In the list of the ‘oldest profession’ we may find many claimants, some of ill repute; but, in fact the oldest ‘human’ public activity is learning because it is part of being human. As opposed to being an animal, whose nature needs only instinct, although it may learn also. And teaching is an adjunct of learning for the social human, whose survival depends on a transmission of learning from individual to individual and generation to generation. This process was formalized in the urban communities of ancient civilizations, particularly for the spiritual and technological aspects of life. Skills and crafts had to be passed from one master of the art to pupils for material needs and religion for the ‘soul’.
An underlying assumption of modernism is that the latest addition/edition is the best. In the past, the idea was ‘the tried and tested is the best; and should not be replaced by any “upstart” idea’. The ‘modern’ peoples of Britain, Europe and America do maintain their ‘traditions’ on the same principle surreptitiously; but the rest of the world must change its ways from its ‘tried and tested traditions’ because these have proved to be failures.
In the past a similar premise applied to the gods; a nation suffering defeat was convinced that its ‘god’ had been proved to be a false claimant to the status or was a ‘lesser god’.
While many third-world nations have abandoned their traditional teaching practices, this is not a likelihood in Pakistan at many levels. As a result a variety of ‘education systems’ co-exist and several ‘mediums’ of instruction may be found within one institution also.
The social divide may have been equalized in the wayside cricket field or the elitist’s backyard but it is extremely potent in the schooling of Pakistani children. The variety of schools in my neighborhood far surpasses the types of market I mentioned in a previous essay. I once counted more than 25 types of schools within a kilometer of my home. The cultural variety of Pakistan that I have been harping about, is nowhere more active than in the upbringing we select for our children from a buffet of tradition and modernity.
One parent wants a school with memorizing facilities for the Quran and computer literacy for the modern age with a bias towards Urdu literature and an element of analytical logic from the Greek and German traditions [700-300 BC & 15-1800 AD]. And sure enough, a school which can fit the bill can be found in Pakistan. Another parent wants the child to be protected from all this hocus pocus that our forefathers have fed us; and would like to get an ‘American’ education without going to America. We can give you what you need! Yet another parent needs to guard against these ‘modernist’ trends and find a school that is as close to what Imam Abu Hanifa learnt; surely he will get that too. This condition is critical at the school level but, with the emergence of new private sector universities of various grades, it has begun to penetrate our institutions of higher learning as well.
Although our civil society is highly critical of how the state is handling education, there is much we may approve of during the past seven decades. In the first instance, this is one sector in which the state has been sensitive to varieties of cultural baggage that litter the communal landscape of Pakistan. Second, ‘public sector education’ has constantly tried to strike a balance between major public concerns. Thirdly, it has managed to make its formula the ‘mainstream’ of the learning mosaic, despite major setbacks. The latest of these onslaughts against the ‘system’ came in the Musharraf era. Actually, when we think of it in context, we see that this downslide is often greater under military rule. Another interesting feature of this process is that every spate of ‘new institutions’ relegates those which preceded it to the status of the outmoded and associates them with the archaic.
Here, I will yield to temptation and add an autobiographical note:
Having been a bad student in school, when I finally awoke to the need of learning for living, I had reached a stage where the usual education plans were not satisfactory. So I asked myself: “what is it that you wish to do with education if you can get it”.
I came up with two ideas: first that I had to look at society in Pakistan to find out what it was all about; second that, if I could make some sense of it, I would like to teach others what to do to make the nation we were born in, a going concern. The first part led me to the disciplines of history and economics; for the second I rejected three options that I did not expect to do well in: politics, journalism and literature. That left me with education.
I wanted to teach at the college level since it seemed to be the lynchpin of our disjointed system; but fate led me to the Multan University where I spent a lifetime teaching history.
History, the window into human life that is stranger than fiction; and only sometimes less fictitious than literature. It also opens into the process of evolution and of human mental construct, be they individuals, nations, societies or civilizations. Society is a product of history and philosophy. This path lay through chronology and geography, to finally reach [what I was to learn later] the sociological construct visualized by Ibn Khaldun.
As a practitioner of mainstream Pakistani education, I found my life to be an interminable series of highs and lows; and the following verse was often in my mind:
har subah yehi souch kay hai jurm muhabbat
aur faisla har shaam; nahin, aisa nahin hai!
[Each morning the thought that love is crime – and the verdict each evening; no, not so!]. So I gave up my love, the cause of my troubles, as only heartaches were waiting for me. Like the proverbial thief who gave up his profession but kept diddling people, I keep peddling education. Denying that I am a journalist or literature, and refusing the title of teacher, here I am a wolf in sheep’s clothing, with a “what I learnt at the university” spiel.
Among the first things I learn was that knowledge of society is not a premier branch, but rather one of the lower castes. History, like philosophy was almost an outcast outcaste. Politics, having claimed the title of science, could not gain the status of science; but it did manage to elevate its rating. Economics, didn’t lay claim to the sacred title of science but still managed to get an honorary [occasionally an honorable] status among sciences.
More to the point, I learnt that those who took admission in social sciences, humanities or arts, frequently were not social, nor particularly humanistic or artistic. Being determined to ride on the “mainstream-modern education” bandwagon, like I did to begin with, they do not have the capability to gatecrash the upper echelons of scientific learning, therefore they settle for the highest they can get from the next level. History scraped the bottom of the barrel again, it is the last choice, because philosophy is frequently absent from the list of subjects. I also took history as ‘an easy to pass, but difficult to get high grades’ subject when I gave up science in B. A. I had hoped that economics would make a ‘respectable social scientist’ out of me; fate intervened again. So, here I am, after a ‘fruitful’ career as a historian, a pseudo-journalist who I hope I has covered up his flaws well enough to discuss how to review the need of social knowledge in Pakistan and how to make it right.
Societies need their own kind of ‘engineering’: adjustments in knowledge and procedures of its use; a means of transmitting the energy and power of the society’s human capital into a form that can maximize the potential of its people and optimize self-satisfaction.
As the subject is dry and tedious, I have started with this light preamble but hope to take up more serious issues in the essay that follows with my refrain of ‘culture sensitivity’.