Activism can improve other things, as it did textbooks
By Anwar Mansuri
ISLAMABAD, Nov 11: School textbooks in Sindh have been cleaned of bias — though not entirely — under the pressure of the country’s civil society and foreign aid donors.
This was observed by Dr Jaffer Ahmad, head of the Pakistan Studies Centre in the Karachi University, at a conference held here on the threats globalization and fundamentalism pose to education.
Books produced by the Sindh Textbook Board on Islamyat, Social Studies and Pakistan Studies for classes 3 to 5 now talk about children’s right to education and dare mention Haider Bakhsh Jatoi, a revolutionary, as a prominent figure of Sindh, he said.
But the willingness of the controllers of education to remove the past distortions in the books appeared to cool for the higher classes, said Dr Ahmad who was involved in the curricula reforms undertaken in the wake of 9/11.
Though the 1857 mutiny “by Muslims” has been changed to read “people’s struggle against the British rule” for the 6th class children, and “Hindustan” — which had been changed into
“South Asia” on the instructions of dictator Gen Zia — has reappeared, he said the textbooks published in 2004 teach 9th class students allegi-ance to the “ideological state of Pakistan” and to “lend support” to the government.
And the new books for 10th class continue to explain the separation of East Pakistan by a “conspiracy theory” to the exclusion of our own faults, he said.
Dr Ahmad recalled that the present government had condemned and shelved the recommendations made by the curricula reforms committee under the pressure of the rightist lobby.
Remnants of the Zia era in the bureaucracy in fact saw to it that old biases were kept in the textbooks for higher classes, he said.
Still the small success achieved by the progressive activists shows that the struggle for reforms should be continued against the challenges thrown by the globalization and the fundamentalist forces, he said.
“Free competition in a free market, the slogan of globalization, has no room for the poor,” said Dr Ahmad.
His colleague in the Karachi University, Dr Riaz Ahmad, observed that “fundamentalists are a by-product of capitalism”.
Even the liberals dupe the poor by their use of progressive terminology. “They (the liberals) never came into clash with capitalism throughout the centuries,” he said.
Dr Neelum Hasan from Lahore said Pakistan’s dictatorial and authoritarian regimes framed the education policy on “the narrow base of ideology”.
Globalization gives the illusion of freedom but was even more authoritarian because it hid its intents, she said, adding that “fundamentalism feeds into globalization”.
Dr Riaz said civil society struggle against authoritarianism can succeed, as did the university teachers against the Model University Ordinance last year, but cannot be sustained over a long period.
“Sustained resistance requires a political movement because sections of society only wage short struggle for a right being snatched away from them, not for snatching rights denied to them,” he said.
His activist colleague, Dr Azra Saeed Talat, however regretted that there existed no movement. Even the civil society reflected the elites, not the poor of the country.
She dismissed the view that globali-zation was rolling back the State as a myth.
“Instead, the State is being strengthened to crush public resistance within hours in the name of keeping peace.
There can be no peace without equality, neither would it be accepted,” she asserted.
“Why can’t we debate the issues that touch the masses in their midst, instead of posh hotels?” she asked, supporting Dr Jaffer’s view that seminars on public issues could be productive if held in the public.
