The post Zarb-e-Azab narrative and the ISPR-sponsored song Hamay Dushman Ke Bachon Ko Parhana Hai (We have to teach enemies’ children) are ignoring the writing on the wall. We might need to shift our attention to ‘fixing’ our education rather than spreading it to every corner of the country. We need to humanise education first before we think of using education as a tool for humanisation. Education is a sociocultural phenomenon, thus existing socio-culturally on the levels where humans exist. It has its history as old as the human history, informing and being informed in a reciprocal relationship. It cannot be, hence, a product of something we have not imagined, practised or perceived. The purpose here is to prove the relationship of our education system and its content as our own product, the brainchild of our existing history and thought. Except the periods of colonisation, slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, famine, and war the human history is a story of progress.
My point here is that there is human existence on different levels of being, and so are our endeavours to better ourselves. In other words, we reap what we sow or what our previous generation has sown for us. One such example is the case of education in Pakistan that is based on what Mubarak Haider, an Urdu scholar, calls the “civilisational narcissism” i.e. teaching our children and upholding the notion of ‘our’ civilisation as the best one. This civilisational narcissism takes place when different cultures, religions or racial groups consider their creed, faith or culture/civilisation better than others, thus promoting xenophobia. This ideology taught in schools through state-approved curriculum and pedagogical practices in classrooms is all done in the name of promoting ‘nationalistic and patriotic’ feelings towards the homeland. Children are indoctrinated from the early age about the presence of the enemy lurking about in various forms, shapes and ideologies, namely, the West, other religions, and hostile nations. A false, collective narcissism is fed through the belief system to deem one’s race or civilisation as supreme, and hence worth following, and that unquestionably, over time, becomes the national ideology.
Subsequently, education should be that tool that emancipates humanity from its sub-human existence by denouncing oppression of all kinds, censuring previous oppressive practices and thoughts that devalued humanity, and to carve out a model where oppression has no chance to survive. However, the education model itself would require humanisation because it was the same set of educational institutes that produced bigotry, hate and prejudices against all forms of diversity that are perceived erroneously as ‘differences’. The thought and effort to systematically ‘educate’ and purge the field of education itself is challenging, because it is firstly to understand the system of education and its sociocultural context where it nurtured, and secondly, to reconstruct it according to new principles of freedom. The new principles of freedom, again, need to be negotiated among various stakeholders of society because of the dialectic nature of these principles. As freedom is not a concept outside society, it is thus a social contract among different parties. This social contract of freedom and humanity will be the panacea for remedying our education system from any sub-human values, accordingly elevating our humanity.
In the textbooks taught at primary and secondary level, in particular, the narrative of ‘glorified’ past of the imperial Islamic civilisation is pervasive. A delusional sense of pride is inculcated into the developing psyche of school-goers about something that was achieved by their ancestors. They are taught how Islamic civilisation was once at the peak of world wisdom and how the Europe of ‘dark age’ used to follow this model both in science and arts. This sense of past achievement induces nostalgic feelings and promotes complacency about the present. Students bask in the glory of the past in a proud manner and do not feel the need to research further in the present. This gradually hinders their way in achieving their personal goals because their belief in agency and human effort is weakened. Such beliefs encourage fatalistic thinking and to accept divine intervention uncritically while rendering the human agency futile.
Consequently, enriching and introducing more humanistic values into our education system should benefit people in a way that raises human critical consciousness. The socio-cultural environment of any country needs to provide a healthy atmosphere for education to grow freely and critically. It will not only free society but will also prevent it from any demonising dogma that grips the political or cultural landscape. Education should be an inspiration for humanity and vice versa.
The writer is a PhD scholar in education