Monday, December 26, 2011
Saturday, December 10, 2011
interview aamir riaz: A sharp eye on education
By Ather Naqvi
Aamir Riaz has closely watched the state of education in Pakistan especially since 2006, when the government was doing a mid-term review of the education policy of 1998 under a federal commission and he was tasked to do a comparative analysis of the 12 education policies announced by then, including the one in 1998. The white paper of the work was published in 2007 and he plans to publish the findings of the study in a book form soon.
He has recently — in August 2011 — completed a research study in Urdu titled ‘Hum Apnay Bachon Ko Kiya Parha Rahey Hain? Punjab Textbook Board ki Nisaabi Kutb Barey ik Jaeyza’, with support from Actionaid and Jaag. As part of the study, he took 34 books, approved by the government and published by the Punjab Textbook Board in 2010, from four subjects (Urdu, English, Islamiyat/Ethics and Pakistan Studies/Social Studies) from Class I to Class X and analysed them in the light of around “45 questions”.
Of all the 871 lessons that he analysed in these 34 books, the conclusions that he has drawn are astounding, to say the least. The lessons are biased, distorted, factually incorrect, gender insensitive and lack on a number of counts.
TNS sat with him in his office behind the Readings bookstore in Lahore where he is currently working as general manager of Ilqa Publications to discuss the findings of the report.
The News on Sunday: What is the underlying message of the report?
Aamir Riaz: The thrust of the report is that despite adhering to religious beliefs and nationalism, one could still allow some room for peace and tolerance. The problem is that our education policies are not inclusive. For example, instead of formulating a syllabus of Islamiat which would take into account sensibilities of various sects, we published a separate book for the Shia sect during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government in the 1970s. This was contrary to the Sharif Commission formed in 1959 that suggested that syllabus for religious education shall not contain material unacceptable to any sect living in the country.
This aspect has been rather reluctantly stated in the Education Policy of 2009 as well. But the problem of a textbook writer is that he can not do anything except follow the guidelines of the state policy.
Then another important issue is: what to teach our children. In the reports preceding the one in 1969, it was clearly stated that all non-Muslims would be imparted education keeping in view their religious beliefs and sentiments. This statement was removed from the 1969 report and reappeared years later in the education policy of 2009.
We do not give a correct version of history of Punjab in the Punjab textbooks. Same is the case with the history books of Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The message of this report is that we should accept various types of diversities in our society and reflect them in our textbooks.
TNS: What method of research did you employ for the report?
AR: I framed 45 questions in all, covering the relevant and important aspects of the research, such as religion, nationalism, modernity, gender and rural and urban bias, etc, and divided them into five sections each. We looked for answers to these questions in the textbooks. The textbooks were our respondents.
This does not mean that the textbooks in Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are free of errors. But we gave greater importance to the Punjab because about 56 per cent of the total population of the country lives here.
I had access to some education documents of the federal government but they were insufficient. So, I had to meet people from various sections of society and connect the dots.
An important fact we discovered during the research was that according to the government’s latest data, about 40 million boys and girls are studying in class I to X, and out of these, 13 million go to private schools and a few thousands go to madrassahs. That means more than 60 per cent students still go to schools in the public sector. Therefore, we are imparting a biased education to a majority of our schoolchildren.
TNS: How do you compare the Punjab Textbook Board’s books with those used in private schools?
AR: I have seen some textbooks of private schools and they too are not satisfactory. The content has no social, ethical or religious affinity to our land. They seem to be preparing a lot that would end up in the Western countries.
TNS: So who do you hold responsible for this mess?
AR: The civilian governments had hardly any time or space to formulate an education policy responsive to our needs. It is very difficult for them to correct the historic wrongs. For instance, interestingly, there is no mention of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the chapter on Second Islamic Conference. In the same way, Nawaz Sharif is not mentioned in the chapter on atomic explosions conducted by Pakistan in 1998.
We started deviating from the path of liberalism and tolerance after the education policy of 1969. This policy was blatantly anti-India, among other things. The four education policies before that clearly showed we were trying to strike a balance between religion and modernity. The element of extremism had not found its place yet. There was nationalism but there was also clear space for languages such as Bengali as one of the national languages. Same was the case with other local languages such as Sindhi, etc. In contrast we had the education policy of 1959, also known as the Sharif Commission Report. Mr Sharif was a professor at the Government College, Lahore and there was no bureaucrat from the civilian or military setup in the 12-member policy formulating team, other than the secretary education. It also had Dr Abdus Salam as one of its advisers.
While comparing the education policies, I found out that while some work is being done on the policy level, there is little attention being paid to what we are actually teaching the students.
TNS: Do we have other instances of content analyses of textbooks?
AR: There is not a single comprehensive content analysis of our education policies so far. The ones that have been undertaken relate to specific areas such as minorities, women, etc. One does not get the whole picture reading those reports. And unless you get the whole picture, it is difficult to go in the right direction.
TNS: How have the local languages been affected?
AR: The issue of mother tongue is very important. We have the example of India where they formed a commission in 1948 which gave recommendations to the constitution committee, pointing out that 96 languages were spoken in India and out of them 26 were spoken by not more than 5,000 people but they should be given the right to primary education in their mother tongue. And they were allowed to do that.
We should understand that there is no clash between the mother tongue and Urdu. But some sections have deliberately done that for their vested interests — to promote centralism. In the first education conference after Pakistan came into being, it was recommended that the provinces’ languages will be kept in view while making policies but this point was later removed. The idea of one language, one nation, and one religion goes against the very presence of diversity in the Pakistani society. Quaid-e-Azam never meant that Urdu will be the national language when he said that it will be the “lingua franca” of Pakistan. There is a clear difference between a lingua franca and the sole national language. In the very next speech of Quaid-e-Azam in 1948, he said that I have no objection to Bengalis declaring Bengali their national language. In his Allahabad speech, Iqbal acknowledges the linguistic, cultural and religious diversity.
TNS: What is the way forward?
AR: Broad but unambiguous education policy guidelines should come from the federal government with the main input from provinces after consultations with the civil society. Words like enemy etc, being taught to a student of a primary class do not make sense. Education reform is not a one man show; the parliament will have to put in its share.
Friday, December 9, 2011
All About NEWLINE Books...Available @ READINGS, Lhore
All available books are at Readings, Lhore
Head Office at 12-k Main Boulevard Gulberg 2 Lhore
Monday, November 28, 2011
Our flawed syllabi
Our flawed syllabi
What are we teaching our children?
While curriculum and quality of education issues have especially been highlighted since 9/11, albeit from a rather narrow perspective, concerns about what we are teaching our children have been around for much longer. And even now the post-9/11 emphasis, triggered by concerns about terrorism, is more focused on issues of madrassahreforms. But, from quality of education perspectives as well as domestic citizenship and harmony reasons, we should be more worried about what is taught in all of our schools and how it is taught, irrespective of whether these are public or private schools.
Although we keep arguing that majority of the country lives in rural areas, yet very few of the lessons in our textbooks depict or talk of issues related to rural life. It might be the case that the state, by emphasising city living, is and wants to encourage urbanisation, but since popular rhetoric of the state does not support this, we have to assume that this neglect of rural life has more to do with policymakers’ and writers’ biases and little to do with thought-through objectives. When these lessons do not confront the reality of rural children, how can we expect them to relate to their lessons?
There have been a number of studies that have touched on issues of low quality and biases in curriculum as well as books. But these analyses have seldom gone down to analysing actual lessons in textbooks in detail to have a better idea of what is being taught. Aamir Riaz, in a recent (August 2011) Urdu report titled ‘Hum Apnay Bachon Ko Kiya Parha Rahey Hain? Punjab Textbook Board ki Nisaabi Kutb Barey ik Jaeyza’,done with the support from Actionaid and Jaag, has gone to this level. The observation given above, about lack of coverage of rural life, is coming from Aamir Riaz’s report. Aamir Riaz took 34 books, approved by government and published by the Punjab Textbook Board in 2010, from four subjects (Urdu, English, Islamiyat/Ethics and Pakistan Studies/Social Studies) from Class I to Class X and analysed them using a number of questions that, apriori, seem reasonable.
Students should have contextualised knowledge, there should be positive lessons on all religions, all sects, across gender, across geography, there have to be lessons on tolerance, civic participation, democracy, rule of law, and so on. We should not be giving our children distorted picture of our history and should not be filling their minds with hatred or keep them ignorant about our rich cultural background. Aamir took these ideas and looked at our books to see what information and values are we providing to our children.
Aamir Riaz reports that he analysed all 871 lessons that these 34 books had. He found that there was hardly any lesson in these books that reported anything positive about other religions, or had good characters based on non-Muslims. What message are we giving the minorities of the country? Equally, if not more, importantly, what are we teaching our children? That good characteristics only occur in Muslims and non-Muslims are not good Pakistanis? On the cultural side too there is very little about Punjabi culture in these books and few of the folk heroes, folk tales, Punjabi literature, and the Sufis of the Punjab make it to the textbooks and even if any do they make a very sanitised appearance.
Almost half of our population is female and we talk a lot about female education and reducing gender education gaps as a priority, yet the textbooks seem to take little notice of these goals. There are very few lessons where the main characters are women, and even fewer where they are role models. Women are never pilots, cricket/hockey players, academics, journalists and leaders of industry in our textbooks.
Aamir also points a huge number of factual errors. And some of them are not just biases or errors of omission: they are deliberate and outright lies. Apart from taking things out of context and quoting selected sentences that fit the ideology that the state wants to project, historical speeches of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Dr Mohammad Iqbal have been misquoted. One can lament the closed-mindedness of writers when they quote things out of context, but actual distortion of historical documents is a criminal act. But, in our desire to demonise ‘the other’ we are not only willing to censor our heroes but actually lie about them too.
Then there are factual errors such as on the same page in one book the authors write we lost the war in 1971, but go on to say that we have fought three wars on Kashmir and won all of them.
There are strong biases against political governments but the military dictators are more neutrally portrayed. Even when prime ministers have done something that the nation chooses to be proud of (the nuclear explosions of 1998, the construction of the motorway, or the Islamic Summit of 1974) the names of prime ministers under whom these things were initiated are not mentioned by name. But usurpers, all of the military dictators, are named and in some cases we tell children that they took over government out of necessity.
There are hardly any positive lessons for the students about public participation, public mindedness, spirit of voluntary service, spirit of involvement in national and other larger causes. Does the citizen not have some responsibilities also, apart from rights? The responsibility to pay taxes, to be involved, qua citizen, in the political process, to hold public office holders accountable, and to ensure the state not only delivers on its mandate, it also does not overstep its bounds. Beyond the state, the citizen has to be involved with other citizens on provision of public goods such as development of community feeling and an enabling environment and so on. Though a lot of this education happens at home and in the community, school lessons have a role here too and our textbooks need to be cognizant of that. But they currently are not.
Aamir Riaz’s report points out the importance of focusing our attention on textbooks as they are one of the main vehicles through which we control/manage what children are exposed to. Biases, mistakes, errors of omission and commission in textbooks come back to bite us in the form of poor education for our children. Aamir did the analysis for four subjects for the Punjab textbook board and he found a large number of major issues here.
One can be sure we will find similar issues with other textbook boards across the country, and with other subjects too. And though Aamir so far has not covered textbooks being taught by private schools, produced by private publishers, but some of the same problems are bound to be there too. We have to not only correct these errors, we also have to figure out how to make the procedures for producing textbooks a lot more robust and reflective of the needs of our children. We ignore this issue at our own peril.
The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at fbari@sorosny.org
While curriculum and quality of education issues have especially been highlighted since 9/11, albeit from a rather narrow perspective, concerns about what we are teaching our children have been around for much longer. And even now the post-9/11 emphasis, triggered by concerns about terrorism, is more focused on issues of madrassahreforms. But, from quality of education perspectives as well as domestic citizenship and harmony reasons, we should be more worried about what is taught in all of our schools and how it is taught, irrespective of whether these are public or private schools.
Although we keep arguing that majority of the country lives in rural areas, yet very few of the lessons in our textbooks depict or talk of issues related to rural life. It might be the case that the state, by emphasising city living, is and wants to encourage urbanisation, but since popular rhetoric of the state does not support this, we have to assume that this neglect of rural life has more to do with policymakers’ and writers’ biases and little to do with thought-through objectives. When these lessons do not confront the reality of rural children, how can we expect them to relate to their lessons?
There have been a number of studies that have touched on issues of low quality and biases in curriculum as well as books. But these analyses have seldom gone down to analysing actual lessons in textbooks in detail to have a better idea of what is being taught. Aamir Riaz, in a recent (August 2011) Urdu report titled ‘Hum Apnay Bachon Ko Kiya Parha Rahey Hain? Punjab Textbook Board ki Nisaabi Kutb Barey ik Jaeyza’,done with the support from Actionaid and Jaag, has gone to this level. The observation given above, about lack of coverage of rural life, is coming from Aamir Riaz’s report. Aamir Riaz took 34 books, approved by government and published by the Punjab Textbook Board in 2010, from four subjects (Urdu, English, Islamiyat/Ethics and Pakistan Studies/Social Studies) from Class I to Class X and analysed them using a number of questions that, apriori, seem reasonable.
Students should have contextualised knowledge, there should be positive lessons on all religions, all sects, across gender, across geography, there have to be lessons on tolerance, civic participation, democracy, rule of law, and so on. We should not be giving our children distorted picture of our history and should not be filling their minds with hatred or keep them ignorant about our rich cultural background. Aamir took these ideas and looked at our books to see what information and values are we providing to our children.
Aamir Riaz reports that he analysed all 871 lessons that these 34 books had. He found that there was hardly any lesson in these books that reported anything positive about other religions, or had good characters based on non-Muslims. What message are we giving the minorities of the country? Equally, if not more, importantly, what are we teaching our children? That good characteristics only occur in Muslims and non-Muslims are not good Pakistanis? On the cultural side too there is very little about Punjabi culture in these books and few of the folk heroes, folk tales, Punjabi literature, and the Sufis of the Punjab make it to the textbooks and even if any do they make a very sanitised appearance.
Almost half of our population is female and we talk a lot about female education and reducing gender education gaps as a priority, yet the textbooks seem to take little notice of these goals. There are very few lessons where the main characters are women, and even fewer where they are role models. Women are never pilots, cricket/hockey players, academics, journalists and leaders of industry in our textbooks.
Aamir also points a huge number of factual errors. And some of them are not just biases or errors of omission: they are deliberate and outright lies. Apart from taking things out of context and quoting selected sentences that fit the ideology that the state wants to project, historical speeches of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Dr Mohammad Iqbal have been misquoted. One can lament the closed-mindedness of writers when they quote things out of context, but actual distortion of historical documents is a criminal act. But, in our desire to demonise ‘the other’ we are not only willing to censor our heroes but actually lie about them too.
Then there are factual errors such as on the same page in one book the authors write we lost the war in 1971, but go on to say that we have fought three wars on Kashmir and won all of them.
There are strong biases against political governments but the military dictators are more neutrally portrayed. Even when prime ministers have done something that the nation chooses to be proud of (the nuclear explosions of 1998, the construction of the motorway, or the Islamic Summit of 1974) the names of prime ministers under whom these things were initiated are not mentioned by name. But usurpers, all of the military dictators, are named and in some cases we tell children that they took over government out of necessity.
There are hardly any positive lessons for the students about public participation, public mindedness, spirit of voluntary service, spirit of involvement in national and other larger causes. Does the citizen not have some responsibilities also, apart from rights? The responsibility to pay taxes, to be involved, qua citizen, in the political process, to hold public office holders accountable, and to ensure the state not only delivers on its mandate, it also does not overstep its bounds. Beyond the state, the citizen has to be involved with other citizens on provision of public goods such as development of community feeling and an enabling environment and so on. Though a lot of this education happens at home and in the community, school lessons have a role here too and our textbooks need to be cognizant of that. But they currently are not.
Aamir Riaz’s report points out the importance of focusing our attention on textbooks as they are one of the main vehicles through which we control/manage what children are exposed to. Biases, mistakes, errors of omission and commission in textbooks come back to bite us in the form of poor education for our children. Aamir did the analysis for four subjects for the Punjab textbook board and he found a large number of major issues here.
One can be sure we will find similar issues with other textbook boards across the country, and with other subjects too. And though Aamir so far has not covered textbooks being taught by private schools, produced by private publishers, but some of the same problems are bound to be there too. We have to not only correct these errors, we also have to figure out how to make the procedures for producing textbooks a lot more robust and reflective of the needs of our children. We ignore this issue at our own peril.
The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at fbari@sorosny.org
