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Miseducation
By Mowahid Hussain Shah

Education is not necessarily the be-all remedy for everything. It depends on what kind of education is imparted. Miseducation is education which is improper and harmful. Half-baked knowledge can sometimes induce the delusion of what Somerset Maugham described in his short story, “Mr Know-All”: “The possibility that he could be mistaken never occurred to him.”

Subcontinental society has shown what rote learning, memorization, and displays of showy piety can inflict. Issues are seen in black and white, while the in-between gray is overlooked.

Decline of attention, reading, and reasoning has left a desolate trail. In its place has been proliferation of warped thinking, with reliance on hearsay, rumors, and unverified facts. Speaking without data or evidence and indulging in generalities becomes the norm. One sees lots of conclusions but very little reasoning to support them.

Miseducation is a problem that cuts across geographical boundaries. The reading public in much of the Western world exposed to mainstream media and academia has been indoctrinated into thinking that in the Middle East, for example, Palestinians are in the wrong and not the wronged party; that nuclear proliferation is an Iranian problem, not Israel’s; that terrorism is individual or group, but not state-sponsored. It is a matter of who controls the context.

Miseducation bolsters blind spots and close-mindedness. All the amount of technical progress in India and success of its educated class in the West has not been able to surmount deeply embedded caste prejudices.

The arrogance of knowing better and being better runs parallel with deeply entrenched ignorance. Maulana Rumi had warned that “ignorance is God’s prison; knowing is God’s Palace.”

What was done to the African continent under the rubric of Christianity, commerce, and civilization remains to be adequately looked into. A case in point is Belgian Congo. Adam Hochschild’s 1998 book, “King Leopold’s Ghost” details the forced labor, starvation, torture, and mass killing of its people in the ravaging of its land for rubber.

Buddhism is generally depicted as a benign faith of peace. But juxtapose those optics with 21st century Burma where its treatment of the Rohingya Muslims, according to the UN, warrants prosecution for genocide.

After he spearheaded his New Zealand cricket team to a remarkable win over Pakistan at Abu Dhabi, it was educative to witness Ajaz Younis Patel do a thanksgiving sajdah, sending a message that the appeal of Islam is transcendental and not confined or monopolized by ethno-national parameters.

Miseducation can occur anywhere. It can be at a madrassa in Multan or a think-tank in Washington.

Miseducation fosters myth-making in America in that theirs is “the greatest country” with the “best” system in the history of mankind, contributing to self-satisfying complacency and bypassing the necessity of self-examination.

On the Vietnam debacle, David Halberstam wrote a book in 1972 on the harm done by the educated elite, “The Best and the Brightest,” lambasting the “brilliant policies that defied common sense” in Vietnam and which underlined the difference between intelligence and “true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.”
In 1709, Alexander Pope had warned that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”