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Who
will educate the educators?
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The current emphasis on promoting
literacy is indeed welcome and, sadly, long overdue. We
have to realise that any data on literacy levels in the
country are meaningless and most likely cooked up. Pakistan
is arguably among the most illiterate countries in the world.
My purpose here is not to go number crunching but to take
issue in the meaning of literacy and the purpose of education
as understood by the rulers of the day.
Whatever little “education” that was available
to us was comprehensively destroyed by the mullahs under
the patronage of Ziaul Haq. The Mullah Business Ltd (for
that is what mullahdom is: a business that sells a thoroughly
expired version of Islam), hijacked education by taking
control of the curricula and textbooks with the full support
of the Zia regime. This brought immense power in the hands
of the mullahs for it gave them control over the minds of
our children and thus our country. Today, two generations
later, we have wasted our youth in the ocean of lost minds,
if not lost souls.
Just like Pakistan was reinvented by the mullahs after the
death of Quaid-e-Azam, education too was “reinvented”
in the image of the mullah’s world view during Zia’s
terrible decade. If you want to see the banality and utterly
concocted practice of education, just pick up the textbooks
of class one to twelve and reflect in horror at how brutally
the minds of our children have been assaulted for over three
decades now.
Here in summary is what our children are taught. All education
must lead to a (forced) suspension of disbelief, no matter
how absurd the idea our children must believe in it; only
Muslims (as defined by the mullah) have the right to exist;
history begins with Mohammed Bin Qasim’ s invasion
of Sindh; the great Harappan civilisation is a myth; all
the philosophical and scientific achievements of the Muslims
up until the defeat in Spain are caricatured beyond recognition;
there is no mention of the real contributions of Ibn-Rushd,
Ibn-Arabi (reinterpreting Greek thought), Ibn-Khaldun (on
history), Ibn-e-Sina, Al-Khawarazam, Al-Jabiri (mathematics
and science), and so on; the great debates on the interpretation
of the Quran and the adaptability of Islam to changing societies
are totally ignored; the immense accomplishments of the
Western civilisation, in every field of human endeavour
that have left the Muslims centuries behind, are un-Islamic;
all sciences are irrelevant for the true progress of education
is to blindly follow the mullah down a nowhere spiral of
ignorance, bigotry, and hate; Jihad means killing innocent
people, mostly fellow Muslims; and while lip service can
be paid (grudgingly) to women being equal to men, the reality
is that women are inferior to men.
I may have exaggerated for effect, but the textbook reality
is not far behind. Therefore, given the foundation of the
present textbook structure, promoting literacy has nothing
to do with educating people.
It is of little help to site the examples of elite schools
imparting a western education to the privileged few. If
they could help it, all the students graduating from these
schools and colleges would leave Pakistan (and the best
among them do so) perhaps never to return. Education can
only become the foundation of social and economic development
if it is universally available and is in tune with the demands
of the times. While the bricks and mortar of a school system
are essential for education, they are certainly not sufficient.
The bogus minds of mullahdom will only create bogus students.
Our present system of education is worse than what we inherited
from the British. It is indeed shameful that, just to take
one example, the Urdu textbooks (Maulvi Abdul IIaq et al)
taught under the British are today far superior than any
mullah created mumbo jumbo we have today. And the “0”
or “A” level textbooks are far more relevant
to the process of education today than what we have stuffed
into the minds of our children for over three decades.
Education in Pakistan has been debased and corrupted to
an extent that even with a comprehensive overhaul today
it will take us at least a decade to bring the country face
to face with the education requirements of the 21st century.
Without a bold and intellectually revolutionary leadership
at the top, just playing around with the “literacy
game” will be worthless. As in the digital world of
today so also in the minds of our children: garbage in garbage
out.
The critical task here is to take the mullah out of the
textbooks and bring a modern, pluralistic and reformative
interpretation of Islam to the front. The mullah of today
is nothing but a “spiritual terrorist”. He has
imprisoned the minds and souls of our youth in his retrogressive
and anti-human school of Islam. As long as the mullah has
the monopoly of interpreting Islam for us, Pakistan can
make no progress. However this requires a separate article
dealing with “Education and Islam”.
Any blind programme of promoting literacy will not achieve
the requirements of education today. We live in a world
where societies at our level of development have redefined
the concept of literacy to meet the economic and social
challenges of a “virtual” one market in the
world. Literacy means digital literacy from the first class
onward. The computer is today’s blackboard; the keyboard,
the pen. Unless the current emphasis of literacy is placed
within the world of today, we will continue to fool ourselves
that the antiquated notion of literacy has anything to do
with education.
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