THE engraving of Lord Macaulay’s ‘controlled education’ on the face of the subcontinent could never literally be undone when it comes to Pakistan.

In fact, our neighboring countries of India and Bangladesh have uplifted their educational standards to a healthy extent from the strands of the Macaulay Doctrine. However, Pakistan could not prove lucky enough throughout its history to redeem its people.

The structure of education in the present history of Pakistan raises some serious questions. Both public and private sectors’ past performance need to be critiqued in order to determine healthy as well as unhealthy trends in the system.

Regarding the question of the imposition of English as the only medium of learning for Pakistanis, it is related to the raison d’etre of Urdu in the wake of the anglicized experiment of our education. Do we really need Urdu’s presence in our education or is it mere dust in the public eye?

The private sector had already ignored Urdu in order to reap the commercial prospects of English as, allegedly, the best medium of learning. Now even the public sector has found the solution of our educational problem in replacing the Urdu medium with that of English. The false impression of rapid success in life by dint of English has, to our depravity, developed into a devoutly-held belief. If English were the only channel of development and modernisation, China, Japan and Russia would not have been blessed with modern riches through the use of their own languages.

The foremost thing that falls prey to a negative approach is the uniformity of student-stratum. For instance, syllabus is not identical across the board.

The noble profession of teaching is abused as it seems people who are good for nothing else apply as teachers to teach in schools. Teachers are not well-paid in the private sector, while the situation of the public sector is far worse.

We assume in our illusive perception that by increasing the study hours and providing tutoring, we are educating our children on western lines. However, this erroneous perception is immediately out when we take even a cursory glance into the western education model. Schools and colleges have five working days a week in the west; and students are relieved with two holidays on the weekend. Furthermore, study hours at primary and secondary education levels hardly match our work routine.

We far surpass them in our study labour, but with extremely poor results. We are doing a great disservice to our children by overburdening them with education of a 10 to 14-hour study a day.

The ordeal of a Pakistani student is manifold. The problems our students face are as follows: (i) non-native medium of learning, (ii) unskilled teaching, and (iii) mind-racking study burden of time and labour. Is there a solution to these problems? Indeed there is a solution to every problem; one must not forget in this current scenario that ‘where there is a will, there is a way’.

SYED MUHAMMAD WAQAS Director General Bab-ul-Ilm Research Foundation Mandi Bahauddin