KARACHI, Jan 7: Recognising the link between education and high priority social issues, a White Paper obtained by Dawn, states that only through education can a society achieve awareness, sensitisation and clarity of conception that can help cure it of the evils that retard its growth.

The White Paper identifies five areas on which education has a direct bearing. They are sectarianism, population growth, health, democracy and environment. It attributes the rise of sectarianism to societal polarisation based on sectarian intolerance, disputes emanating from disunity and extremism. These were the direct result of indoctrination pursued according to political agendas. Education did not try to neutralise the protagonists of divisionary extremism who had a field day. The White Paper suggests that “school education must now be designed to smoothen the turbulences of sectarian differences and develop a rational character and outlook of inclusion and tolerance”.

Prepared by a team set up by the federal education ministry under Javed Hasan Aly, a retired federal secretary, the White Paper is titled “Education in Pakistan”.

Many steps that governments took to create awareness of the population explosion problem failed to produce results due to ‘dogmatic fatalism’ and expensive awareness programmes being transient in effect. The White Paper believes that the education system as a whole “has failed to create mindsets amenable to understanding and the resolution of this problem. Linkage of education with the goals of population welfare must be more consciously appreciated”.

The White Paper laments the failure of the national education policies to incorporate various health concepts into school curricula and textbooks. The knowledge of hygiene is no longer imparted through the textbooks leaving it to the government to undertake expensive media campaign to create health awareness.

The link between democracy and education has been articulated very frequently in Pakistan but sounds more like propaganda than belief. The White Paper writes that in their social psyche the elite and the powerful tend to be autocratic in inclination and pursuit. The social upheavals the state has suffered, the lack of continuity in its dispensation and the general immaturity of the political will stem from the lack of commitment of the citizen to the cause of democracy. This, the White Paper believes, is due to the failure of the education system to create a social psyche, willing to listen to others and create a tolerant society respectful of the beliefs, needs, ambitions, hopes and fears of all. Education has the capacity to change mindsets and cultivate a democratic attitude.

The link between environment and education has been recognised for long. Yet environmental degradation has been allowed to become a monster capable of obliterating life on earth. “Education must therefore emphasise preservation and sustainability of our environmental asset,” exhorts the White Paper.

Some of the recommendations made by the White Paper are: a) curricula and textbooks must not foster or lead to sectarianism. All divisive material must be weeded out of the national curriculum and textbooks; b) the state must not be partial to one politico-religious interpretation or the other; c) ethics derived from the Quran and Sunnah should essentially form the basis of religious education and rituals must not overtake substance as the focus of sensitisation; d) population growth and management should be articulated in the textbooks; e) hygiene and disease prevention should be central to early school education; f) sports should be compulsory in all schools; g) democracy as a way of life should be a conscious part of school education; h) environment must be incorporated and integrated in early education.