Daily Times

On Friday, last week, a freshman from my FSc pre-med class requested I not mark him absent while he skipped college to attend an important ceremony. His school was offering certificates of recognition to its ‘high- achievers’, a term coined to refer to candidates who obtain exceptional scores in the annual matriculation examinations. It reminded me of the television reports of a young fruit vendor from Gujranwala who stood second for the same exam. But it also raised some uncomfortable questions.
Are high scores something to celebrate? It is a debatable topic anywhere but it becomes much more complicated in Pakistan. Leave aside the score; is there anything to celebrate about the way the score has been achieved? What does the exam test in the first place? What is being rewarded? Here is one way of approaching these questions. We can evaluate the efficacy of the ‘system’ by assessing the product (the high achievers) with the help of an informal aptitude rubric. When high-achievers come to college, what skills do they have? What is the attitude towards learning? What are their career goals and general attitudes towards life? What are their opinions on music, poetry, gender, democracy? What, according to them, constitutes success? Where do they see themselves in 10 years’ time?
I cannot claim to speak for all teachers in Lahore but I can offer my experience. Here is a scenario. You have just entered a freshmen science group class. You break the ice. You learn that everyone has the ‘board exam’ on their minds. You tell them about the library, sports camps, theatre and music, and public speaking forums that they can make use of. Silence. You venture on to say that studying the textbook is important but studying poetry is important too because it says important things to us in beautiful ways. Silence. You say that going to the theatre educates and refines us, perhaps more than a teacher in a class does. You propose that they read autobiographies of famous people, of physicians and scientists, if they like. What you get in response is a question: “What is the use of studying a book, or doing anything for that matter, that is not relevant to the board exam? This comes from the highest achiever.
The high achievers are not to blame here because this is what the ‘system’ has taught them. As a teacher you could dump your idealism and focus solely on the textbook or you could persist, saying, “If they do not want to read anything, I will discuss Interstellar in class thinking it is a popular quantum physics-related movie and they would be interested. But the high achievers will say anything outside the syllabus is a waste of their time. If you ask them how their time would be better spent, they will ask you to sit down quietly and let them memorise fission and fusion definitions for the test they have to appear in later at the academy.
Wikipedia tells us that the concept of the academy can be traced to Plato’s school of philosophy. This establishment was founded around 385 BC at Akademia, which is the Greek name of a sanctuary of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. The academy in Pakistan is a private tuition centre where the student is offered vigorous prep sessions and tricks to obtain high scores in the board exams. It is a sanctuary of myopia but you cannot blame the academy for it all because it has grown out of the system. This is how.
In general, the board exam all over Pakistan is designed to test one thing: candidates’ memory. The exam does not require candidates to be creative. It does not test their general reading. It does not require them to express their opinion on an issue. It wants them to rote-learn definitions, and diagrams — even English essays and stories — and reproduce them in the exam. The highest achiever is usually the one with the best memory.
Only high achievers will be able to attend the scarce medical colleges and engineering universities in the country. To them, the only glorified professions are engineering and medicine. And they are right. Social status is conferred by select professions, medicine, engineering, the civil service and the military. Is intelligence simply the ability to rote-learn passages and reproduce them in the exam?
Long ago, Harvard professor Howard Gardner proposed the idea of multiple intelligences. According to Gardner, there are eight different intelligences: visual, linguistic, mathematical, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. The idea is important because it tells us that there is no single universal way of assessing a student’s intelligence simply because intelligence is not one ability. Each one of us is intelligent in our own way; we just have to identify the kind of intelligence we have the most and then build on it.
Each of us is capable of possessing all or some of Gardner’s intelligences. We can identify our strengths and weaknesses accordingly. A modern education system would work to actualise the innate capacities of students. The board exam should focus on each of these abilities. Why not encourage students to recite poetry or create a symphony? Students could be marked in science exams for completing science projects. Why can we not ask them to review the books they have read in the board exam? Instead of having them reproduce essays and stories from memory, why can the board not ask them to write their own stories? Why subsist in and perpetuate myopia?
So, when the time comes to celebrate high achievers next year, just think about what it is we are celebrating.

The writer is a lecturer in English at Government College University, Lahore