Beyond Literacy: An Invitation to the Voiceless Majority
ByAmjad Noorani
Los Altos, CA
A voiceless majority that feels the pain of Pakistan’s problems – that’s who we are. We want to do somethingbut we don’t know what and where to begin. We are concerned that things are getting worse yet we are hopeful. Life goes on. Somehow, Pakistan survives.
A stark fact in the developing world is that there is no second chance for the young child. Education either takes place at the right age or that window of opportunity may never open again for millions of children. This deep void of non-education is probably the worst form of social injustice inflicted on the underprivileged in any society.
Populations somehow survive to find shelter, water and food but education is a basic human right and squarely the responsibility of the state. With 12 million Pakistani children not in schools, a major gap exists between the demand for education and its provision.
Should the success of an education system be measured by the number of schools, students and test scores? Is the shortage of education due to insufficient resources, or lack of political will, or mismanagement – or all of the above? Or, is there a deliberate campaign to suppress education in order to hang on to the feudal system of governance?
What about content and quality of education? Is basic literacy an adequate benchmark of national progress? Will we continue to blindly accept the political indoctrination and half-truths as education? Has curriculum content become so trivialized and unimportant that parents are just happy to see their kids get through school and move on? Isn’t it time to place higher value on the development of a person’s ability to think freely?
And, what should be the role of NGOs in reforming education? Are they to go on serving in areas where government has failed or never addressed the problem? Can the collective impact of NGOs bridge the huge disparity between supply and demand in education?
These piercing questions were debated recently in a public forum on ‘Education Reform in Pakistan’ in San Jose, California. Beyond the continuing dialog on education reform, the positive outcome of this forum has been to move forward as a broad-based advocacy and action group. An ‘International Coalition for Education Reform in Pakistan’ (ICERP) is in the formative stages and its primary objective shall be to develop an effective partnership with government.
Readers are invited to join this initiative by signing up on http://icerp.wordpress.com/. I strongly urge you to also read a report of the conference and Dr. Anjum Altaf’s keynote and his conclusions of the conference. Both these articles appear elsewhere in this publication. Please do share these articles with others as well.
To appreciate the issues and suggested remedies, Dr. Altaf’s words require careful thought and a full reading of the text of his keynote. I quote from Dr. Altaf’s address: “We have a twin struggle: first to ensure that our citizens obtain their basic human right of education; and second that the education enables them to think for themselves.” He concludes that while literacy is important, the content of that literacy is even more important and he deplores that education has become “… an instrument of politics.” Dr. Altafbelieves that NGOs should not see themselves primarily in the role of providers as this creates the trap of setting numerical targets of increasing the number of schools and students. Dr. Altaf adds that in the context of the problem, such targets distract from the real issues and that, in numerical terms, the targets and accomplishments do not mean very much. He suggests instead that NGOs can consciously be ‘innovation laboratories’ and work towards having these innovations adopted in the public school system. This, he believes, would be “… taking on a greater responsibility as the cutting edge of education reform.”
In the same vein, it is appropriate to share excerpts from the words of well-known physicist Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy of Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. Addressing the NED Engineering College Convention last year in San Jose, Prof. Hoodbhoy concluded that “Universities are all about thinking.” … “Without personal and intellectual freedom there can be no thinking and hence no ideas, no innovation, no discoveries, no progress. Our real challenge is not better equipment or faster internet connectivity but the need to break with mental enslavement, to change attitudes, and to win our precious freedom”.
In the Friday Times a few years ago, Prof. Hoodbhoy wrote: “It is a myth that Pakistan’s problem is illiteracy or lack of schools and money. On the contrary, it is excess of mis-education and the unconscionable manipulation of young minds that makes Pakistan dangerous to its own people and the world.” He assailed the content of what is taught as “ … Pakistan’s poisonous education curriculum” and added: “ The long road to education reform in Pakistan must begin with dissolving the Curriculum Wing (CW) of the federal ministry of education.” … “The work of the CW could be entrusted to some of the country’s universities. This would scarcely be extraordinary. For example in Britain, universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, and London, define the curricula for school-leaving examinations. There are numerous other models: in the United States, every school is free to have its own curricula but college entrance examinations (the Scholastic Aptitude Test) enforce learning standards. India and Iran also have no national curriculum. These countries are proof that a country need not fall into pieces without one; surely Pakistan can survive without the CW.”
In an essay on the controversies in higher education, Dr. Hoodbhoy wrote (Dawn, Jan. 2 and Jan. 9, 2008): “To open minds, the change must begin at the school level. Good pedagogy requires encouraging the spirit of healthy questioning in the classroom. It should therefore be normal practice for teachers to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How to check the correctness of measurements? What is the evidence? How to make sense out of your results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such critical questions and framing reasoned answers.”
At the end of the day, it is up to us to do something to save Pakistan – something like signing up with ICERP on http://icerp.wordpress.com/. Geographically and culturally, Pakistan has much to offer the world. May I ask everyone to consider making Pakistan a better place, a friendlier place to visit and enjoy. Let us hope that soon peace will come to Pakistan and that its people – our people – will be respected and recognized as a tolerant, compassionate and hospitable country.
