Scour any newspaper first thing in the morning or watch a TV show. Surely, what you read and hear wouldn’t boost your spirits. The early morning freshness on the face might even vanish and gets replaced by anxiety about the future. For, most probably, you would get to know about another instalment of the blame game that goes on between the loyalists of one political party against their opponents. It includes both print and electronic media. Besides ridiculing one another with mimicking gestures, they even turn physical at times to settle the score. These episodes of allegations and counter-allegations have now begun to sicken the public minds.
Similarly, the bouts of mudslinging hurled by the members against one another in the parliament before the budget session had nothing to do with the public welfare. Politicians may term the cacophony thus caused as “beauty and charm” of the democratic system but this beauty failed to impress those in dire need of jobs to support themselves and their families.
People are only interested in knowing what is being done for their well-being. So far, there’s precious little to show for the government’s performance in the welfare sectors. Two most important sectors – education and public health – neither get the government attention they deserve nor the requisite finances to run and maintain them efficiently. Even the curriculum of what to teach the new generation in schools and colleges is not clearly defined.
A stark inequality exists in what is taught in government schools and the upper-class private schools with English as the medium of instruction. Ultimately, it creates two classes in society. One class graduates from Urdu medium schools and the other from English medium schools. These are generally called English Medium and Urdu Medium types. Sadly, this class discrimination would continue to crop up later in life when they seek jobs.
While the Arabs are interested in learning English, we want our students to learn Arabic to succeed in life
Since English is considered as a language of opportunity, why not introduce it as a compulsory subject in all government schools right from the primary classes? Quite the contrary, the Senate approved a bill last February that mandated the teaching of Arabic in primary and secondary schools in Islamabad. The senator who introduced the bill in the upper house argued that by learning Arabic, the students would later land good jobs in the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia and earn precious foreign exchange for the country. How farsighted or farfetched is the senator’s logic is your pick! But the comical part is that the Arabs are interested in learning English and we want our students to learn Arabic to succeed in life.
Interestingly, my daughter, after doing her Masters in TESOL (Teaching English to Students of Foreign Languages) teaches IELTS in Australia. Her students belong to various nationalities. However, she claims that Pakistani students are slow performers when compared to students of other nationalities. Even though many Pakistani students in her class hold not just one but two Master’s degrees from public universities, their performance remains the same. So much for the standard of education in our universities.
While the politicians of various hues play their politics, the people worry about their uncertain future. Psychologists agree that a constant state of uncertainty adversely affects the mental and physical faculties of individuals. This state of mind makes people tetchy and frustrated. Perhaps for this reason they have turned intolerant and tend to lose their cool over small matters. As a tennis player, I notice how some of the players on the tennis court behave rowdily over disputed line calls. Why have the normal courtesy and civility in life disappeared even among the educated ones?
It’s disconcerting to note that reportedly 64 per cent of the population is below 30 years of age and innumerable among them are still without jobs. The pathetic situation is bound to turn the suffering class angry and disappointed. Enlarge the trend of frustration and anger to a larger scale and you see its impact on the society at large. Don’t we often read about shootouts between litigants outside the courts where they had gone to seek justice? When the cases in the courts run for years, people lose their patience and take the law into their own hands out of sheer frustration.
It’s immaterial which political party one voted for, but one would definitely like to see the party in power to provide good governance and produce results. During such hot days when it feels as if the doors of a furnace had suddenly opened, people suffer from long hours of load-shedding. Even the gas supply has become scarce in summers. Understandably, the traffic on roads indicates how the government is being run. Our traffic scene is chaotic at best. For instance, driving through Kahna on main Ferozepur Road is a nightmare. Encroachers and vendors have a heyday while the policemen stand and watch or play with their cell phones. Were a foreigner from a developed country given a tour of our land and asked his impression after a month, how would he comment? “You guys certainly deserve better,” could be his likely answer.
The writer is a Lahore-based columnist and can be reached at [email protected]