Daily Times

One of the basic aims of educating the young is to empower them to meet the future challenges posed by this post-global and post-media age. But at least in Pakistan, this realization is a far-off dream because a large number of educational institutions, at all levels, are running and imparting education in a conventional style that aims at scoring higher grades only.

Consequently, we may find hundreds of learners securing up to 95 per cent of the total score but very few would be available to deal with any critical situation or to solve a puzzle based on critical learning or logical analysis. The best example of this failure can be seen in huge quantities of failure in the entry test or any other competitive tests.

This is not the basic aim of education, but it is rampant and very few are serving the real purpose of education and doing what they can to empower the student seeking guidance under them. Not a higher grade but a skillful and empowered learner will be able to meet the future challenges of the advancement of technology and its roles in changing the modes of life.

This can be accomplished only when the learner is motivated for his job security through the learning of skills and is empowered by individuals through education. At a broader level, the consequences are even bitter because such a system is not producing the individual who can lead the nation towards solid and sustainable progress to meet the demands and challenges posed by the modern technological world we are surrounded by.

Not a higher grade but a skillful and empowered learner will be able to meet the future challenges of the advancement of technology and its roles in changing the modes of life.

A rightful education system must develop three basic aspects in the learners: Competence, Belonging, and Autonomy. By Competence here, it means that education and training must develop Competence in not only understanding the concepts but also with the skilful and critical application of the theoretical knowledge to deal with the day-to-day issues and problems at the individual as well as collective level.

This training produces individuals who not only understand the world and its issues around them but also are capable of devising ways and means to solve these. Belonging means that the learner must understand that the institution, the state, the culture, and the system under which instruction is being imparted to him, belongs to him/her, and s/he belongs to all this.

It’s a sense of owning and ownership. Once this is developed, the learners become the most useful members of society enabling them to engage with the world with the same positive pride and sense. The third ingredient of education is to autotomize the learners that they must be able to function independently and so on a constant course of learning, experimenting, and improving. That also means the student-centered approach in teaching which is a widely practiced mode of instruction in Western classrooms. A few universities in Pakistan also have taken the initiative in this direction. Some universities in upper Punjab and south Punjab are experimenting with the Flipped classroom teaching method which is yielding positive results.

These three major aspects of education tend to train and improve the learner to be a useful member of society by lowering the significance of securing higher grades and enhancing the empowerment of the students.

Today, a major cause of demotivated and uninspired students and faculty is that they are not working on the real purpose of education and are only busy in making the students as information and data banks which is a colonial legacy. Consequently, any attempts to reform the syllabi or teaching strategies would not pay any dividends, and reforms would fail to change the system. We must shed away this view of education and take a holistic view.

Achieving such ideals of education as discussed above is possible if education aligns perfectly with the culture, values, and thinking process of the society. So far, Pakistan because of its colonial background has attempted to fix the models for education based on the Western and American style which is sure an ideal to the culture and values but not that suitable to the Pakistani setup. The resultant product is a hybrid but not a pure Western and or indigenous.

This makes such individuals neither possess their value system nor that of the foreigner. This has seeped from the upper to the lower level and so our educational product is not preparing us for our society but rather for some alien society. When a system is embedded within these value systems, many of the issues relevant to educating the youth are automatically solved and human beings are turned into useful individuals through educating the people.

This must include the redefinition of success and failure and initiating the process of decolonization of the education system. An individual well-trained in the value system of society can take better care of himself as well as his society.

The writer is a professor of English at Government Emerson University, Multan. He can be reached at zeadogar@hotmail.com and Tweets at @Profzee