I wish this guy to be our next PM. Click the link to read whole article
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After he had completed his famous hospital project, Imran Khan thought of reforming Pakistan~{!/~}s education. The idea was to create a network of schools to reach the children that the state was not able to educate. It was a sound idea but was undermined by the contribution of practical advice from his spiritual mentor, Dr Ghulam Murtaza Malik. The project was given up probably because the mosque schools recommended by the pious man had already been tried by the government and found impossible to run. It became quite clear afterwards that Imran Khan knew very little about modern education. The fact that he preferred the advice of a cleric over that of Pakistan~{!/~}s physicist and education expert Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy was enough to prove that.
Imran Khan~{!/~}s verdict: Leader of Insaf Party Imran Khan in Nawa-e-Waqt (31 July 2002) supported the agitating teachers of the state-owned schools in Punjab and said that while the Musharraf government was imposing restrictions on the religious seminaries, it had allowed the English-medium schools in the private sector to run like wild camels without a rein (shutar-e-bemahar). These schools taught courses that made the pupils slaves of the West. He said the county should have one syllabus for all schools. He said privatising the nationalised schools was wrong because this would make education the slave girl of the rich. The same paper reported that PML(N) leader Tehmina Daultana also supported the agitating teachers.
The Punjab government issued a notification on 28 July 2002 saying it was returning the educational institutions nationalised in the decade of the 1970s back to its owners. The government will reach new agreements with the owners under which all the teachers would be allowed to remain in their jobs under new terms. The government will pay the salaries of the teachers during the interim period when the teachers will not have agreed to terms of employment of the owners. Buildings of the returned institutions would not be used for any purpose other than school and college education. The Punjab government~{!/~}s latest step is part of a policy to allow 75 percent share in its education sector which is its most inefficient sector. It has already handed its almost dysfunctional 120 schools to NGOs doing charity work and is ready to hand over 130 more.
Punjab~{!/~}s effort at reform: Under the present notification 22 institutions would be affected where there are 16,000 teachers employed by the state. The province actually needs to employ 30,000 more teachers for its other schools; hence, the threatened teachers of the institutions to be returned to their owners can easily be absorbed within the system. Punjab wants to get out of the mire of state-owned schools where the quality of education is abysmal and where teachers are often absent. The teachers of these institutions have come out and staged violent demonstrations, often helped by the political and religious parties opposed to the government of General Musharraf. Sensing the danger of political exploitation on the eve of elections, the Punjab government has immediately withdrawn the order and things are back to being what they were.
It is sad that the Punjab government~{!/~}s attempt at reinvigorating its dead education sector through privatisation has come to naught. It is equally sad that Imran Khan either ignored the facts or simply acted like a politician looking for dubious popular support. Punjab~{!/~}s education is a mess. In the big city of Lahore the municipality (MCL) also runs its khoti schools which need to be given away. The MCL duplicates the Punjab government~{!/~}s educational efforts with 260 schools of its own. A legacy of the British period, these schools have declined to such an extent that people call them khoti (she-ass) schools where maintenance stopped years ago and virtually no education is imparted to children.
On of the ten schools taken from MCL and already given to an NGO is MCL High School for Girls at Kot Khwaja Saeed near Mughalpura. Inaugurated in 1989 by mayor Mian Shuja-ur-Rehman, the school has been allowed to run down. Its building is dilapidated and its teachers-to-pupil ratio is one to a hundred. The local population which was forced to send its girls to the school had despaired. Today a visit to the school is an eye-opener. It gives an idea of how the MCL has failed to look after its schools. Approach to the school is so bad that even grown-ups find it difficult to visit. Its old building is crumbling while an extension added to it later has been ruined by a building contractor who ran away from the job.
Imran Khan and English-medium schools: Imran Khan~{!/~}s other angry objection about the English-medium schools in the private sector springs of his ignorance about education and lack of awareness of what harm the state sector has done to this important social institution. His insistence that there be uniform syllabus for all repeats the mistake most politicians looking for cheap votes make. Well known Pakistani historian Professor K.K. Aziz in his book The Murder of History, based on 66 official textbooks from all parts of the country, discovered ~{!.~}a hair-raising array of logical fallacies, biased statements, irrational distortions, misleading affirmations, hypocritical and self-righteous pronouncements, leaps of imagination and plain inaccuracies~{!/~}. The idea was to indoctrinate the nation and create a special mind suitable to those who controlled the state in the name of nationalism.
State indoctrination is at the cost of development of intellect. If the British raj tried to indoctrinate Allama Iqbal and the Quaid it did not succeed because there was a countervailing nationalism of resistance against it. Today our children are helpless in the face of the state~{!/~}s function of brainwash. According to one estimate the area of independent growth of intellect allowed in the state-owned schools is around 10 percent of the brain, as opposed to 40 percent in the case of India. The private sector schools are functioning within the parameters of Pakistani nationalism but the slavery of the mind there is less. A uniform syllabus based on textbooks made by the state would completely destroy Pakistan~{!/~}s chances of survival as a thinking nation. Needless to say, without the private sector Pakistan cannot cope with the job of educating Pakistan. Our state indoctrination through the textbooks mostly pertains to India.
Producing unthinking but loyal citizens: In his book Prejudice and Pride: School histories of the freedom struggle in India and Pakistan Krishna Kumar says that a human child is ~{!.~}socialised~{!/~} by his parents through a certain process of conditioning to elicit from him a bahaviour of obedience. Similarly a state too undertakes conditioning to produce obedient citizens. It uses history to create a uniform mind (national identity) and puts a carefully cultured version of it in the school textbooks. India and Pakistan have ~{!.~}defined~{!/~} each other forever in the textbooks their citizens read and not all citizens are in the business of reading history on their own and finding out where it was distorted. What results is the tendency on the part of Indians and Pakistanis to forestall knowledge by implying that they already know each other.
Krishna Kumar writes: **~{!.~}Both countries live with the assumption that they know each other. The ~{!0~}other~{!1~} after all is a former aspect of the ~{!0~}self~{!1~}. There is no room for the curiosity that foreignness normally awakens. Physical vicinity compounds this feeling. If India and Pakistan were geographically apart, there might have been a chance for the kind of anxiety that lack of news about a hostile relative residing far away causes. India and Pakistan are politically so far apart and culturally and geographically so close that there is no room for an epistemic space between them.~{!/~} **
Assault on the child~{!/~}s mind: In Pakistan and India, the space appropriated in the child~{!/~}s mind for purposes of nation-building is so excessive that it impedes intellectual development – that other job that education performs. If the state is ideological it indoctrinates as a tenet of national life and almost totally monopolises the intellectual space. In this respect, the Indian child may have a better chance of developing intellectually although this chance may be curtailed in the Hindi medium. In respect of Pakistan, access to English may actually perform the task of scuttling the ship of the ideological state. In India, the author notes a steady erosion of secular institutions in the 1990s when the state education came under pressure to accommodate the ideology of religious revivalism.
Spot on!
**What any ideological state usually lacks is the intellectual. That is because the state spreads its ideology through indoctrination which in turn leans on the syllabi and textbooks. But the development of intellect is a ~{!.~}dissenting~{!/~} activity. There may be some satisfaction in making everyone in Pakistan think alike, but the price for this unity is paid through intellect. Pakistan has not benefited from its indoctrination of the past years. Disunity has followed a coercive methodology. Using education to achieve cohesion is neither honest nor effective. The British did not succeed in it although their indoctrination was trivial compared to the kind of crude brainwash we have stuffed into our education. The only way Pakistan can progress is through freedom of expression and through an environment friendly to the growth of intellect. **