making your child academically ahead of their peers. It is something more important than that: an invitation to build, in the years before formal schooling begins, the kind of learner who will thrive in any classroom, carry curiosity across every threshold, and continue learning long after any teacher’s influence has faded.

What a Genuinely Teachable Child Looks Like

Before we ask what parents should do, we need to be clear about what we are working toward. What does a genuinely teachable child look like — not at eighteen, but at six, on the morning they walk into their first year of formal school?

Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2004, p. 79), in one of the most comprehensive reviews of how human beings learn, describe young children as actively engaged in making sense of their world from the earliest months of life. Children are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. They arrive with curiosity, with drives to understand, with what the research calls predispositions to learn in particular ways. The question is not whether a child can learn. It is whether the conditions around them have allowed those predispositions to develop — or whether they have, slowly and inadvertently, been replaced by compliance.

A genuinely teachable child tends to show four qualities that learning science consistently identifies as foundational.

The first is self-regulation: the capacity to manage impulse, sustain attention, and persist when a task is difficult. Dörrenbächer-Ulrich and Bregulla (2024) identify executive functions — the cognitive abilities that allow a person to plan, hold information in mind, and inhibit distraction — as foundational to all self-regulated learning, with their development beginning in the preschool years. A child who cannot yet regulate their attention or manage frustration is not unintelligent. They are simply not yet equipped for the particular demands that formal classroom learning will place on them.

The second is a rich language foundation: a broad vocabulary, the ability to follow and construct a narrative, the confidence to express an idea and the patience to listen to another. Language is not simply a communication tool. It is the medium through which young children think. A child who arrives at school with a well-developed language capacity is not just better at reading. They are better at learning everything.

The third is a growth orientation: the belief that effort leads to improvement, that difficulty is not a verdict on one’s ability but an invitation to try differently. Bransford et al. (2004, p. 102) describe research on what they call “entity” versus “incremental” theories of intelligence. Children with entity theories believe that ability is fixed — you are either clever or you are not — and they tend to avoid challenge, give up when frustrated, and prioritise appearing competent over actually learning. Children with incremental theories believe that intelligence grows through sustained effort, and they are far more likely to embrace difficulty, persist through setbacks, and recover from failure.

The fourth is a disposition toward questioning: the ability to notice when something is unclear, to ask about it rather than ignore it, and to sit with uncertainty long enough to genuinely explore it. This is the earliest form of what cognitive scientists call metacognition — the capacity to think about one’s own thinking. It is the quality that transforms a passive receiver of information into an active builder of understanding.

None of these four qualities arrives fully formed at school age. All of them are shaped, in the years before formal schooling begins, by what happens at home.

What the Learning Sciences Tell Us About These Early Years

The research on how children learn is simultaneously encouraging and demanding for parents. Encouraging, because it confirms that what you do at home matters enormously. Demanding, because it asks more of you than enrolling your child in the right enrichment programme.

Bransford et al. (2004, p. 103) describe the role of parents and caregivers in terms that are straightforward but far-reaching: “Parents and others who care for children arrange their activities and facilitate learning by regulating the difficulty of the tasks and by modelling mature performance during joint participation in activities.” This is not a professional skill requiring formal training. It is an ancient human one, embedded in the ordinary moments of domestic life — reading together, cooking together, walking and wondering aloud together.

Bransford et al. (2004, p. 108) describe how caregivers reading with young children are “attempting to function in what psychologists call a child’s zone of proximal development — to stretch what the child can do with a little assistance.”

“What do you think will happen next?”

“Why do you think she was afraid?”

When we ask these questions, we are not deploying a pedagogical technique. We are doing something people have done around fires and under stars for as long as there have been stories to tell. We are also, quietly and consequentially, building our child’s capacity to make meaning from the world, which is the core of what learning means.

Language development follows a similar principle. Bransford et al. (2004, p. 95) note that language “has to be practised as an ongoing and active process and not merely passively observed.” A child who spends hours watching a screen and hours listening to a parent talk with them, read with them, and think aloud with them will develop very differently in terms of linguistic capacity — and through language, in terms of thinking capacity — by the time they reach school age.

The development of self-regulation and executive function in early childhood is equally shaped by environment. Dörrenbächer-Ulrich and Bregulla (2024) confirm that executive functions have a particularly significant role in the development of metacognition during the early years, and that the conditions that support executive function development — warmth, predictability, appropriate challenge, and the opportunity to try, fail, and try again — are precisely the conditions that characterise a secure and language-rich home.

The growth orientation, too, is cultivated long before school begins.

A parent who says “You kept going even when it was hard — look at what you managed” is building something different from a parent who says “You’re so clever.”

One praises effort and process.

The other praises a fixed attribute.

The first teaches the child that their agency matters.

The second teaches them that they possess a quality they need to protect, which means avoiding challenges where they might be seen to struggle.

Played out across thousands of ordinary interactions over six years, the difference becomes visible in the classroom, in who tries, who persists, and who quietly retreats.

What Islamic Tradition Tells Us About Preparing the Learner’s Heart

The learning sciences describe the mechanisms by which children develop into learners. They do not, by themselves, answer the question of what learning is for, or what kind of person we are trying to nurture. The Islamic tradition offers something that the sciences do not: a vision of the learner, not merely a description of the learning process.

It is God who brought you out of your mothers’ wombs, knowing nothing, and gave you hearing and sight and minds, so that you might be thankful.
(al-Nahl 16: 78)

Parents are companions guiding their children from ignorance to knowledge through learning, using all God-given senses to listen, observe, and think. This process clarifies the concept of the origin of learning. The Eurocentric view describes these as primary and secondary learning, reflecting how humans evolve to meet their needs. However, Islam sees this journey as an intentional and meaningful process. There are immediate goals within reach for everyone and distant goals for the future, all rooted in a fundamental purpose: that we may be thankful.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said: “Every child is born on the fitrah — it is their parents who make them a Jew, a Christian, or a Majusi” (Sahih al-Bukhari; Sahih Muslim). The fitrah is the primordial human disposition: an inward orientation toward truth, toward goodness, toward God. The child, in this understanding, is not a problem to be corrected or a blank page to be filled. They are a being already aligned toward what is good — and the parent’s responsibility is not to create this alignment but to protect and nourish it.

This is a profound reframe. Parents who understand the fitrah approach the preschool years not with anxiety about what they need to install in their child, but with something closer to reverence — an awareness of what is already present, and a commitment to allowing it to flourish rather than inadvertently suppressing it through pressure, comparison, or a narrow definition of what learning looks like.

Abdalla (2025, p. 7) describes tarbiyah — the most encompassing Islamic concept for the nurturing of a whole human being — as “a gradual process of nurturing toward perfection,” proceeding stage by stage in alignment with the child’s development. The earliest stage, which Abdalla (2025) identifies as full dependence, is not a period of passivity on the part of the parent. It is, according to the tradition, the most intensive phase of tarbiyah — the time when the home environment does its most fundamental work. The scope of this work, as Abdalla (2025, p. 13) articulates it, extends across the “physically, intellectually, scientifically, doctrinally, spiritually, morally, socially, volitionally, and creatively” dimensions of the child’s being. This is not a school curriculum. It is a description of a family.

The Prophet’s own approach to teaching — documented with remarkable care by Abu Ghuddah (2017) — offers parents a model that is as practical as it is inspiring. Abu Ghuddah (2017, p. 15) describes the Prophet as one who “was known to pose rhetorical questions,” who “would answer questions in brief to encourage the student to expand on the ideas he was presenting,” and who did not hesitate to use “illustrations, and other forms of imagery.” What characterised the Prophet’s pedagogy above all, according to Abu Ghuddah (2017, p. 23), was the emotional environment he created: students were not embarrassed for not knowing, not punished for asking the wrong question, not rushed through difficulty. They were held patiently in the space of learning.

A child who grows up in a home where questions are welcomed and not knowing is treated as the beginning of understanding rather than a source of shame — that child has already been shaped, in the most important sense, by the prophetic method.

Al-Attas (1980) describes adab — the concept at the heart of the Islamic philosophy of education — as the proper orientation of the human being toward knowledge, toward others, and toward God.

Adab is not simply courteous behaviour.

It is the inner posture of readiness: a willingness to receive, to reflect, and to allow what one learns to change one’s understanding and one’s actions.

A child who approaches knowledge with adab is teachable in the deepest sense.

And adab is not transmitted in a single lesson. It is absorbed, slowly and inevitably, from the environment in which a child grows.

Our Home Is the Madrasah That Matters Most

The conclusion of all of this — from the neuroscience, from the learning sciences, from the Islamic educational tradition — is consistent: the home is the most consequential educational institution your child will ever attend.

Not because schools are unimportant, but because what happens in the home during the first six years sets the conditions that determine whether everything else will succeed.

A child who arrives at school having spent five years in a home where books were read aloud and questions were asked over them, where effort was noticed and named, where stories of the Prophets were told with warmth and wonder, where language filled the air and curiosity was modelled daily — that child arrives with an invisible advantage that no classroom can fully manufacture.

We do not need to be an educator to give our children this. We need to be present, curious, warm, and consistent. We need to believe that these years are not a prelude to the real work of education but its most essential foundation.

Dear young parents,

Choose your school carefully.

But first, choose the learner.

And the learner is built at home.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
Director of Education
Khalifah Education Foundation
www.hasrizal.com

References

• Abdalla, M. (2025). Exploring tarbiyah in Islamic education: A critical review of the English- and Arabic-language literature. Education Sciences, 15(5), 559. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15050559

• Abu Ghuddah, A. A. (2017). Prophet Muhammad: The teacher (M. Z. Abu Ghuddah, Trans.). Claritas Books.

• Al-Attas, S. M. N. (1980). The concept of education in Islam: A framework for an Islamic philosophy of education. ISTAC.

• Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2004). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (Expanded ed.). National Academy Press.

• Dörrenbächer-Ulrich, L., & Bregulla, M. (2024). The relationship between self-regulated learning and executive functions — a systematic review. Educational Psychology Review, 36, 95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09932-8

I've been exploring various school options for months—international, national, Islamic, and homeschooling. I've read reviews, joined WhatsApp groups, and visited open days. I keep wondering, 'What’s the best education choice for my child?” a lady in her 30s asked.

She was among the participants in a workshop I recently held in Kuala Lumpur.

I asked her, “What are you really looking for in your child's education?”

She paused.

"And what do you feel most uncertain about when choosing the right fit for your child?" I added another question.

“I want something better than what I had,” she says, quietly.

That pause is the beginning of wisdom.

Many parents approach the school choice conversation as a logistical one: fees, location, facilities, and examination results. These things matter, of course. But they are the last questions you should be asking, not the first. Before you choose a school, you need to do something harder. You need to think. Not about schools. About yourself, your assumptions, your world, and your child.

This article is an invitation to do exactly that.

Your Schooling Is Not Your Child’s

The first thing I ask parents to do, and the hardest, is to set aside their own experience of school.

This is not because your experience was unimportant. It was formative, in every sense of that word. But it was also deeply particular: to a specific time, a specific place, a specific set of teachers, a specific curriculum, and a specific vision of what education was supposed to produce.

None of those things is the same today.

Jack Mezirow (1991), whose work on adult learning transformed how educators think about how grown-ups process experience, described the way adults carry what he called “meaning perspectives” into every new situation. These are the unspoken frames through which we interpret the world, built layer by layer from our histories. The challenge with meaning perspectives is not that they are wrong. It is that they feel like facts. They feel like reality.

When a parent says, “I turned out fine, so what was good enough for me is good enough for my child,” they are not being careless. They are expressing a deeply held meaning perspective.

They are describing the world as their experience taught them to see it.

Mezirow (1991) argued that genuine learning, for adults, begins when we subject those meaning perspectives to what he called premise reflection, examining not just our experiences, but the very assumptions that shaped how we understood those experiences.

For parents thinking about their child’s education, this is the first essential task.

What did your schooling teach you to believe about intelligence?

About success?

About the relationship between learning and examinations?

About who deserves opportunity and who does not?

These are not questions about schools. They are questions about the invisible lenses you bring to every decision you make about your child’s future.

Looking Back Before You Look Forward

Once you are willing to set aside your schooling experience as the default template, you can begin to examine it honestly.

This is a different exercise.

It is not about rejecting what you had, but about seeing it clearly, its gifts and its limitations. Think back to your best years in school. What made them good? Was it a teacher who saw something in you? A subject that made you feel alive? A moment when you realised you were actually capable of something? Hold onto those things. They tell you something real about what learning, at its best, can do.

Now think about the years that were less kind. The years when you felt invisible, or behind, or wrong in some fundamental way. The years when school felt like something to survive rather than something to savour. What was missing? What was demanded of you that did not match who you were? What was never asked of you at all?

This kind of reflective examination is not a nostalgic indulgence. It is informative.

When parents are able to name what served them and what failed them, they begin to develop a much more precise and honest account of what they want for their child and what they are determined to avoid.

The goal is not to recreate your best memories or erase your worst ones.

It is to extract from your own experience a set of values that will guide your thinking, rather than allowing your history to unconsciously govern your choices.

The World Your Child Will Graduate Into

Here is the uncomfortable truth about most school conversations: they are really conversations about the past.

When we rank schools by examination results, we are measuring an old idea of what learning is. When we celebrate rote memory and silent classrooms and individual competition, we are preparing children for a world that has already changed. The question is not only what schools look like today. It is what the world will demand of our children in twenty years.

Herodotou and colleagues (2019), reviewing evidence-based pedagogies for the future of learning, found that the most promising approaches for preparing learners for a rapidly changing world emphasise skills like collaborative problem-solving, self-directed inquiry, and the integration of technology with human judgement. Their argument was not that examinations are worthless, but that schooling must move well beyond content delivery toward cultivating adaptable, reflective learners who can navigate genuine complexity.

This is not a radical fringe position.

It reflects a growing consensus across educational research about what learning needs to look like for a generation that will face challenges we cannot yet name.

The honest answer to “what should a school be preparing my child for?” is not a specific career or a set of examination grades. It is the capacity to think clearly, to act with integrity, to keep learning long after school ends, and to contribute meaningfully to others.

These capacities are not produced by accident.

They are cultivated, deliberately, through intentional educational choices. And they are cultivated nowhere near as effectively in a system built primarily around ranking and sorting children.

What We Were Taught to Believe

For Malaysian parents, and particularly for Malay Muslim parents, this conversation has an additional layer of complexity that cannot be ignored.

The education system you grew up in, and the assumptions you carry about what a “good school” looks like, were not shaped by a neutral process. They were shaped by history.

Faisal Malik (2019) offers a clear and important account of how colonialism did not merely introduce a new administrative system to Muslim-majority societies. It dismantled an integrated educational tradition that had, for centuries, made no separation between the development of the intellect and the cultivation of moral character, between the pursuit of knowledge and the service of God. What replaced that tradition was a bifurcated system: secular schooling on one track, religious instruction on another, with little meaningful conversation between them.

The legacy of that fracture is visible in Malaysian education today, in the persistent sense that “academic” subjects belong to one world and “Islamic” education belongs to another, as if the two have nothing to say to each other. Malik (2019) calls the internalisation of Western secular education as the standard, the benchmark by which all other schooling is measured, the “colonised mind.”

It is not an accusation.

It is a diagnosis.

And the first step in addressing any diagnosis is recognising that it applies to you.

This matters because parents who have internalised this framework will instinctively default to evaluating schools by metrics, rankings, examination pass rates, university acceptance records, that were never designed with their children’s full humanity in mind.

The Islamic educational tradition offers a richer vocabulary for what education is supposed to achieve. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (1980), one of Malaysia’s most distinguished Islamic philosophers, argued that the proper concept for Islamic education is not merely ta’lim, the transmission of knowledge, nor tarbiyah, the nurturing of growth, but ta’dib: the disciplining of the soul, mind, and body through adab, a word that carries connotations of courtesy, refinement, rightful ordering, and proper conduct in the presence of knowledge and of God. The goal of such an education, al-Attas contended, is the production of the insan adil, the balanced, just, and fully formed human being.

For non-Muslim readers, this maps onto something equally recognisable: the ancient and enduring idea that education is not primarily about what you know, but about who you are becoming.

Abdalla (2025), in a recent critical review of Islamic educational literature, notes that authentic tarbiyah encompasses the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, physical, and social dimensions of the learner simultaneously. This holistic vision, far from being an archaic relic, is one that contemporary learning sciences are increasingly converging on from their own direction.

The question is not whether this vision is valuable.

The question is whether the schools we choose actually pursue it.

Who Do You Want Your Child to Become?

This is the question that matters most, and it is the one asked least often.

Not: which school has the best results?

Not: which pathway leads to the best university?

But: who do you want your child to be at thirty, at fifty, at the end of their life?

Jasser Auda (2008), in his analysis of the higher objectives of Islamic law, identifies five essential dimensions of human flourishing that Islamic ethics is oriented toward protecting: religion (dīn), intellect (‘aql), progeny (nasl), life (nafs), and property (māl). For our purposes, what is striking about this framework is its ordering. The cultivation of faith and the development of the intellect come before economic considerations. When parents evaluate a school primarily by its university placement record or its ability to produce high earners, they are, consciously or not, inverting that ordering entirely.

The maqasid framework invites parents to ask a harder and more important set of questions.

• Will this school nurture my child’s connection to their values, to a sense of purpose larger than themselves?

• Will it cultivate genuine intellectual capability, not the capacity to memorise and reproduce, but the capacity to think, to question, to discern?

• Will it prepare them to be responsible members of a family and a community?

• Will it help them flourish as a human being?

These questions do not always have clean answers, and different schools will serve different children differently. A child who thrives in structure may need something very different from a child who thrives in openness. The point is not to produce a universal ranking but to develop a personal vision, a clear and honest account of who you want your child to become, and then to evaluate schools against that vision rather than against someone else’s.

This also means accepting that the right choice for your child may not look like the choices made by your neighbours, your extended family, or the parents in your social circle.

Vision requires courage.

And courage, in this context, means choosing deliberately rather than conforming unconsciously.

A Different Conversation

The parents who make the most thoughtful educational decisions for their children are not the ones with the most information about schools. They are the ones who have done the inner work first.

They have set aside the assumption that their own experience is the template.

They have examined that experience honestly and extracted something useful from it.

They understand that the world their child will inherit is genuinely different from the one they grew up in.

They have considered, seriously and carefully, what their own tradition and culture have to say about what education is for.

And they have asked, and kept asking, the question that not many schools and their advertisements will ever answer for them: who do I want my child to become?

When you can answer that question, clearly and honestly, you will know what you are looking for. And you will be far less likely to choose a school by accident.

Leave a comment

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
Director of Education
Khalifah Education Foundation
www.hasrizal.com

References

Abdalla, M. (2025). Exploring tarbiyah in Islamic education: A critical literature review. Education Sciences, 15(5), 559. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15050559

Al-Attas, S. M. N. (1980). The concept of education in Islam: A framework for an Islamic philosophy of education. ISTAC.

Auda, J. (2008). Maqāṣid al-Sharī’ah as philosophy of Islamic law: A systems approach. International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).

Herodotou, C., Sharples, M., Gaved, M., Kukulska-Hulme, A., Rienties, B., Scanlon, E., & Whitelock, D. (2019). Innovative pedagogies of the future: An evidence-based selection. Frontiers in Education, 4, 113. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2019.00113

Malik, F. (2019). All that we lost: The colonised mind and the decline of the Islamic education system. Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research.

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. Jossey-Bass.

After submitting my M.Ed. dissertation, I expected my mind to take a rest.

It did not.

A dissertation is supposed to feel like closure. You submit, you exhale, you try to remember what it felt like to read something that was not assigned. But certain ideas refuse to be filed away. They keep asking questions. They stay at the edge of your thinking, waiting.

Universal Design for Learning was one of them.

UDL was not the centrepiece of my dissertation. It was a thread within the findings, not the headline. But the feedback I received from my research participants about it was striking, and more than that, it confirmed something I had already suspected from my own experience as a learner: that UDL was not simply a pedagogical framework I had studied. It was part of what got me through.

I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. Medication helped, and I will not minimise that. But medication adjusts the conditions of learning. It does not remove the structures that were never designed for you in the first place. UDL gave me permission to work with my own mind rather than against it. The dissertation was finished because of both.

I wrote about it earlier:

In October 2025, I returned to Malaysia for the annual work visit organised by Khalifah Education Foundation. The theme for this cycle was inclusive education.

UDL came with me.

What I discovered during that visit was something I had not fully anticipated. When I introduced UDL to educators in that setting, I watched something shift in the room. Not the excitement of encountering something entirely new, but the recognition of something already known. The quiet relief of being given a name for what they had already been doing, and had been uncertain whether they were allowed to do.

Some of these educators had been quietly adjusting their practice for years.

They had been making accommodations, offering alternatives, removing barriers, without any formal framework to stand behind. And because they had no framework, they had been carrying a small but persistent anxiety: was this right? Were they compromising something they should not? Were they lowering standards? Were they doing their students a disservice by making things more accessible?

The idea that being tougher and harsher is better still runs deep in our culture. We often hear terms like ‘strawberry generation’ or ‘snowflake cohort,’ which are subtle, sometimes mocking ways of talking about this sensitive topic.

I had seen that anxiety before, in other contexts. It comes from confusing form with substance.

SUBSTANCE VS FORM

Here is how I now explain it, and how I explained it during that trip:

When a primary school language teacher asks students to write a story about their school holidays, what is the actual learning objective? Is it to produce a certain number of sentences? Is it to demonstrate accurate spelling? Is it to show that a pencil can be held correctly? Is it neat handwriting? Is it a particular sequence of paragraphs?

Or is it something else entirely?

If the objective is to assess the student’s ability to recall, sequence, and communicate personal experience using vocabulary they have acquired, then many of the technical formats surrounding that task are incidental to what matters. The handwriting is not the vocabulary. The spelling may or may not be part of the focus, depending on what the teacher is actually trying to assess that week. The number of sentences is a container, not the content.

UDL asks educators to separate the substance from the form, and then to consider which forms are non-negotiable because they are part of the substance, and which forms are simply habits or conventions that can be made flexible without compromising anything real.

When a student cannot write but can speak, and the task is to assess whether they understand sequencing and vocabulary, giving them an option to record their story is not lowering the standard. It is removing a barrier that was never actually part of the standard.

This is what UDL calls multiple means of expression. I call it asking what actually matters, and then being honest about the answer.

The educators in that room understood this.

Many of them had been doing it instinctively. What UDL gave them was not a new practice, but a language, and with that language came the ability to defend and explain what they were doing without apologising for it.

DEEP INSIDE

Several of those educators are volunteers.

They work with children from some of the most precarious backgrounds imaginable: undocumented migrant families, long-term asylum seekers, communities on the margins of legal recognition. These children have no guaranteed right to formal education in many contexts. Their access to learning depends entirely on the commitment of people who choose to show up, without the assurance of payment, without the protection of an institution, without the backing of a mandated curriculum.

I asked some of these educators what kept them going.

They were not always sure how to answer that question directly. But the shape of their answers was consistent. They believed these children had a right to education. They believed that right could not be suspended simply because of the accident of where a family had come from, or the legal limbo in which they found themselves. And they felt, in a way they often described as something they could not fully set aside, that they were accountable.

One educator said something that has stayed with me: “How can I face Allah knowing all of this happened and I did nothing?”

That is not a training outcome.

That is not a competency achieved through professional development.

That is a theological conviction functioning as pedagogy.

LITERATURE

When I returned to the literature, I was looking for the same thing the educators were expressing. I wanted to understand what the research said about the inner life of educators who make inclusive education happen, particularly in environments that offer no structural support for doing so.

What I found was almost entirely focused on training. How to train teachers. What training works. Which training models produce better implementation of inclusive frameworks. The implicit assumption throughout was that the barrier between teachers and inclusive practice was primarily a knowledge gap, and that closing that gap required better professional development.

But I had just spent time with teachers who had been removing barriers long before they attended any workshop. Long before they knew what UDL stood for. Long before anyone had trained them in any aspect of inclusive education theory.

The training literature could not account for them.

This is the gap I want to explore.

My PhD proposal centres on the lived experience of educators who are implementing what most frameworks would recognise as inclusive education, in contexts that are explicitly exclusive at every structural level. Within those lived experiences, I want to understand the role that faith, personal values, worldview, and cultural identity play as sources of intrinsic motivation. In a field dominated by secular educational theory, what does it mean when faith is not a peripheral variable but the central driver?

And for my specific focus, because this is the community I know, because this is the tradition I belong to, and because this is where the research gap is sharpest: what is the Islamic theological foundation of inclusive education? What does Islamic jurisprudence and ethics actually say about the right to education, about the responsibility of the learned toward the unlearned, about inclusion as a value embedded in the tradition itself?

These questions feel urgent to me.

PHD APPLICATION

Last week, I submitted two PhD applications.

I will be honest about what is at stake for me personally.

I was diagnosed with ADHD late in life. The years before that diagnosis were years of navigating systems that were not designed for the way my mind works, without knowing that was the problem. Opportunities in academia follow a particular timeline, and I missed most of that timeline, not out of lack of ability or commitment, but because the conditions were never right, and the support was never there.

Something happened during the Malaysia trip that made all of this sharper.

I found myself in conversation with a doctor of psychiatry in training who is researching the relationship between ADHD and solat, the ritual prayer that anchors Muslim daily life. He needed a collaborator who could do something specific: lay down the intellectual and theological foundation for how Islam understands neurodiversity, and ADHD in particular. I was appointed as a co-researcher to take on that work in the clinical master's programme in psychiatry.

Sitting with that responsibility, I saw very clearly something that had been forming at the edge of my thinking for a long time. The literature gap is not a gap. It is closer to an absence. The philosophical groundwork required before rigorous clinical, educational, or psychological research on Muslim neurodivergent experience can be properly done has simply not been built yet. Studies exist, but they are reaching for foundations that have not yet been laid. Every future researcher working at the intersection of ADHD, Muslim identity, and lived experience will need somewhere to stand.

That somewhere does not currently exist in any systematic form.

What struck me, sitting with that realisation, was not only the size of the gap. It was the particular profile of the person needed to fill it.

This is not work that can be done from a single disciplinary vantage point. It requires someone trained across multiple fields, someone who understands Islamic jurisprudence and theology from the inside, who has lived within Muslim culture and also navigated Western academic and social institutions, who understands neurodiversity not only as a clinical category but as a lived experience. That profile is not common. And I kept finding, uncomfortably, that it described me.

I do not say this with arrogance. I say it with the weight of someone who recognises that a particular door is open, that they may be one of very few people currently positioned to walk through it, and that the door will not stay open indefinitely.

A funded PhD is the single largest barrier remaining. At this stage of my life, with the commitments I carry and the years already behind me, self-funding is not a realistic path. If the proposal is not funded, the research does not happen. It is that direct.

I am not asking for sympathy. I am simply naming the reality as it is.

What I do know is that this research is worth doing.

These teachers deserve to have their stories told in a way that the academy can hear.

These children deserve to be in a body of literature that takes their right to education seriously.

The Islamic intellectual tradition deserves to be represented in inclusive education scholarship with the rigour and depth it actually contains.

And the researchers who come after, working on ADHD, on prayer, on Muslim identity, on neurodivergent pedagogy grounded in faith, they deserve foundations they can build on rather than scaffolding they have to reconstruct from scratch each time.

AMAL JARIAH

Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) once said:

‏ إِذَا مَاتَ الإِنْسَانُ انْقَطَعَ عَنْهُ عَمَلُهُ إِلاَّ مِنْ ثَلاَثَةٍ إِلاَّ مِنْ صَدَقَةٍ جَارِيَةٍ أَوْ عِلْمٍ يُنْتَفَعُ بِهِ أَوْ وَلَدٍ صَالِحٍ يَدْعُو لَهُ ‏"‏

When a man dies, his acts come to an end, but three:

1. recurring charity,

2. or knowledge (by which people) benefit,

3. or a pious child, who prays for him (for the deceased).

(Sahih Muslim: 1631)

In Islamic tradition, there is a concept called amal jariah, a continuous charity whose benefit does not end when a person departs. The scholar whose work is read and built upon long after their death is still, in some sense, present in that reading. I am at the stage of life where this is no longer an abstract theological idea. It is a question I carry personally: what will I leave that will still be useful when I am no longer here to offer anything?

If this research becomes what I believe it can become, work that is cited, returned to, and built upon by researchers in disciplines I may never directly inhabit, that would be enough. That would be the right kind of legacy.

Beyond counting the H-Index or anything like that.

If this is my last stage of formal learning, I want it to leave something real behind.

A Note on How the Proposal Was Prepared

I raced against time to submit.

One of the applications required an AI declaration, which made me think carefully about how I was using AI tools throughout the process and whether I could honestly and confidently declare that use.

I believe I can.

The ideas in the proposal are entirely mine. The research questions emerged from my own reading, workshop experience, and gaps in my research. The theoretical framing came from months of literature engagement. The writing was done by me.

But I used AI to help me stress-test the proposal.

Not to write it.

To interrogate it.

Here is what I did.

I built a structured prompt instructing Claude to study the published work, writing style, and research focus of my potential supervisor. I then instructed it to function, as far as possible, as if that supervisor were reading my proposal for the first time. The prompt asked it to evaluate what was strong, what was weak, what would concern an admissions panel, what would concern a funding reviewer, how ready the proposal was, and what the five most urgent changes were.

The experience was sobering in the best possible way. An AI operating as a rigorous, knowledgeable, and impartial reader has no obligation to be kind. It was not. And the proposal is better for it.

Think of it this way. If you are fortunate, a supervisory relationship gives you perhaps five substantive meetings during the development of a research proposal. In each of those meetings, both parties need to arrive prepared, the ideas need to be at a certain level of development, and the feedback needs to be digested and acted upon before the next one. Using AI as a preparatory step means arriving at that first real meeting with a proposal that has already survived at least one serious round of critical engagement. The conversation starts at a higher level.

If you are working on a research proposal and would like to try a similar approach with your own potential supervisor, here is a version of the prompt you can adapt:

Supervisor Simulation Prompt

I am uploading the following documents: my current research proposal, background information on my potential supervisor at [target university], and any previous feedback I have received on earlier drafts. I am also providing information about the funding body or scholarship I am targeting, and the admissions requirements of the programme I am applying to.

Using these documents, act as my potential supervisor and conduct a rigorous critical review of the proposal. In this role, do the following:

1. Compare this draft against any earlier weaknesses identified and evaluate what has genuinely improved.

2. Identify what major problems still remain.

3. Specify what would prevent you, as a potential supervisor, from fully backing this proposal.

4. Identify what would weaken its chances with a funding reviewer.

5. Rate the proposal on this scale: Not ready / Promising but needs major revision / Strong with targeted revisions / Very strong and near submission-ready.

Then provide:

• The five highest-priority changes still required

• Three likely objections from a doctoral admissions panel

• Three likely objections from a funding reviewer

• A clear final recommendation: should this be submitted now, or revised again before submission?

Be rigorous. Do not soften the critique out of encouragement. The goal is to know exactly where the proposal stands.

The proposal and its ideas remain mine. What AI gave me was a mirror, held at an unfamiliar angle.

If anyone reading this is in a similar season, preparing something that matters, working under pressure, hoping it is enough, I hope this is useful.

And to everyone who has read this far: if you could spare a moment to wish me well, to say a prayer, to send a quiet “amin” in my direction, I would be genuinely grateful.

This one matters.

Amin.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil writes at hasrizal.substack.com. He is the Director of Education at Khalifah Education Foundation and a PhD applicant exploring UDL within the Islamic identity and philosophical foundations of inclusive education.

At the M.Ed. graduation ceremony held at Trinity College Dublin, Professor Neville Cox, Registrar and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, delivered a speech that was quietly profound in the way only a life devoted to scholarship can produce. He spoke of the journey behind every graduate in that hall; not merely the academic rigour, but the personal cost: the long nights, the self-doubt, the weight of feeling out of place in rooms that once felt impossible to enter.

He reminded us that a graduation is not called a "commencement" by accident; it is, by design, a beginning, not a conclusion. Moved by his words and carrying the gratitude of a journey that was never mine alone, I curated a song lyric as a personal memory of that day; imperfect, honest, and sung by AI for the family, the friends, and every soul who quietly made this possible. Alhamdulillah.

There were nights I sat with doubt alone
Every word I wrote felt like borrowed stone
The voices said you do not belong here
A stranger in the hall, but I stayed near

Page by page and season turning slow
I learned to trust the things I didn't know
The loneliness was heavy, cold and long
But something in the silence made me strong

This was never meant to break me
Every fall was there to remake me

Alhamdulillah, this is the day
Through every storm I finally found my way
Not the end, this is where I begin
A graduate of Trinity
The world is calling, hear it ring
Go and change the things that need to change
Alhamdulillah, this is the day

Behind this gown are hands that held me up
Prayers offered over every morning cup
Family near and those who crossed the sea
You are the quiet force inside of me

The children watching, knowing Abi tried
The ones who kept the candle burning bright
Every sacrifice, every du'a said
I carry every one of you ahead

This was never ours alone to carry
Every soul who walked beside me
Alhamdulillah, this is the day
Through every storm I finally found my way
Not the end, this is where I begin
A graduate of Trinity
The world is calling, hear it ring
Go and change the things that need to change
Alhamdulillah, this is the day

They called it commencement, not a closing
A door that opens, not the last
Hard work and tears and honest hoping
Carried me beyond my past

Every mind that goes unseen
Every voice that dares to dream
This degree belongs to more than me
It's for the ones still finding where to be

Alhamdulillah, this is the day
Through every storm we finally found our way
Not the end, this is where we begin
A graduate of Trinity
The world is calling, hear it ring
Go and change the things that need to change
Alhamdulillah, this is the day

Alhamdulillah
This is only the beginning
Go and change the world

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
Trinity College Dublin
M.Ed Graduation Ceremony
15 April 2026

There is a particular kind of discomfort that follows a panel session, and I know it well by now. It is not quite regret. It is not quite satisfaction either. It sits somewhere in between, restless and unresolved, and it tends to arrive on the commute home or in the quiet before sleep.

Yesterday was no different.

I keep asking myself the same question on loop: did I say too much? Did I go off script? Did I ramble where I should have been precise? But then another voice answers back, measured and firm — the theme was lived experience. If not here, then where? If not me, then who?

That tension is probably the most honest thing I can say about NSC 26.

How it began

I introduced myself as a recently completed M.Ed. student at Trinity, originally registered as a participant, then asked to represent LaunchPAD as an ambassador. I explained, briefly, that LaunchPAD advocates for increasing the participation of students with disabilities in postgraduate studies across Irish universities. Two minutes. Clean enough.

Then Juliet asked her question, and I said out loud, on the microphone that the question was very long and had a lot to answer. I meant it as an acknowledgement. Whether it landed that way, I am not entirely sure. But it was honest, and that set the tone for everything that followed.

What I chose to say, and why

I did not follow my cue card verbatim. What I had prepared with care became something looser, more organic, pulled forward by the moment and the room. I decided to say what actually happened.

I told them my M.Ed. at Trinity was my sixth attempt. Five before it, all incomplete — one in the United Kingdom, two in Malaysia, two in Finland. I said this not for sympathy, and not to perform resilience. I said it because it was directly relevant to the question of sustainability in research. You cannot talk about why you chose your methodology, why you chose your topic, why you chose IPA, without explaining the ground you were standing on when you made those choices.

The part that I still struggle to articulate cleanly is the contradiction that defined those years. I could not complete coursework and finish a dissertation, and yet I am now an author of nearly thirty books. Saying that out loud in that room, I watched people recalibrate their understanding in real time. That is exactly the kind of dissonance that ADHD produces, and that the world still does not fully grasp.

My diagnosis came at 47, in 2022. It answered everything. Not all at once, but gradually, like a room slowly coming into focus. I decided to try once more at TCD, carrying all my previous failures as both weight and fuel, telling myself that this time was genuinely different, because I had a name for what had always been happening, and I had access to medication, support, and an institution that understood inclusive education.

On the research itself

I chose my research topic with sustainability in mind, and I said so plainly. A master’s dissertation that sits on a library shelf and is never opened again is a quiet failure, regardless of the grade. I did not want that. So I chose to study university students with ADHD and their experiences in the era of generative AI, which meant, in many ways, studying myself. I was fully aware of the risks: bias, proximity, and the questions around validity. I did not sidestep them. I addressed them through triangulation and positionality, and I chose IPA not out of convenience but because it was the only method that honoured the premise I was actually defending.

Current research in this space leans heavily quantitative. That work answers certain questions. But ADHD individuals have already been misserved for decades by systems built on generalisation and averages. IPA was my way of pushing back, methodologically, not ideologically. I never aimed to generalise the findings. That was not a weakness. That was the point.

To international students

I said it then, and I will say it again here: do not treat your identity as an outsider as a liability. It is not. The concepts and theoretical frameworks that dominate research are not as universal as they are presumed to be. We have something to offer, not to disrupt, but to enhance. To make inclusion genuinely inclusive. Culturally responsive, not just structurally accommodating.

I believe that. I meant it.

How it ended

The timekeeper gave me the warning card. I wrapped up at six minutes, perhaps abruptly. The microphones began having trouble after that, and I kept thinking — quietly, absurdly — that I had somehow exhausted the batteries by speaking too much. That thought made me smile to myself. I said nothing more during the Q&A. I felt I had already given what I had.

After the session, a Malaysian student from the University of Limerick approached me, along with her colleagues. She is on an Erasmus programme, based mostly in Lisbon, only visiting UL for a short period. That brief exchange was genuinely one of the highlights of the afternoon. Something about being recognised, not as a speaker, but as a compatriot — it settled something in me.

The honest accounting

I was unwell. I had been fighting a fever, and I almost did not go. But cancelling at the last minute was not something I could bring myself to do, not for this. I kept my distance, wore a mask throughout most of the day, and managed.

I used the TCD wifi to download nearly fifty papers to Zotero, bringing my PhD proposal reading list close to four hundred sources. That felt like the right use of the day’s margin.

There is also the matter of a paper I began preparing on IPA as a methodology for ADHD research. I want to publish it. The question of how to do that without a current university affiliation is one I have not yet resolved, but it is a question worth sitting with.

Alhamdulillah for the opportunity. For the invitation. For the room that listened.

The discomfort I carry home from these moments is not a sign that something went wrong. I am learning to read it differently now, as evidence that I showed up fully, without a rehearsed performance. That is what lived experience asks of us. You cannot curate it and still call it real.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
hasrizal.substack.com
www.hasrizal.com

This afternoon, I took part in the ALTITUDE Summit 2026 organised by AHEAD Ireland, held on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 March 2026 at the Convention Centre Dublin and online. The summit brings together leaders, educators, and professional staff from Further Education and Training and Higher Education to advance Universal Design in tertiary education. Anchored in the ALTITUDE Charter, it provides a space to share practice, strengthen networks, and consider how governance and institutional structures can embed Universal Design across learning, teaching, assessment, supports, services, and both physical and digital environments.

I was invited to participate as one of the eight LaunchPAD Ambassadors. Although I had hoped to attend the summit more fully, today is the last day of Ramadan and tomorrow is Eid, so I was only able to attend for the session in which I was one of the panellists. Even so, I still managed to listen to some of the presentations.

In my contribution, I shared a personal and practical case for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) based on lived experience as a postgraduate student with ADHD, and used that experience to make a wider call for system-level change.

I introduced myself as a recent graduate of the M.Ed. in Diversity and Inclusion at Trinity College Dublin, and as someone whose research focuses on ADHD and generative AI.

Barriers in the Academic Essay Writing Process

A central aspect of the sharing was how UDL genuinely impacted our postgraduate studies. In my case, one major obstacle was the highly structured academic writing. It was always the nightmare I had to endure, and I had no way to explain why a 3500-word essay is difficult, considering myself known as a prolific book author.

However, on this occasion, our instructors offered the entire cohort alternative assessment options for all assignments. Instead of the conventional essay, we had the flexibility to select any format that effectively demonstrated our understanding, analysis, and findings. I opted to submit my assignment as a pre-recorded Canva video presentation. This decision significantly impacted the experience: assignments were completed on time, with reduced stress and increased focus, and there was no requirement to disclose ADHD, given the flexibility available to all students.

Various Formats of Learning Materials

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) was integrated not only into the assessment processes but also within the learning materials themselves. Course materials were accessible in various formats, including research papers, printed books, e-books, audiobooks, and podcasts. Given four hours of daily commuting, these diverse formats enabled me to convert travel time into meaningful engagement with the course content. A significant portion of the learning experience during the journey was facilitated through these materials. This exemplifies the practical application of UDL.

From Personal Empathy to Institutional Norm

At the same time, an important gap was highlighted. What worked well in cases like mine happened because of the lecturers’ initiative, not because it was embedded at the institutional level. The point made was that UDL should not depend on individual goodwill or isolated examples of good practice. It needs to become the norm across modules and programmes, with accessible learning materials available in multiple formats and with alternative assessments built in as standard practice. This is especially important if disabled postgraduate students are to participate equitably without constantly having to negotiate support on a case-by-case basis.

Universal Design for High‑Stakes Work

One area for further change was also suggested. UDL principles should extend beyond coursework assignments to encompass higher-stakes academic work. There is already ongoing research in this area, but it is time for UDL to be taken more seriously in the context of high‑stakes postgraduate assessment, particularly postgraduate dissertations, PhD theses, and the viva. This argument is not about lowering standards, but about improving validity and fairness. We need to ask whether the viva always measures what it claims to measure, and whether some of the difficulties postgraduate students face are truly about academic ability, or whether they reflect environmental and systemic barriers that remain unaddressed.

A Unique Conclusion to Ramadan’s Tenacity

These are some of the points I shared during the session. At the same time, I learned a great deal from my colleagues, LaunchPAD ambassadors Leah and Siobhan, whose insights and experiences added rich new dimensions to my own thinking. I will share my reflections on what I learned from them in a separate entry, so that I can do justice to the depth of their contributions.

For now, it’s time to break my fast and do some cooking, bringing this meaningful day to a warm close.

Eid Mubarak!

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
LaunchPAD Ambassador
www.hasrizal.com

A study published in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion examined what leads employees with ADHD to disclose their diagnosis at work proactively before performance becomes an issue, and what happens when they do.

The researchers surveyed 166 working adults with ADHD and found two things that, on their own, are not surprising but together carry a quiet weight. First, when employees feel psychologically safe, when they trust that disclosure will not be used against them, they are significantly more likely to share their diagnosis. Second, that proactive disclosure is linked to thriving at work: not merely surviving or coping, but actively growing and finding vitality in what they do.

The inverse was equally clear. When stigma consciousness is high, when a person is acutely aware that others may view them through the lens of a label, disclosure drops. And with it, so does the possibility of thriving.

What struck me was not the finding itself. It was what it implies about the thousands of professionals who have made the opposite calculation: to stay silent, to mask, to perform neurotypicality as a condition of belonging.

A Familiar Arithmetic

I received my ADHD diagnosis midway through my career. By then, I had published books, led a school network, sat on a national education policy committee, and studied across multiple countries. The professional record was intact. From the outside, it looked like consistency and competence.

What it did not show was the architecture behind it. The systems I had built around myself to compensate for what I could not name. The outlines were rewritten not once but repeatedly before a single paragraph emerged. The attempts at postgraduate study that did not hold, not for lack of ability, but for lack of understanding. The meetings where I listened harder than anyone in the room because I knew my attention could leave without warning.

The diagnosis did not add anything to my capacity. It explained the cost of what was already there.

And it raised a question I had not anticipated: now that I had language for this, what was I supposed to do with it — publicly?

The Platform and the Performance

LinkedIn is, by design, a space of professional presentation. It rewards coherent narratives, clean progressions, and the appearance of steady upward movement. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Professional identity matters, and the ability to present oneself with clarity is a real and valuable skill.

But there is a difference between professional presentation and professional performance in the theatrical sense. And for many neurodivergent professionals, LinkedIn requires a kind of performance that goes beyond strategic communication into something closer to concealment.

The profile must look linear, even when the career was not. The language must be confident, even when the internal experience was one of constant recalibration. The gaps must be explained or hidden. The struggles must be reframed as growth, or left out entirely.

This is not unique to ADHD. Anyone with a non-linear career, a period of illness, or a life that did not follow the expected trajectory knows the quiet editing that LinkedIn demands. But for neurodivergent professionals, the editing runs deeper. It is not just the career that needs tidying. It is the mind itself that must be presented as though it works in the way the platform assumes.

Disclosure Is Not the Point

I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that every neurodivergent professional should disclose on LinkedIn, or anywhere else. Disclosure is not a virtue. It is a decision, and like all decisions, it has costs and consequences that are unevenly distributed.

The McIntosh et al. study makes this clear. Disclosure leads to thriving, but only when the environment is safe. In the absence of safety, disclosure becomes exposure. And exposure without support is not honesty. It is a risk.

What I am interested in is the space between disclosure and silence. The place where many neurodivergent professionals live: aware of their diagnosis, thoughtful about its implications, but unsure whether the professional spaces they inhabit can hold that information without distorting it.

I have spent time in that space myself. Drafting and redrafting an About section. Weighing whether to mention ADHD in a headline or let it sit further down the page. Asking not whether I am comfortable with the diagnosis — I am — but whether the reader on the other side of the screen will receive it as context or as a caveat.

That calculation is familiar to many. And the fact that it is necessary tells us something not about the individuals making it, but about the professional culture that requires it.

What Professionalism Could Mean

If professionalism is measured by contribution, by the quality of work produced, by the people served, and by the ideas brought to bear, then many neurodivergent professionals have been meeting and exceeding that standard for years. Often without accommodation. Often at considerable personal cost. And often without the language to explain why the cost was so high.

The study’s finding is not just that disclosure helps individuals thrive. It is that psychological safety, the environmental condition that enables disclosure, that is the variable that matters most. Not resilience. Not grit. Not the individual’s willingness to be vulnerable. The environment.

This maps directly onto what I know from my own research and advocacy in inclusive education. Universal Design for Learning begins with the same premise: that when we design environments around variability rather than a single assumed norm, more people can participate fully, not because they have been fixed, but because the barriers have been removed.

The same principle applies to professional spaces. A LinkedIn that is genuinely inclusive of neurodivergent professionals would not require disclosure as the price of belonging. It would not demand that a person explain their ADHD in order to make sense of a non-linear career. It would allow for professional narratives that are honest about complexity without penalising it.

We are not there yet. But naming the gap is the first step toward designing something better.

A Closing Thought

I did not write this to persuade anyone to disclose. I wrote it because the calculation itself, the weighing, the editing, the quiet negotiation between honesty and strategy, deserves to be named. Not as a personal failing, but as a systemic feature of professional culture that we can change.

Perhaps the question is not whether neurodivergent professionals should speak more openly. Perhaps it is what kind of professional culture we are building when so many feel they cannot.

Reference: McIntosh, C.K., Hyde, S.A., Bell, M.P. and Yeatts, P.E. (2023). Thriving at work with ADHD: antecedents and outcomes of proactive disclosure. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, 42(2), 228–247. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-02-2022-0033

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil is an educator, author, and advocate for inclusive education based in Ireland. His M.Ed. research at Trinity College Dublin explored the academic experiences of university students with ADHD in the era of generative AI. He writes at hasrizal.substack.com.

Introduction

The intersection of language, labels, and inclusive education is a delicate space to navigate. As highlighted in a recent Inclusion Dialogue podcast featuring Professor Richard Rose and Dr Joanne Banks, labels serve an essential role in securing better support for students with disabilities, yet they also carry inherent risks. Professor Rose noted that while labels can be helpful in acquiring resources, they can also do much to deny the personality of the individual.

Professor Emer Ring reinforced this concern in her work, Leading Inclusion from the Inside Out (Ring et al., 2021). She observed that a language of deficit continues to be employed when describing children who are perceived to require “extra” or “special” inputs to progress through the education system.

When examining current policy and legislation, the imperative to protect children is clear. If evidence demonstrates that the use—or absence—of labels causes harm or leads to discrimination, we must act. In Ireland, the Equal Status Acts 2000–2018 promote equality of opportunity and explicitly prohibit discrimination on nine grounds, including disability. Under these acts, schools are obligated to provide reasonable accommodations to facilitate the participation of students with disabilities.

Core Areas of Inquiry

To navigate the complex advantages and disadvantages of using labels, this discussion explores three key questions:

1. How do professionals perceive and utilise labels in inclusive education?

2. How do labels impact children’s access to opportunities and support?

3. Are there more effective ways to communicate about disabilities that can help us support children with additional needs without relying on labels?

These questions are framed by the foundational principles established by Kauffman and Badar (2014). The authors stress the necessity for better thinking and clearer communication in special education. They posit that the language of inclusion is grounded in human constructions—such as the concept of human rights, which can be redefined —while simultaneously acknowledging that disability must also be understood through a logico-mathematical framework, recognising facts that cannot be changed. While avoiding categorising these conditions as “problems” may seem progressive, doing so risks invalidating the significant, lived challenges these individuals encounter.

The Evolution of Nomenclature in Ireland

Historically, the education of children with disabilities in Ireland has undergone a profound evolution. Prior to independence, these children experienced an era of profound neglect, invisibility, and state denial regarding their educational needs. During this time, the government viewed their requirements as purely medical, resulting in many children residing in hospitals or asylums. Over time, this shifted toward an era of special schools, eventually leading to current initiatives for mainstream inclusion.

Accompanying these systemic changes, the terminology used to describe these realities has also evolved. Osgood (2006) emphasised that nomenclature shapes our understanding of disability constructs. It dictates the formal names of institutions and determines the labels used to identify specific categories of disability.

Reflecting on this evolution reveals the historical, educational, and social contexts underpinning these terms. We have transitioned from the harmful, institutional era of broad social labels like “vicious” or “wretched” to a modern focus on person-first language and recognising neurological differences.

Models of Disability

This transition has been significantly aided by our evolving understanding of disability, which can be viewed through several distinct models (Flood, 2010):

• The Medical Model: This model views disability as a personal limitation or impairment that needs to be treated or cured. Emphasis is placed on medical treatment, rehabilitation, and individual interventions to “fix” the disability.

• The Social Model: Shifting focus from the individual to the societal context, this approach argues that people are disabled not by their impairments, but by barriers in society, such as discriminatory attitudes and inaccessible physical spaces. It emphasises accessibility, equal opportunities, and removing societal obstacles.

• Biopsychosocial and Bio-Ecological Models: To achieve a comprehensive understanding of disability, these models consider the complex interplay between biological, psychological, and social factors. They highlight how both individual characteristics and environmental conditions shape disability experiences.

The Impact of Labelling: A Delicate Balance

Labels themselves are inherently neutral; it is the societal attitudes and stigmas attached to them that dictate their impact (Kauffman & Badar, 2014; Alzahraney, 2023).

The Negative Impacts (Risks) (Lauchlan & Boyle, 2020; Alzahraney, 2023):

• Stigma and Social Isolation: Labelling often leads to stereotyping and stigma, resulting in social disadvantage and exclusion.

• Self-Perception: Labels can lead to internalised stigma, reduced self-worth, and lower motivation.

• Lowered Expectations: Labelling can create lowered expectations among teachers and parents, limiting the student’s potential by focusing on perceived deficits.

• Over-Reliance on the Medical Model: This can limit broader developmental support by prioritising diagnosis over holistic interventions.

The Positive Impacts (Benefits) (Lauchlan & Boyle, 2020; Alzahraney, 2023):

• Access to Tailored Educational Services: Labelling allows students to receive specialised educational plans, such as Individualised Education Plans (IEPs), providing customised instruction.

• Focus for Advocacy: Labels act as a crucial tool for advocacy, directing attention and resources to a student’s specific needs.

• Clarity and Emotional Relief: Labelling provides a structured explanation for learning challenges, helping to reduce stress and guilt for students and their families.

• Access to Legal Protection: Assigning a label offers an additional layer of protection within the legal framework.

Case Study: The Complexity of ADHD

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) provides an excellent case study. It differs from other neurominorities primarily due to its neurochemical origins—specifically the dysregulation of dopamine and noradrenaline pathways —which often respond well to targeted pharmacological interventions.

Perspectives on ADHD vary among experts. For instance, Professor Russell Barkley points out the public health risks associated with untreated ADHD (Barkley, 2024), while others, like Dr Ned Hallowell, view it as a potential asset. Ultimately, as noted in the literature, ADHD is best understood in its complexity: it is “Neither Gift nor Curse” (Mercer, 2012).

Moving Forward: Character Education

To foster a truly inclusive schooling experience, character education serves as an organic framework for redesigning the educational landscape. Schools that have a virtues-led curriculum are more likely to prioritise a community that has compassion, co-operation, and acceptance of difference at its core (McGrath & Noble, 2010). Key character values supporting inclusive education include tolerance, the spirit of citizenship, friendship, being communicative, care for the environment, and care for the society (Pamungkas, 2016).

Conclusions

1. Our responsibility is twofold: to protect the rights and needs of our learners while also recognising the dynamic nature of disabilities, which demand ongoing research. Our scientific approach should remain unaffected by societal misconceptions as we work toward genuine inclusion.

2. Stigma does not originate from labels; rather, it stems from a lack of understanding and empathy among students, educators, parents, and society at large. Addressing these gaps requires a steadfast commitment to continuous education.

3. Character education, with its focus on cultivating virtues both within and beyond the curriculum, offers a promising framework for advancing diversity and inclusion.

References

• Ajiningsih, C. R., Syamsi, I., & Haryanto, H. (2019). Character education in inclusive school. Proceedings of the International Conference on Special and Inclusive Education (ICSIE 2018).

• Alzahraney, T. S. (2023). Labeling is not the issue: The benefits of labeling children with learning disabilities when response to intervention is implemented. International Journal of Special Education, 38(1), 1–15.

• Barkley, R. A. (2024). Why can’t we rename ADHD? [Video]. YouTube.

• Berkowitz, M., Althof, W., & Bier, M. C. (2012). The practice of pro-social education. The Handbook of Prosocial Education, 1, 71–90.

• Equal Status Act 2000. (2000). Irish Statute Book . https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2000/act/8/enacted/en/html

• Faraone, S. V., Banaschewski, T., Coghill, D., Zheng, Y., Biederman, J., Bellgrove, M. A., Newcorn, J. H., Gignac, M., Al Saud, N. M., Manor, I., Rohde, L. A., Yang, L., Cortese, S., Almagor, D., Stein, M. A., Albatti, T. H., Aljoudi, H. F., Alqahtani, M. M. J., Asherson, P., . . . Wang, Y. (2021). The World Federation of ADHD International Consensus Statement: 208 evidence-based conclusions about the disorder. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 128, 789–818 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.01.022

• Flood, E. (2010). Assisting children with special needs: An Irish perspective.

• Flood, E., & Murphy, D. (2022). Supporting special educational needs: An SNA handbook.

• Kauffman, J. M., & Badar, J. (2014). Better thinking and clearer communication will help special education. Exceptionality, 22(1), 17–32 . https://doi.org/10.1080/09362835.2014.865953

• Lauchlan, F., & Boyle, C. (2020). Labeling and inclusive education. In Oxford research encyclopedia of education.

• McGrath, H., & Noble, T. (2010). Supporting positive pupil relationships: Research to practice. Educational and Child Psychology, 27(1), 79.

• Mercer, P. (2012, February). ADHD: Neither gift nor curse. Attention Magazine . https://chadd.org/attention-article/adhd-neither-gift-nor-curse/

• Mubarak, R., & Syamsi, I. (2019). The influence of character education towards acceptance of the children with special needs in inclusive school. Proceedings of the International Conference on Special and Inclusive Education (ICSIE 2018).

• Osgood, R. (2006). Language, labels, and lingering (re) considerations: The evolution and function of terminology in special education. Philosophical Studies in Education, 37, 135–145.

• Pamungkas, B. (2016). Urgensi pendidikan karakter untuk mengoptimalkan layanan pendidikan bagi siswa berkebutuhan khusus di sekolah inklusif.

• Ring, E., O’Sullivan, L., Ryan, M., & Daly, P. (2021). Leading inclusion from the inside out. Peter Lang Verlag . https://doi.org/10.3726/615063

• Rose, R. (2022). Inclusive education; imposition or a process of shared international learning? In Inclusive Education (1st ed.). Routledge . https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003263425-12

• Walsh, B. (2016). Essays in the history of Irish education. Palgrave Macmillan UK . http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/trinitycollege/detail.action?docID=4719900

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
M.Ed. Diversity and Inclusion
Trinity College Dublin

This article and video represent the assignment I submitted to fulfill one of my coursework requirements for my M.Ed. in Diversity and Inclusion at TCD School of Education. Using the UDL framework, I opted to submit my coursework as a pre-recorded video presentation. The process is detailed in a separate article. Read more here:

1. Introduction: The 20-Year Hurdle

For many, a Master’s degree is a linear one or two-year progression.

For me, it was a 20-year hurdle punctuated by five unsuccessful attempts at different institutions across four countries.

It was only on my sixth attempt, at the age of 50, that I finally navigated the pedagogical landscape of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to secure my Master of Education (M.Ed.).

This success was not merely a triumph of persistence; it was the result of a profound intersection between a late ADHD diagnosis, supported by the focus provided by medical stimulants, and a radical systemic shift within the university itself.

During my time in Dublin, I witnessed the TCD School of Education transition from the traditional silo of “Special Education” toward the broader philosophy of “Inclusive Education.” This was more than a change in nomenclature; it was a move away from reactive “fixes” for individual deficits and toward an environment where the programme is designed from the outset to accommodate the natural variability of all learners.

2. Understanding UDL: A Proactive Paradigm Shift

At the core of this inclusive shift is Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

As a learner and amateur researcher in this field, I recognise that traditional academic accommodations are often reactive—they require the student to self-disclose a disability and request a “pardon” for their struggles. UDL is proactive; it assumes that barriers exist within the curriculum itself rather than the student. By designing flexible pathways for engagement, representation, and expression, we eliminate the need for special requests.

This empowerment is best understood through the “Curb Cut” effect. Originally designed for wheelchair users, sidewalk ramps (curb cuts) ended up benefiting parents with strollers, travellers with heavy suitcases, and delivery workers. In education, when we design a curriculum for the “margins”—the neurodivergent or the student with a disability—we inevitably improve the learning experience for the entire cohort.

Our impairments made the barriers visible and helped tackle them.

3. Multi-Modal Representation: Conquering the Four-Hour Commute

UDL demands multiple forms of material representation. For me, this was a strategic necessity to bypass the “reading fatigue” and executive dysfunction often associated with ADHD. Navigating a heavy four-hour commute to TCD meant that traditional printed journal papers were often inaccessible. I utilised a multi-modal digital workflow to transform travel time into an active study:

• Inclusion Dialogue Podcast (Dr Joanne Banks): As a specific TCD-linked resource, I utilised this podcast to engage with core academic themes via audio, allowing me to process complex pedagogical theories while in transit.

• Snipd App: This was an essential “life hack” for my ADHD. It allowed me to bookmark specific audio segments and generate AI-driven notes and transcripts of the podcasts I heard, ensuring that fleeting insights were captured and organised.

• Varied Media: My study routine was intentionally hybrid. I utilised journal papers, printed books, and ebooks interchangeably, choosing the format that best matched my fluctuating energy levels and environment, whether online or face-to-face (F2F).

4. The Core Innovation: Action and Expression via Video

The most transformational moment of my M.Ed. was the departure from the mandatory 3500-word essay. Under the UDL framework, my lecturers at Trinity allowed for alternative formats, including podcasts or YouTube videos. This represents a significant challenge to traditional academic gatekeeping, which often confuses the ability to write a long essay with the ability to construct a high-quality argument.

The logic was simple: evaluate the substance, not the container. My lecturer used words that felt “sacred” to me: “substance, not the form!” This shift was revolutionary. It allowed me to leverage my strengths in verbal communication and public speaking to prove my mastery of the literature review without being paralysed by the executive demands of a 3500-word document.

5. The Technical Workflow: From MindMap to Submission

To maintain academic rigour, my video presentation required a structured digital workflow as disciplined as any written thesis. I recommend this toolkit for any neurodivergent learner:

1. MindMap Pro: I utilised this to brainstorm and structure the literature review. It allowed me to visualise connections between theories and maintain an organised hierarchy of thoughts across all my devices.

2. Canva: I designed my visual aids here and utilised the platform’s accessibility functions. Crucially, I recorded the presentation directly in Canva to keep the workflow seamless.

3. Grammarly: I wrote a full script for the presenter notes, using Grammarly to ensure the tone remained “semi-academic”—professional yet accessible.

4. ChatGPT: I used AI to insert specific emojis into my presenter notes. These served as vital visual cues for emotion and consistency, helping me track my pace and maintain the correct energetic tone while recording—a significant aid for ADHD eye-tracking.

5. Recording Technique: I maintained eye contact with the camera lens and intentionally utilised silence between sentences. This “pause-heavy” method reduces the need for filler words (like “um”) and makes the subsequent editing much more efficient.

6. AI-Assisted Post-Production and Accessibility

The final stage involved refining a 30-minute raw recording down to the strict 15-minute university limit.

• Wondershare Filmora: I used “silent detection” AI to automatically cut dead air, bringing a 30-minute draft down to 17 minutes before final manual refinements.

• WhisperTranscribe: This tool was used to generate accurate closed captions. Following UDL principles, this ensured my video was accessible to the marker and my cohort. Furthermore, I utilised these transcriptions to help generate the final text-based components of my coursework.

• Final Submission: I uploaded the video as an “unlisted” YouTube link. The final submission via Turnitin was a Word document containing the video link, a comprehensive reference list with in-text citations adapted for the visual medium, and the necessary metadata.

7. Reciprocal Benefits: The “Coffee Time” Theory

This UDL approach not only helped me overcome executive function challenges but also offered a mutual benefit to academic staff. I refer to this as the “Coffee Time” theory. While grading dozens of 3,500-word essays can lead to eye strain and mental fatigue, viewing a well-made, engaging video provides a mental “coffee break" during assessment. By concentrating on the core content—the part that truly matters—lecturers can evaluate the argument's quality in a more human-centred way.

This method proved its academic validity when I received a final grade of Distinction Cemerlang.

Alhamdulillah.

8. Conclusion: Removing the Hardship

The success of my sixth attempt at a Master’s degree proves that education is truly inclusive only when the existence of choice is guaranteed. In my cohort of around 45, only a few of us chose the video format; the rest were comfortable with the traditional essay. This is the essence of UDL: the ramp is there for those who need it, and it stays out of the way for those who do not.

Universal Design for Learning did not privilege me over others. It provided equal flexibility. It recognised learner variability as the norm rather than the exception. In doing so, it quietly dismantled barriers that had previously remained invisible.

For me, UDL was not merely a framework studied in lectures. It was the structural condition that made completion possible. It exemplified how inclusive education, when genuinely implemented, benefits students with and without diagnoses alike.

Design matters. And sometimes, the difference between failure and distinction is not effort, but architecture.

Hasrizal Abdul Jamil
M.Ed. Diversity and Inclusion
Trinity College Dublin.