TEACHING ACCORDING TO NEEDS & CAPACITIES
I have rudely interrupted my Urdu text to discuss primary education in English for the benefit of those who do not read and write in Urdu.
No! No! This is not for the non-Pakistani reader. It is for the benefit of the Pakistani leadership that I have had to do this. Not the political leader in most cases, though it may have been true of the “Urdu Speaking” [one whose mother tongue is Urdu] Musharraf. I am sure that some of my regular readers spot the mistakes that I make in my Urdu texts and can guess that I was not brought up to write in Urdu. I put in a lot of effort after the age of thirty, to get to this level of writing and reading in Urdu, although I was fairly fluent in Urdu speech. I know many educated Pakistanis who, having lived all their life in Pakistan, can’t speak Urdu fluently.
Anyhow. You do remember my suggestion that primary education should be given in a child’s mother tongue? The idea behind it was that a child should be learn alphabet sounds and shapes with reference to words that are familiar. Now, the child is familiar with only such words from the mother tongue that are in use by the people he or she is exposed to.
What this implies is that the language component of primary education needs to be formulated as a tailor made curriculum at the level of a locality or community. Following the current form, if a child enters school at age 3-5, for nursery to primary, alphabet should have become familiar for the child by age six or earlier. Assuming that the child has, in addition to immediate family, been exposed to cousins, neighboring households, a nearby market and perhaps a playing area where other children and elders of the community are available, there should be an adequate vocabulary to choose from. In addition, the child would be exposed to some realities of nature from which examples of biology, botany, physics, chemistry and math may be derived.
The urban child’s exposure to botany and zoology is likely to be considerably less than a rural child and the village children will have seen fewer examples of technology, and that is where we must concentrate. This does not mean that we wish to perpetuate the disparity but that we do not want the disparity to inhibit growth at the beginning of the process. At the secondary level, it should be an objective of the teachers to provide opportunities to bridge the gap but not to enforce equality. There is no harm in a rural child remaining in the village and an urban one remaining in his own locality – after all, they do so even now, in the existing system.
It is not fair to subject the majority of children of any class or community to adjust to a uniform system for the sake of the one or the few of that category who will benefit from the additional exposure. In attempting to be unbiased against the extraordinary, we place the ordinary person at a disadvantage. At least at the level of primary education our sympathy should be with the ordinary child who is going to do no more than finish the compulsory schooling.
I know, you will find my reasoning somewhat warped, but do give it some thought:
Those of you who have Marxist leanings have probably gathered the gist from the title of the English section of this blog; but the meat is in the examples. So, first the argument. When Marx rediscovered a universal truism: that human abilities & needs are not uniform, the communists acquired a slogan. The South Asians of old knew “jo tan laagay so tan Janay”. The body that feels is the body that knows. In this uneven endowment of nature lies the secret of society. One person is good at one thing and the other at another, and thus is the mutual need. When an over zealous Samaritan tries to level the playing field, it becomes uneven for the weak and the poor.
Now for the examples and illustrations of how it works: The principle of “they work in twos”. The cases of “the ones that got away”. And, how applying the same criteria can be extremely unjust, sometimes with malice & aforethought. See if you can relate to the following examples:
My butcher, gardener and electrician don’t like to work alone. The man who slaughters animals for Eid has a mate who used to be a security guard with no initiative but needed more money than he was making. Then he met my butcher. Now they work as a team and both can prosper.
My gardener had a mate who found fruitful opportunities in another town and left. One of them used to take care of the vegetable patch and the other managed the lawn. Now my lawn is not well looked after unless I put in a lot of effort but even the vegetable patch is not as neat as it was since my gardener doesn’t work well without a mate. My electrician too, comes in twos.
The compulsion of passing a set of subjects in one go has caused many of my students to fail. I myself am among the ones that got away. An exceptionally bright young man just wasn’t able to learn English. After several failed attempts, he finally stopped attempting to do the Matric.
Three examples of the last category are from history, Aesop’s fables and American democracy verses Russian freedom of expression, the fourth is from education and tagged sales.
When Egypt under Nasser fought Israel, the Anglo-French ultimatum declared that both parties should retreat to a point ten miles away from the Suez. In the situation that existed, this meant that Egypt should retreat some thirty miles or so while Israel could move forward many miles because Egypt was more than ten miles to the east of Suez at the time.
In Aesop’s fables, the story of the fox and stork showed how each hosted the other with food in utensils that suited them, so the guest went without a meal.
They say that an American was chiding a Russian about lack of “freedom of speech” in Russia. When asked to illustrate, the American said [in another age from now] “I can go up the steps of the White House and say the President of the United States is a bum and no one will stop me”. The Russian replied “So? I can go up the steps of the Kremlin and shout at the top of my voice that the President of the United States is a bum and no one will stop me either.”
But the real issue is the tagged sales of education. You can score a scholarship in one subject because you are that good at it but if you fail another, you can’t get a degree. When shops and stores tag sales, these are incentives like buy X, get Y free. If my electrician, who can double as a plumber at a pinch, were to insist that either I give him both tasks or he will do neither, it is quite likely that I will refuse to give him both; but the student doesn’t have that choice, except at the cost of his degree. The net looser is the society which loses a lot of talent in the market.