EDITORIAL: On November 2, 2020, Prime Minister Imran Khan chaired a meeting on the government’s effort to introduce a uniform education system. He said such a system would end the class-based system as all children would get equal opportunities to excel. While on the face of it this seems like a laudable goal, there are a number of questions left unanswered. First and foremost, despite the federal and provincial governments being seemingly together in this endeavour, the gap between the private schools and state schools and madrassas appears huge. This relates not only to the fee structure, which likely leaves out the poor and even a majority of the lower middle and middle classes from accessing the better standard education private schools offer and in fact consolidates inequality, it is not clear whether all the provinces are fully on board. Since education is a provincial subject (apart from the federal capital), the provinces would have to pass legislation to give legal cover to the changes envisaged. The state education sector has been the victim of neglect for many many decades, both in funding and the quality of teachers, and therefore instruction, available there. The madrassas have still to fully prove that they can make a departure from the narrow religious instruction they traditionally impart to move their charges into the 21st century. While some madrassas have embraced general education in recent years, this is certainly not universally the case. The religious clerics who man the platform of madrassa organisations have resisted reform for as long as memory serves. The government intends to introduce the uniform curriculum for primary education in April 2021, middle (grades 6-8) by 2022 and high (grades 9-12) by 2023. The curriculum itself has not been made available publicly to allow experts in the field to examine it critically. One of the issues bedeviling education has been religious instruction, which has failed to make allowance for children of religious minorities. Now the scheme intends such students to be taught separately about their respective religions. Last but by no means least or even an exhaustive inventory of problems, teacher training and quality remains a big hole in the state sector and madrassas, and even the much vaunted private sector may need help in this regard. This is especially critical since Federal Education Minister Shafqat Mehmood briefed the meeting on the values to be imparted to children under the new educational dispensation. These include character building, self-defence and awareness about environmental issues, honesty, truthfulness, tolerance, mutual harmony and democracy. Quite a tall ask from the level of quality available in our current pool of teachers.

What is inexplicable about this whole exercise is the need to reinvent the wheel while worldwide experience can be drawn upon. This experience has by now demonstrated in practice that education till at least the primary level should be imparted using the mother tongue as the medium of instruction. The difference in cognitive advance as a result is undeniable. Children at that stage have little problem learning more than one language. Urdu, the national language and lingua franca, and English can be taught at primary level as subjects so that as children proceed up the education ladder, they do not face difficulty in gaining higher education and becoming citizens of a connected world. Pakistan’s diversity suggests that uniformity should not be made a fetish. The content of the curriculum could, after thorough debate and discussion by all stakeholders, be agreed through consensus. But depriving children of the use of their mother tongue at least until primary level disadvantages them in terms of cognitive advance. It also has the undesirable effect of distancing and alienating children from their linguistic and cultural legacy, not to mention the identity that flows from these. Our failure to recognise the multi-national character of Pakistan has led to tragedy in East Pakistan (amongst other factors) and caused a sense of deprivation in the smaller provinces of today’s Pakistan. Even the majority province of Punjab needs help to recover its virtually lost Punjabi identity. The fear is that the government’s real, unstated desire is to pour all children into an ideological straitjacket that force-multiplies the current culture of unquestioning rote learning. A linguistically and culturally diverse education system not only draws on the advantages of initial instruction in the mother tongue, it could in freedom impel a voluntary national identity despite ethnic differences, thereby achieving the cherished goal of national integration in a democratic, not top-down forced manner

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020