June 9, 2005

I think I have finally figured out why the average Pakistani who has gone through the secondary board system doesn’t really appear able to think or act with any degree of logic and good sense. Since most of us get an education that is administered and controlled by the secondary and higher secondary boards, it stands to reason that reason or rationality is not our strong point. Pray why? The answer is simple.

Starting from class one, if not earlier, students are taught to learn by rote. The teacher writes questions and answers on the blackboard — or the newer green, or white boards, and the students copy them down dutifully. At home they memorize them and reproduce them verbatim during tests and exams.

So what is the message Pakistani children and their parents get from school? It is that memory is the most important part of their brain, infinitely more important than their analytical, critical or even creative powers. Not surprisingly, when we grow into adults, lots of us lead our lives relying mainly on our recall and recollection abilities, rather than using the full range of our mental powers.

Research has no place in the education imparted by our secondary school schools and students spend all their time stuffing facts, or what their textbooks present as facts, into their minds. In more progressive schools children are taught not just how to acquire knowledge but, equally importantly, how to apply it.

Before last year’s secondary school exam, a class ten English teacher asked her students to write an essay on beggars. One of her students asked her what that word meant. With the final exam just weeks away, the experienced teacher immediately wrote a short essay about beggars and asked the student to memorize it. Sure enough, just as the teacher had anticipated, the English paper asked for an essay on beggars and the student with the trained memory passed with flying colours.

But how did the teacher know what questions would be asked in the English paper? The lady explained that exam papers are based on a limited number of questions that are repeated every few years. Experienced teachers can work out fairly correctly the topics what will be examined in any particular year. Apparently the people who set the papers, those who mark them, in fact everyone connected with the examinations including those who control them, know the system and operate within its parameters. The entire secondary school system is based on students committing answers to memory and reproducing them in the finals.

To reinforce the system, a body of tutors can be found in every middle class community. Parents hopefully send their offspring for a couple of hours every day to a nearby tutor, whose job it is to see that students memorize their homework. Recently, I listened to a class seven student blurt out an answer to a social studies question in which Paris was mentioned. I asked the boy where Paris was. He looked around in confusion and then came up with the answer triumphantly, “It is in London.”

The Urdu-English nexus can be partially blamed for an education process that systematically kills our ability to analyze problems, examine options and arrive at logical solutions. It crushes our initiative, innovation and creativity, leaving few of us with any confidence in ourselves. What is surprising is that nobody seems to have done anything about it. All the big names who preside over the education hierarchy, from the minister down, or those in the private sector, seem to find nothing wrong in students having to learn by rote, without clearly understanding what it is they are memorizing.

That Pakistan has inherited this method from the pre-partition days makes it all the more reprehensible. Perhaps somebody should inform the custodians of our children’s education that times have changed. And the most revolutionary changes are taking place in the field of education.

When a foreign friend’s son, travelling on the national airline from the US to Karachi for a week’s visit, lost his baggage, I was apologetic. When after a lot of string pulling, the baggage was found — but on the day he was leaving — I trotted out that rusty cliché: We are a developing country, you know. I relied on the same cliché when visitors commented on the traffic with drivers ignoring every rule in the book. Or when a man roughly pushed us out of the way without a word of regret.

Let’s return to education. I was asked by a friend to attend the prize distribution function at her charity school at Kalapul’s railway colony, in Karachi. Imagine my surprise when I found girls and boys in neat uniforms seated in straight rows, teachers who spoke confidently and with impressive personalities, and an exhibition of students work that was more attractively presented than in many fancy private schools.

The school also has a mothers’ club, the idea being to create some awareness in the minds of the housebound and ignorant wives of this near-slum neighbourhood. And all this due to the lifelong commitment of a Behbud Association member and her team. Alas, the school only has eight classes.

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