KARACHI: Curriculum for national coherence stressed: Education symposium
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, June 28: Speakers on the second day of a symposium on “Understanding Quality Education” on Tuesday held curriculum as the key feature of education frameworks meant for societal development, which needed to be given special attention.
About seven local and foreign educationists spoke at the symposium, which is being organized by the Sindh Education Foundation (SEF). The symposium will conclude on Wednesday.
In his key-note lecture on “Social change through education”, Prof Peter McLaren, a professor of education at the University of California, discussed about the critical pedagogy, multiculturalism and ethnography.
He said that multiculturalism in education was being appreciated by the modern world, but it needed a balanced approach as it was a potential threat to the identity of individuals or society.
Prof McLaren was of the opinion that any open universalism was not a bad thing, but it could prove foolish once it was subjected to any status quo or aimed at class-exploitation.
He said that training programmes for teachers had to use critical pedagogy to enable them to empower students with the forces that influenced the world order. This will help them to challenge those orders which were against their liberty and freedom, he added.
Prof McLaren further pointed out that education could bring about mass social changes only through pedagogical revolution after having perpetual and frequent analysis.
Earlier, Dr Arfa Sayeda Zehra, who has been on the national curriculum review committee, said that the education system should be aimed at building humanity and not just to meet the political interests in a given period.
She said that education was a process to find the meaning of life, while educational curriculum was a tool to understand the meaning of life.
Dr Zehra expressed the view that curriculum should be taken as a force of coherence of a nation and civilization, while any aspect of education could not bee seen isolated from moral values.
She said that curriculum should be saved from turning into a model generating biases, divisions and hatred.
Any curriculum that failed to create movement and make the individuals think can not be considered helping in education, she added and remarked that the state of affairs pertaining to curricula in the country was not very much encouraging as it developed a personality-centred society and was not proving a source to linking the past to present and then to the future.
After critically examining the quality of education in Pakistan, a couple of speakers explored various philosophical dimensions which had existed in diverse civilizations throughout the course of history regarding the meaning of education and the role it should ideally play in a society.
A lawyer and political activist, Syed Raza Kazim, spoke about the shaping and reshaping of society through education.
Dr Mubarak Ali, a noted historian, traced the history of knowledge and education and lamented the state of education in the country.
SEF Managing Director Prof Anita Ghulamali and Dr Usha Nayar of India also spoke during the day.
On the third and concluding day, among other activities, there would be two sessions of panel discussions.
