A recent report by Dawn’s Azizullah Sharif told us that at least twenty thousand fresh matriculates will be entirely unable to secure admission in any first year class in any of Karachi’s 123 government colleges. This is because the number of admissions being offered in all the colleges combined stands at just over eighty thousand – including all the offered faculties of pre-engineering, pre-medical, computer science, commerce, arts (humanities) and home economics – while the number of young people qualified to seek admissions is estimated to stand at beyond a hundred thousand.

That short report will probably be the last we hear about the tragedy that is shortly to take place in the lives of twenty thousand hardworking and educated teenagers whose parents paid for at least ten years of education. And while most of these youngsters are not star students (they are likely to hold degrees with C-grades and under) they nevertheless passed their examinations and had every right to expect admission into a state-run educational institution – perhaps not in their preferred discipline but at least in some discipline. Yet the fact remains that there are more matriculates than first-year seats in Karachi and that is just too bad for the students who for whatever reason – the almost perpetual power shortages, for example – were not able to secure A-1, A or high B grades. A sad story indeed. Yet what is sadder, in my view, is the fact that education in the true sense of the word is denied to even those few lucky ones who manage to get themselves into colleges and graduate with degrees. They have training, sure. They’re more qualified than many million others and have some opportunity to earn a living. But education? The honing of the mind, the nurturing of the ability to think and to challenge, to dream and invent? These vital areas are not part of the ‘education’ system in Pakistan, which is really defined as vocational training.

One of the best statements I’ve ever heard on this matter was not delivered by an academic, researcher or so-called intellectual but by Stephen Fry, the British writer, actor and comic who spread sunlight and joy with his performance as Jeeves in the BBC’s adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s most famous creation.

In the late 80s, Fry worked on a BBC radio show called ‘Loose Ends’ for which he created a fictional character called Professor Trefusis. “I liked Trefusis,” wrote Fry in the introduction to a book presenting some of his radio work in printed form. “His advanced years and further advanced eccentricity allowed me to get away with spiked comments and straight rudery that would have been unthinkable if uttered in the normal voice of an aspiring comic in his twenties.”

So Fry, in his guise of Professor Trefusis, delivered ‘wireless essays’ over the radio. Here is what he had to say on the matter of education and its falling standards in Britain:

“We are to regard education as a service industry, like a laundry, teachers the washers, children the dirty linen. The customer is always right. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And what in the name of boiling hell do parents know about education? How many educated people are there in the world? I could name seventeen or eighteen.

“Because of course education is not the issue. […] This new England we’ve invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders. And freedom is no part of the programme of today’s legislators. Freedom to buy shares, medical treatment or council houses, certainly, freedom to buy anything you please. But freedom to think, to challenge, to change? Heavens no.

“[…] ‘Teach Victorian values, teach the values of decency and valour and patriotism and religion,’ is the cry. Those are the very values that led to this foul century of war, oppression, cruelty, tyranny, slaughter and hypocrisy. It was the permissive society that it is so horribly fashionable to denounce that forced America to back out of the Vietnam War, it is this new hideously impermissive society that is threatening to engulf us in another. I choose the word ‘engulf’ with great care. Look at those Islamic cultures in the Gulf for moral certainty, for laws against sexual openness, for capital punishment and flogging, for a firm belief in God, for patriotism and a strong belief in the family. What a model for us all. Heaven help us, when will we realise that we know nothing, nothing. We are ignorant, savagely, hopelessly ignorant – what we think we know is palpable nonsense. How can we dare to presume to teach our children the very same half-baked, bigoted trash that litters our own imperfect minds? At least give them a chance, a faint, feeble, glimmering chance of being better than us. Is that so very much to ask? Apparently it is.

“Well, I’m old and smelly and peculiar and I’ve no doubt everything I’ve said is nonsense. Let’s burn all those novels with naughty ideas and naughty words in them, let’s teach children that Churchill won the Second World War, that the Empire was a good thing […]. Let’s run down the arts departments of universities, let’s string criminals up, let’s do it all now, for the sooner we all go up in a ball of flame, the better.”

That little rant, as I think you’ll agree, may be used in its entirety to refer to Pakistan. The lack of education in this sense – the lack of freedom to think, to challenge, to change and to question the trash that litters the mind of generation after generation – is one identifiable source to which most of the country’s travails can be traced. As usual, the establishment got it wrong. It’s not about politicians needing a degree to sit in parliament, but about how creative and gutsy they can be in getting the country out of the traps in which it keeps finding itself – and despite the seemingly disparate nature of the manifestations, these traps remain essentially the same decade after decade: bad planning, short-sightedness, poor judgement and the tendency to seek quick fixes.

Postscript: That said, azaadi mubarak!

— hmumtaz@dawn.com