April 28, 2005

The education system in Pakistan has failed to deliver the goods as required. An NGO refuses to reconcile with this downslide and is working to arrest and reverse the situation, writes Adil Ahmed

The school system has been under a fair bit of focus for its inability to deliver the goods in the desired fashion. The end product has laid bare the inadequacy of both the curriculum and its delivery system. The zest and zeal of the educators has diminished alarmingly and has increasingly become market driven with schools operating more as profit centres than seats of learning.

All this does not bode well for Pakistan’s search for an enlightened society that will provide it with competitive advantage in the global village.

One institution that refuses to reconcile with this downslide in education, and has energetically put in place a mechanism to arrest and reverse the slide is the Human Rights Education Programme (HREP).

Established in 1995 when Karachi was going through a particularly bad patch, HREP has flourished and grown into an outreach programme covering over 700 schools and 350,000 students. It also works with over 100 NGOs that take the HREP into their own project schools.

“All the people associated with HREP were actively engaged with schools and education,” says Zulfiqar Ali, the NGO’s director. “What was being taught in classrooms had no relevance with what was happening in the society. These students belonged to neighbourhoods where streets were on fire and people were getting killed. They were directly affected by the violence.

“In schools, however, they were taught that there was no problem, and we were all Muslim brothers and sisters who had always lived in harmony, and would always forever live in harmony. We realized that the education system was not providing students with analytical and conceptual skills, nor the clarity of mind through which they could become good citizens.”

It started as a research based non-profit organization geared to seeking ways and means to inject some kind of social relevance into the education system. “The curriculum, it’s textbooks, the teachers using that curriculum to teach, it’s examination system, everything was out of synch,” says Ali with exasperation. “As teachers and educationists the best thing we can do is help children understand the world they live in. If we are not doing that, then there is no use teaching them maths, physics and chemistry.”

To make the education system socially relevant and develop a tradition of social activism amongst children, HREP follows a three-pronged strategy. It engages children directly and through schools to train a new generation in social activism; it invests in educational research and development as a central focus of the work; and it creates institutions and traditions for long term impact.

The Children’s Museum for Peace and Human Rights is an institution Ali and his team are quite fired up about, and hope to see it materialize soon as a rallying ground for future efforts. The NGO is governed by an eight member executive committee, a small staff, and support from a team of committed volunteers.

As part of its activism and outreach programme HREP runs the Right-On Network established in August 1997, with funding from Save the Children (UK-based NGO) to provide children with more regular opportunities for involvement outside the classroom. Aware and Aagah are the English and Urdu newsletters of this network with an editorial team comprising children who collect, commission, edit, and write all the articles.

The organization runs thematic campaigns to engage children and teachers in structured activities around a theme throughout the year. Tolerance, peace, participation, conflict resolution and diversity are some of the themes that have been undertaken. For the current year, the theme is A better world is possible. “We have provided the children with four ingredients — optimism and hope; participation and action; diversity; wars and weapons — and have asked them to add on to these.”

The NGO organized the Human Rights Conference and for the current year the issues under focus were the Lyari Expressway, democracy, traffic, katchi abadis and billboards. In the plenary session the students were informed on these issues by experts. They then went into workshops to gain a more detailed understanding, and finally there were field trips that provided them a first hand experience.

The Lyari Expressway group went into a house that was marked for demolition and met with the family threatened with relocation. They met government officials and heard their views on the need for development, even if it entailed human suffering. The democracy group went to the Sindh Assembly and quizzed both the speaker and the leader of the opposition.

The next day the children again had workshops in which they organized and prioritized all the information. Then each group made a presentation to the conference in which they presented the government’s view, civil society’s view, and their own conclusions.

“That level of research and analysis is going to stay with the children for a while,” says Ali. Nearly 170 children and 50 teachers attended the conference.

Funding naturally is a major concern, and it is not made easy by the kind of work HREP does.

Ali is convinced that the subject of education can only be tackled at the government level. “We are talking about close to 90,000 schools in the country, and that is the level at which change must take place.” A tall order that requires an expeditious undertaking.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)