Before the Schooling Years

“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