IN tandem with Islamabad, the Sindh government has announced

that the students who were scheduled to sit for their Grades IX to
XII Board examinations this summer will be promoted to the next
class without being tested.

In the absence of an alternative, this can be deemed to have been a sensible

step. Moreover, the fact is that the exams we have been holding for the last
several decades are no less than an ‘immaculate deception’. They are rife with
corruption, and candidates resort to unfair means while massive sums change
hands to manipulate results.

As a consequence, the real learning outcome of the students is appalling.

Education in Pakistan is exam-oriented and these exams are a farce, leaving
no incentive for the students to study. For them, it is a paper chase for the
certificate/degree.

Now is also the time for the government to come clean on its failure to educate
the children of this country as it is required to do under Article 25-A of the
Constitution. The pandemic lockdown and the disruption it has caused are a
blessing in disguise. The government should now rise to the occasion to bring
about radical changes in our education system.

The sermonising in our textbooks should stop.

It is important to make it responsive to the indigenous needs of our people. A
system that promotes inequity, oppression, exploitation and is tailored to
meet the demands of the corporate sector that now controls our neoliberal
economy needs to be discarded right away. It needs to be made more relevant
to our conditions and should be child-centred.

From press reports, it appears that with the exception of upscale institutions,
where children have access to digital technology, the schools for the children
of the masses will remain closed indefinitely though teachers are expected to
be present.

Just before the lockdown, the government was working on a new curriculum.
Now is the time for our rulers to do some rethinking. Many sacred cows of our
education system need to be demolished and some simple goals set without
having to adopt elaborate procedures.

We should, for starters, not be afraid of confessing honestly that our

proclaimed educational goals, namely to instil religious values, patriotism and
reverence for ideology, have remained beyond our reach even after 72 years of
narrow goals. In the process, much damage has been done.

The more the authorities have persisted in emphasising religion in education,

the more society has moved away from morality, ethics and integrity. The
greater the effort to Islamicise and ideologise the curricula, the more have
selfishness, corruption and untruth been enhanced in all spheres of our
national life. This sorry state of affairs testifies to our pedagogical failure to
reform society through religion in education.

In the process, we have also failed to produce students who can think critically
and possess problem-solving capability. Some, but not the majority, acquire
professional skills but still need further training to learn how to apply them.
Most of them cannot even communicate coherently — neither verbally nor in
writing — in any language.

That is because they are the products of a system in which rote learning is
inbuilt. Worst of all, we cannot even inculcate civility, integrity, ethical values
or civic sense in the young who pass through our education system.

I do not blame them. They are what they are because our education has made
them so. I attribute this to the duplicity and confusion we create in the child’s
mind at the formative stage. The student picks up a textbook to read and gets a
heavy dose of sermonising. He looks around and finds that society behaves
quite contrarily. The message? Be smart and do the forbidden so long as you
can get away with it.

The sermonising in our textbooks should stop. Let the child follow her natural
potential. Just be kind to her and she will learn kindness. Allow her to explore
her natural skills and she will develop happily and enjoy it. She will imbibe the
goodness you create in the classroom.

Remember, she must also be facilitated to develop her communication skills —

obviously in a language that she doesn’t have to struggle with. Thus her
cognition will grow and in a few years she would be so highly motivated that
nothing would stop her from going after what her aptitude is suited to.
Hopefully, she will then be ready to explore the formal curricular scheme if
she is allowed a measure of freedom.

From newspaper reports, it emerges that schools may not open for some time
but teachers are expected to attend. This is an opportunity to provide the
teachers some in-service training. This is what should be the focus of the
authorities. They should drop their rigidity and work out a simple plan to
transform pedagogy, which can be transmitted to the teachers online through
the school managements.

www.zubeidamustafa.com

Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2020