For the umpteenth time in 50 years we have a hopeless “new national education policy” on the anvil. It is the product of closed door sessions chaired by bureaucrats and politicians with no hands-on experience or intellectual understanding of modern educational concepts and philosophies. There is no review of the strengths and failings of the education system inherited from colonialism; nor, therefore, is there any conceptual attempt to define the critical junctures where we need to break with the past and link up with the future. The worst of the deformities of the draft is the usual, misplaced ideological attempt to graft a narrow “Islamic” dimension on to the concept of modern, universal education.
Everyone knows that mass education is a sine quo non of economic development. But few “educationists” — and certainly not those who drafted this policy — understand that If economic development is to be vigourous and sustainable, it must be “national”, “autonomous” and “democratic” in character. It must not limit itself to technical economic policies or structural reforms but also involve the educational passage of civil society from a colonial mentality to a sovereign, critical one. Such a new “mentality” is required to help colonised people to emerge out of the historical experience of irrationality by increasing their ability to perceive the challenges of their time and preparing them to resist the emotional trauma of societal transition. What we therefore need is not an education policy which focuses only on the technical requirements of economic development but one which simultaneously seeks to channel and harmonise the social processes unleashed in the post-colonial experience.
The experience of peoples “awareness” in post-colonial societies is exceptional. The poorer a country, the greater is the likelihood that the elites constructed and bequeathed by colonialism will treat the lower classes as vulgar and innately inferior. But when the poor and lower-middle classes discover that their elites regard them with contempt, their response is one of overt aggressiveness. This threat to the legitimacy of the power of the elite frightens it and compels it, through force or paternalism, to silence and domesticate the masses and impede the process of popular democracy. These circumstances, in turn, exacerbate the prevailing climate of irrationality and stimulate sectarian, ethnic and religious violence. The more, therefore, that our society moves towards such irrational positions, the more urgently we need to create an educational process which encourages critical attitudes, which reforms our pedagogical and democratic institutions in order to affect a total approach to social and political responsibility and decision-making. For this a new system of education is required, one which focuses on the development of our intellectual powers and brings about a frame of mind which can bear the burden of skepticism and which does not panic when many of our prevailing thought habits are challenged by new and dynamic ones.
This philosophy of rationality has predictably been lost on our educationists. All three “educational epoches” in Pakistan — Gen Ayub Khan’s ‘professionalisation’, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s ‘nationalisation’ and Zia ul Haq ‘ideologisation’ — have failed to deliver. Now the Muslim League has now decided to go one step backward: enlightenment and rationality are to be sacrificed at the alter of obscurantism and intolerance by advocating a revival of General Zia’s mosque-school and the ‘Nai Roshni’ scheme.
There are fundamental flaws in this quick-ejaculation education charade: it fails to analyse the failure of such policies in the past; It fails to discuss the sort of ‘homo Pakistanicus’ we need to evolve. And it strikes down the principle of pedagogical rationality discussed above.
Take a look at what Islamabad is serving up to financial donors. There will be Quran-teaching (Naazira) from class one to class eight which will serve to stuff the primary schools with the clergy whose sectarian politics has already the frightened the citizenry to death. The government plans to set up 80,000 new primary schools by 2002. It will send 25 percent of the children to the old schools for evening classes while 25 percent will go to the mosque schools which are planned to be set up. That means that half the child population of school-going age will be diverted to mosques and evening classes. That also means that 50 percent of the policy will not bear fruit because it will have once again swallowed General Zia’s fraud without examining its failures. Mosque school tend to exclude all the minorities, most girl-children and most Shia students because Shia mosques are few and far between. The programme failed earlier because people were not willing to hand over their children to the mullahs. The mullahs did not allow the children to sit inside the mosque for reasons of cleanliness. The Deobandi domination of the mosque kept non-Deobandi children away. And there was one mullah to three classes, making instruction impossible. When the programme collapsed in 1987, there were 30,000 mullahs protesting in the streets asking General Zia for their salaries even as billions of rupees had already gone down the drain by then. As political gibberish kowtowing to the clergy, the new education policy draft is yet another master-stroke by an ignorant and uneducated Muslim League government. Its abhorrent features must be resisted at all cost.