Daily Times

Education and social issues; contrast combination: For a long time, people — in Pakistan — saw the contribution of education in addressing and resolving social issues as troubling, unacceptable and doomed because it exposed individuals to question on traditional beliefs in society. In marked contrast, they urged acceptance to recognise that individuals’ problems are rooted in the society, in which they live.

As a nation, we would have to be vocal that, until this society, based on capitalism, profit and the needs of the minority power elite, is reinstated by a workers’ state, based on the interests of the vast majority of the population, the fundamental causes of social problems will remain.

Not only in the field of education but also there has, particularly in Pakistan, been no growing body of literature focused on the discussion of social issues. Social issues had been seen as radical issues — what they are not — and iciness was shown by the people responsible for resolving them. It couldn’t be handled as belonging to an ethical responsibility. However, in the middle of this decade, many educators expressed despair that the next generation would appear to have little awareness of the need for structural analysis or commitment to collective action for social change.

All developed nations are suggesting uncritically that the role of education in resolving social issues, to deliver betterment to the society on behalf of the state is self-evident.

In states like Pakistan where people appear to be left equally uncertain about both the genuineness of institutions and commitment to best practice; insensitive responses to criticisms by anarchists are another hindrance in a creating harmonious path for the nation. As a nation we must be anxious that, however appropriate, whistle-blowing, may have potentially negative consequences.

Just as the lack of quality public education, contributes to common obliteration, mars national prosperity and destabilises not only the families but ultimately; societal norms.

Education on social issues becomes more significant in the face of economic and environmental challenges. To make future adults achieve their full potential, a necessary step to be taken is, to familiarize them with the problems of real life in a safe environment.

The placement or delays in obtaining a prerequisite and consequential tune-up is essential too. The analysed contextual echo of the subject under discussion that typically the aim of social education is worded in social change terms, while much of the actual practice is of a social control nature — but that is not true. It also added weight to the impression that social education may be, increasingly, part of an incorporative agenda whereby the function of social education is predominantly to ensure that difficult and troublesome individuals are made to accept prevailing societal norms.

Both modernisation and freedom seemed to be inevitable and advantageous but at the same time under constant suspicion of creating an endangered individual, and it is here that education becomes a fundamental part of the modernist narrative

At the same time, there are inherent tensions whenever, individuals with problems, would be financially dependent on the state or its institutions for employment or the existence of their service. There have always been reasons to doubt whether the apparent practice is done as traitors or as citizens.

The legacy of resolving social issues can only be addressed by the rhetoric of delivering quality education which is undoubtedly ubiquitous. The modern world has experimented successfully with its spirit which seems to have strengthened its social bonds. Much radical rhetoric was, in fact, imposed on social issues by weak education policies ‘approved’ by least bothered political figures.

Crux of this whole discussion is that those who had once been seen as the means of society’s transformation; the working class, are now seen by power elite as people in need of training to eradicate their prejudices. The reason behind this is that public education never addressed the changing social issues of the modern era. The great divide between thought and action engulfed it further.

Meanwhile, deliverance of public education demonstrates, despite its apparent commitment to anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice, education on social issues has increasingly been drawn into implementing the government’s control over stigmatising social issues as they shouldn’t come under discussion. Social problems which point mainly to individual causes, while the overpowering majority are most unlikely to be thinking in terms of ‘fundamental’ solutions.

Both modernisation and freedom seemed to be inevitable and advantageous but at the same time under constant suspicion of creating an endangered individual, and it is here that education becomes a fundamental part of the modernist narrative itself and not only of the process of the history of education. Which would limit its focus to the education of social problems, is the key to understanding the cultural construction of novelty, and the enlightened self as a self-re?ective lifelong learner in the system of thought that symbolises apprehensions and expectations for liberation at the very same time.

Educational aspirations — forming the aware citizen — to modern schooling was never the government’s intention; its aim was more the educational deliverance against the background of its moral and political decay. Progressive nations depend on building healthy societies through quality education, and quality education depends on “face to face and heart to heart” encounters with real life problems. Even when after 71 years of political and social upheavals and economic transformations — mostly negative — between the outbreak of the wars and breaking away of East Pakistan from West Pakistan — as a country Pakistan never decide upon a program that could be called restoration. Pakistan was and is on a track of progression, desperately in need of reassuring social order.

Ideas of natural laws and the absolute rights of every human as well as the local/regional identities of most of Pakistan’s inhabitants had to be made compatible with the newly adopted jargons called the moderate Pakistan whereas, at the same time, this country is politically driven by the Islamic constitution and defended militarily by the armies, the inner coherence of the nation-state is totally dependent on the values of  the inhabitants’ and their identi? cation with the values of the society. This would have to be developed by education, respectively ensuing from the increased awareness of problems resolution and information dissemination in the society through educational systems.

An educational culture of delivering education on social issues can be expressed as hope. The fears of an unknown future could be axed through ‘aware citizens’ resulting from educational processes to be implemented in organizational contexts, the schools.

As a result, all the citizens knowing their roles and responsibilities would be regarded as a success. It would be one of the characteristics of a thriving educational culture to react to nonrealistic expectations not only with education of perceived as solution to social problems but also with more and allegedly better educational opportunities. Compulsory education was continuously extended more and more. The moral part of this would have to be coated through the genre of education and the more practical part through education on social issues.

The ennoblement of education into quality education that enables individuals to cope with problem of real life is largely owed to the ongoing establishment of encountering with social issues, whereby it is no twist of fate that focuses on the individual’s soul but it actually aims at it. Even when education on social issues has emerged as an autonomous discipline working with empirical methods, the educational rhetoric of implementation of it in primary and middle school class – in public sector – remains idealistic, serving moral values reasoned relevant for individuals to cope with the various challenges of progress.

Against this background, education as a mean of the change is at the heart of solving perceived social problems such as health, crime, economy, ecology, traffic and public behaviour, harassment, abuse, drugs and alcohol but is more fundamentally connected to the process of sel-awareness of individuals, brought about by the ideas of freedom and responsiveness.

Nida Ahmed is an emerging columnist, passionate to see people learn to get rid of targeted messaging by create opinion-changing content.

Published in Daily Times, November 2^nd 2018.