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PROBLEMS OF EDUCATION IN PAKISTANIntroduction1 here was a time, when India sub-continent was noted all over the world as a gloriouscentre of education and culture where students from all parts of the globe used to pour inthe educational and cultures Nalanda, Tax.la and Prayag attracted students from the places, as far as Egypt, Greece, China, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. It was 'an ideal system of education, which apart from disseminating sweetness and light, infused into the minds of the pupils a spiritual urge for coming in contact which the kingdom of the Absolute. Butnow when we look at the present state of affairs in our country, the change shocks usdeeply and we cry out in the language of Wordsworth."Whiter is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream "400 f°r Prospective HeadmastersIt is asserted with great regret by persons of almost every shade of opinion that our educational system has not undergone any change with the change brought about by political independence. It bears no imprint of freedom and appears to be as listless andacademic as it used to be during the days of slavery. Our universities still remainanchored to the pattern that had been introduced a century ago by our British rulers toserve their administrative needs. The imperfection of that pattern are now keenly felt andthere is a universal cry for introducing a radical change in the educational system - achange that will touch not merely the methods and curricular but the very objective andideology of education, in accordance with the needs of the new social, economical and political set-up in the country. Passive and Mechanical SystemThe crowing defect of our existing educational system that requires the immediate * andearnest consideration of all those who are interested in the welfare of the country, is itsexcessively passive and mechanical character. The students play no active role in theattainment of knowledge. His entire education is passive and mechanical. Things areloaded or his mind which he cannot digest, which he only crams and therefore they never  become his own. They remain floating on his mental surface a mere matter of idleinquires; they never sink deep to become entwined in the mental texture, to help toconstitute a distinct intellectual and spiritual personality. Our educational system in thewords of Dr. Annie, is just 'cramming the boy's head with a lot of disjointed facts pouredinto the head as into a basket, to be emptied out again in the examination room, and theempty basket carried out again into the world."This is the reason why a student who succeeds so well in his college examination fails somiserably in the examination of life. The best product of our examination system is anowlish looking, boy, a veritable bookworm who knows nothing of the world beyond theworld books. He is physically poor, intellectually blank and morally insolvent. He has no proper grasps and assimilation, no views and visions of his own. He is determined to noacts, has no desire to form convictions, arrives at no conclusions and his will seems to besuspended, asleep, diseased or dead. He simply covers the window of his mind with the
 
 pages of books and the plaster of book phrases sticks into his mental skin, making itineffective to all direct touches of truth. The present system of our education, therefore,makes of the students dumb-driven cattle rather than enlightened citizens, bookwormsrather than creative thinkers, machines rather than ideal men. Our students, "act ,as performing animals and animated dolls. Their souls are regimented and their faces arewithout feature."Theoretical Nature of the SystemThe existing system of our education is predominantly academic and theoretical. It istheoretical as a rule and practical by chance. As Maulana Azad observed, "There is noadjustment between the system of our education and the needs of our life. The student istaught lesson from books but not lessons from life. In other words, he is providedwith^knowledge, but not with wisdom. He is obliged to know the history of Greece of 2,000 years ago, but he knows more about the English Country councils, than about ownmunicipality of his own town. He is so busy in leaning about "great and distant thingsthat he has little interest in life's little thing around him, he ,mmits to memory thecharacter - sketch of Hamlet some other imaginary person described in his book, but hecannot read the character of his own friend or relative. He can recite the poems of Shelleyor the Gazals of Ghalib, but he does not know in what ways he can server his communityor nation. Want of Moral and Cultural Education Now, we come to the question of moral and cultural development of our students. Whatdo our universities do for their character building? Do they strive to make them honest,upright the truthful? Or, does their function finish only with imparting to them bits of information? We have to admit sadly that today their function does finish with impartingthem bits of stimulating their imagination and feeding to their emotional life. They do notinculcate in them a love of virtue and righteousness, a sense of selfrespect and personaldignity. In the past, a student was taught to be God-fearing, to love and practice the rulesof religion, to obey his parents and respect his teachers. But today the false glamour of western civilization has led our students astray and they have forgotten the noble idealsand traditions of their past culture.Our schools and colleges still run on those antinational lines that were laid down byMacualay more than a century ago with a view to perpetuating the hold of British ruleand the domination of western culture. Their courses of study and text books do not breath the air of freedom hardly feel of being the citizens of Pakistan, endowed with arich cultural heritage. In the name of secular education our schools and colleges have become so colourless and un-Pakistani that their students do not feel any sense of  patriotism. The students of today are governed and guided wholly by worldly values.They have no passion for the worship of the true, the good and the beautiful. They haveno love of learning for its own sake and even no sense of respect for the teacher.The old pious bond of reverence and gratitude between the teacher and the taught has been supplemented by unnatural, economic and official relationship. The teacher isnothing more than a paid servant or the college or the university. The personal spiritualrelationship between the teacher and the taught has disappeared and consequently acts of 
 
in discipline and hooliganism have become deeds of daily occurrence with our studentcommunity. The problem of growing indiscipline among the students is something whichreflects seriously on our educational institutions and which proves that they have beentotally incapable of producing youths of sound moral calibre, character and culture. Wantof Physical TrainingOur students are poor not only intellectual but physically too. Their unsound minds livein unsound bodies. Hordes of pale, spectre-thin youths meet the eyes at the portals of colleges and universities. This is so because there is hardly any provision in our collegesand universities for systematic physical training, games and sports and such other extra-curricular activities. The want of physical training leads the students to lose in other waysalso. They do not learn the dignity of labour. They begin to shun labour of every kind, physical or intellectual. They become idle, ease loving and extravagant. Jinnah deeplymourned this neglect of physical work in our system of education. He advised theeducationists of the country to see that Pakistan's system of education is so modified thatthe tremendous manpower of the nation is fully exploited for the progress and prosperityof the people. The handful of Japanese is reported to have said that they can "live by thetips of their fingers". Therein lies a great lesson for the students of Pakistan. TheExpensiveness of the Prevailing SystemConsidering the general standard of living in the country, it is definite that our system of education is highly expensive. Even for the upper middle class people higher education inour country has become a white elephant. The education of a student at the collegiatelevel costs the community approximately one thousand rupees a year. This does not,however, take into amount the cost of maintenance which is likely to amount to another six hundred rupees a year. University education is thus drawing heavily upon thenational resources of an impoverished community. A Pastime LuxuryIn a way, our education has been a sort of pastime luxury, a form of amusement like manyother modern thing of entertainment such as science has invented for us. Students go to'schools and colleges more for the sake of amusement than instruction. Our classroomshave an appearance almost of a cinema hall, well furnished with chairs and electric fansand the blackboard which can be compared to a screen on the background of which theteacher stands more or less like an actor trying to please his audience by his saucyremarks, pleasant stories and a copious display of antics. He is on the stage and has to play his allotted part very wisely and wittily. Such actors appear before the huge audienceof the students one after another and if any actor fails even a little in this dramatic performance, the audience get out of control and raises strange catcalls of all kinds torectify the part of the actor, just as it happens in a theatre house. They have no love of wisdom, no thirst of knowledge, but only a desire to get * certificates and diplomaswhich may serve them as passport to white collars services. Want of Vocational trainingThe commonest criticism against our educational system, which is not, however, without justification, is that it does not fit us for earning our bread. Our colleges and universitiesare like factories that produce graduates in quick succession just as machines issues forthPins and needles one after another on a mass scale. Every year thousands of graduates are
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Little Swallow

Please refer the author, i have to work on this issue.......

reply02 / 28 / 2012
Narjis Ann

who is the auther? I wish to cite this in my reseach paper

reply05 / 13 / 2011
123010203

what is d name of author?

reply01 / 11 / 2010
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