Daily Times

Whether the curriculum needs to be in line with the cognitive needs and interests of children or whether it should be based on geopolitical and ideological wrangling is a question not without merit in Pakistan. Having an immensely polarised society, popular discourse never allows any consideration of the country’s religious, cultural and linguistic diversity. Education in Pakistan is sandwiched between the political ideologies of political parties, pressure groups and jihadi outfits.

A study of education policymaking in Pakistan clearly shows that it has always favoured the religious extreme right and the bourgeoisie, both safeguarding each other’s interests. In the wake of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan in 2010, many subjects were devolved to the provinces by abolishing the concurrent list, including education, whereby the provinces can now legislate on education and decide both the contents and medium. Since both have deep political and ideological connotations, therefore these have surpassed other problems in quality, access and budget allocation in the education sector. For instance, curriculum in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa becomes a hot topic but lack of access for girls to education in Indus Kohistan, the least developed district in the province, never becomes news.

The issues of access to education, its quality and retention of students in schools are the effects of medium of instruction and contents added by other factors such as lack of education infrastructure, security and quality of teachers. The medium of instruction in Pakistan has been oscillating between two languages, Urdu and English. Urdu is Pakistan’s national language and English is overwhelmingly considered the language of development in Pakistan. Favouring Urdu as the medium of instruction over all other regional languages, despite being the mother tongue of only seven percent of Pakistanis, it is asserted that Urdu is understood by the majority in Pakistan. Of course a majority understands it, as it is now the language of mass media in Pakistan. Still, the rural fringes in Pakistan do not understand it.

Whatever your memories of school days, it became painful when we were ‘forced’ to speak an alien language or taught in some other language, which we never used at home or in our immediate environment. We were made to feel that our own language was backward, embarrassing or simply irrelevant. While English has been made a holy grail and Urdu a drive of patriotism in Pakistan, any concern regarding the mother languages of children falls on deaf ears here.

The former government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, led by the Awami National Party (ANP), initiated a somewhat inclusive policy conducive to the immediate environment of the majority of children in the province. In 2012, the then provincial government made Pashto — the majority language in the province — a compulsory subject and medium of instruction in public and private primary schools in 17 majority Pashto-speaking districts. For the next academic year, it also introduced four other regional languages — Seraiki, Hindko, Kohistani and Khowar — to be taught in pre-primary classes where these are the mother tongues of a majority of children, aiming to make such language classes gradually compulsory throughout primary school.

However, in the aftermath of the 2013 elections, the ANP was routed by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI). The PTI-led government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa announced a new education policy. It abandoned the initiative by the previous government and, early this year, opted for English as the medium of instruction from class one and claimed the change would be incremental. Interestingly, despite being a strong adversary to Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N government, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa copied what Punjab had adopted in 2009 and reverted it to Urdu this year as the medium of instruction with English starting from class four.

PTI leaders have been asserting that they want a uniform education system in the country wherein every child will have equal right to ‘quality’ education. According to them, the only solution to eliminate this disparity in education is to make English the medium of instruction as early as class one in public schools. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government says it has prepared new textbooks and plans to train 350 teachers, who will, in turn, train 23,000 teachers. This argument ignores the socio-cultural processes in language acquisition, especially for second or third languages. Whether teachers are prepared to teach in English and whether schools and children’s immediate environment provide them the socio-cultural settings for English is not considered seriously. Cognitive linguists suggest that to assure cognitive and academic success in a second language, a student’s first language system, oral and written, must be developed to a high cognitive level. This asks for the child’s mother language to be the medium of instruction for him/her in schools, at least for the first four to five years of education.

For a multilingual country like Pakistan, educationists suggest a trilingual plan: the child’s mother language in the early stages, at a later stage, a second (national language) should be introduced and, afterwards, a third language (English) must be incorporated. As for content in textbooks, Pakistani students have always been very unfortunate. They have been taught a distorted history, a biased science, half true social studies with repetitive Pakistan Studies. Even the languages — Urdu and English — are taught through books full of lessons on religion. Every government in Pakistan has tried to infuse what the ruling party or individuals like General Ziaul Haq hold dear irrespective of its relevance in the contemporary world.

Distortion of facts in Pakistan has a long history. It started from the days of independence and only increased. Zia not only changed textbooks at the school level but also changed the entire curricula for higher education. This has stopped critical thinking as well as skill development in learners. Today we have a large number of resisters swathed in extremism, bigotry and conservatism as a result of Zia and his legacy. Any reform in the curriculum is rejected in a second by dubbing it as an international conspiracy against Pakistan and the ummah.

The Jamaat-e-Islami, (JI), though a junior coalition partner in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has virtually forced its big partner, the PTI, to concede purging the province’s curriculum of ‘objectionable’ content. They want to incorporate jihadi teachings in the curriculum that will nourish extremism further rather than stemming it in the province. The provincial secretary of the JI rationalises the change as follows: “Our homeland is under threat. It is being droned by US forces and we have to defend ourselves. In these circumstances, is teaching our youth the ideology of jihad a sin?”

Instead of instilling their own whims and political agendas in the minds of Pakistan’s future generations, policy devisers must take stock of the needs and interests of the children. While language in which students are taught matters, what is taught in school is even more important.

The writer heads the Institute for Education and Development in Swat. He can be contacted at ztorwali@gmail.com