National educational policy – a change on the way?
September 14, 2009 § 12 Comments
The present take by the government, if carried out as put in the writing, would be a grand influence in changing the trends of academia.
The National Educational Policy is finally out amid lot of anticipations and after many delays. The cabinet approved it on September 9, 2009 after a rigorous effort from many quarters to ensure the participation of all the concerned parties. And the policy encompasses many such features which had been looked forward to for the past many years.
The budget, for one, of the educational sector has been raised from an earlier 2 percent to a now 7 percent which is a welcome move. In the past, educationalists have consistently bemoaned the lack of resources for the education sector and have also, in parallel, criticized a hefty spending on defense in face of such negligence to education. However, the present take by the government, if carried out as put in the writing, would be a grand influence in changing the trends of academia.
Coming to the other parts of the policy, we may first discern certain domains which are the chief issues of the present-day education in Pakistan. These mainly are the syllabi, the teaching methodologies, and the madressah system.
The debate over the credibility of the government-decided curricula has been raging for quite some time now. And the educationalists have expressively cited their concern and dissatisfaction over the textbook syllabus. The objections run along two parallels. One is that the syllabus takes on a tone of prejudice towards certain countries, factions or societies by necessarily involving a religious or falsely patriotic view of things, hence growing up individuals who have been ingrained already with the sentiments of resentment towards, say, India or Hindus. Such a biased view of things for the young students is highly undesirable. The need for involving religion in certain subjects has also been questioned and it has been stressed that such subjects may make entirely optional.
The other objection is that the curriculum devised lacks the basic traits needed to actively involve a student in creative thinking. Such objections stand quite valid in face of repeated instances where students in the present educational structure are found to grossly lack any concepts of a certain subject at hand and adopt the technique of rot-learning to fly through the exams.
And that, now, brings us to the second issue, namely that of the flawed teaching methodologies prevailing currently in a wide majority of institutions ran under local educational boards. The list starts with teachers who adopt such teaching methodologies which are aimed solely at making students learn the content rather than understand it. And it ends in such examinations where students are tested, nonetheless, for the very same rot-learning and accorded grades on the basis of how good they are at it.
The good thing about the present policy is that it at least goes on to explicitly acknowledge the flaws in the current teaching methodologies and aims at removing them with time. According to the NEP, the future appointments of the teachers will be based upon higher qualifications and the teachers will also be trained to deal with the challenges of a concept-based teaching system.
However, the NEP falls short of taking a go at the examination system hosted by the local government-operated educational boards which have been displaying inefficient functionality and redundant techniques both for preparing exams and their checking. The absence of a good accountability method to overlook the tasks carried out by board officials has resulted, year after year, in corruption, scandals, altering of results and trading out of board papers pre-handedly, on fee of few thousands of rupees. The current policy entirely neglects the need to immediately look to the conditions of these boards and a reform program for them, bringing them under the umbrella of stricter accountability and making the procedure of exams’ devising and checking much more transparent.
Moving on, the third major issue in our academe is that of madressahs. While the governmental jurisdiction on their affairs is detoured through the Wafaq-ul-Madaris, their sheer number and the large enrollment demands a serious consideration of their functionality in a national context. To neglect them would be neglect the millions of students enrolled in them, leaving them to the hands of syllabi customizable at the whim of anyone running a madressah. It is well-known that the current standards prevalent, even in Wafaq-ran madaris strictly rule out the inclusion of any modern tools, techniques and subjects. And such hard-core traditionalism has often resulted in fundamentalist tendencies in students at these madaris. And so such an intolerant approach towards modernism may prove very difficult to contain in the coming years.
The NEP, apparently, has this considered and the federal Education Minister Mir Hizar Khan cited in the press conference that efforts were being made to introduce the contemporary subjects into the curricula of madressahs. And although Wafaqul Madaris has been resisting the reforms, he posed a hope that Rehman Malik will be able to settle some feasible negotiation with them over the matter. One can hope that the issue will not be left to a non-conclusion and in regard of its immediate importance, shall be attended to asap.
Another important part of the NEP 2009 is the vesting of implementation powers of the policy with the provincial governments. This is particularly important since only the provincial government could more clearly address the wants of local structures and devise effective strategies to implement the policy through them.
The objections over curricula also stay largely unanswered, more so with the introduction of an ‘Islamic Education’ chapter which is looked upon as a move to further ideologically define education in Pakistan. Such a trend must be shunned and the curricula should be a neutral content of such education which may shape individuals who can actively learn, recreate, think and be a dynamic ingredient of the society, choosing their own choices rather than fed with them educationally.
All in all, the NEP is a document well-drawn-out. It has taken a step forward from earlier documents of similar nature in that it has at least recognized many issues, if not all, plaguing the educational sector of Pakistan at present. There certainly is room for a lot of improvement and many domains stay seriously neglected as cited above. However, realization is the forbearer of change and one can only hope that the higher-ups are finally feeling the need to address seriously these issues and are ready to think out-of-the-box.
Published at Chowk.com: http://www.chowk.com/articles/national-educational-policy-a-change-on-the-way-salman-latif.htm
uh wow 7 percent ^^ amazing ^^ so i have a very good question which buildings are going to be reconstructed now? i mean instead of buying new books, expanding libraries, buying computers our prestigious punjab university spends it on demolishing old buildings and making new ones ^^ and wow 7 % quite an increase i mean sure education is only 7% important in ones life right its not like it plays a major role in the economy of a country right -.-’ seriously -.-’ and yes argue on the curricula what about the castrated testing system? what about the fact that each year almost a 500 seat approx goto waste in major universities like PU etc because PU admissions are opened before the mbbs or uet entry tests as a result students depositing cash as a fail safe plan??? I mean those 500 seats could be used for some other students but noo why should we care about them we should just think of making money…our educational system in my view needs no change… it needs to be abolished altogether and re-established from the start…
and one more thing who says that hiring highly educated personal would increase creative thinking? I beg your pardon but i know many departments and many PROFESSORS, Associate Professors and lecturers in universities who give students guess papers before mid and final exams just to ensure a good result.. for what? well to either have their contract validity increased or for the reputation. I mean who the hell would watch over them? Many of them are PhD.s or Mphils …
oh and one last thing i have sat through a direct lecture from the head of lahore board. Believe me on paper the methods and precautions taken for the results were FOOL PROOF…
@Dev!l
First of all, Phds and Mphils doesn’t ensure a person being a good teacher. Since the government is raising the pay of teachers, it also has claimed it’s plans for a training program for the teachers too. Plus, as I’ve asserted, there’s the need for the transparent expending of this now 7% budget for education.
Things improve only slowly. This policy at least admits the flaws and gives few written solutions. We can only hope that the change process continues.
thats my point man… written solutions… We have a lot of things on paper… we need people who will make the writings a reality… That is my problem with our educational system… lots of talkers no doers…
once upon a time while studying education during intermediate i felt this very vigor to pour and when i did… it was a complete waste.
we still stand there where we were.
__
This is one of your brilliant attempts of articulation.
// The other objection is that the curriculum devised lacks the basic traits needed to actively involve a student in creative thinking. Such objections stand quite valid in face of repeated instances where students in the present educational structure are found to grossly lack any concepts of a certain subject at hand and adopt the technique of rot-learning to fly through the exams.//
Aruging with curricula and educational structure, how is it about mentioning NATIONAL Habit of shortcuts, flawed tactics and ways of educationists ? :)
___
@Dev!l
Written solutions are certainly better than plain denials, are they not?
@AD
Still, we can never give up a trying – we don’t have a choice really.
@Haroon
Thanks for liking the article.
And I’d agree that our social trends overshadow our all national dimension, including education. Unless the society isn’t made aware of the flaws of current educational system, an actual change would be an impossible bet.
A very thought provoking post, Salman. I really wish I had enough to time to comment in detail and spell out all the ideas that this post of yours engendered in my mind. The post surely has the potential to generate healthy discussion about the matters you’ve brought up regarding education.
Being a part of the academia myself and currently studying about it along with teaching, I would definitely want to raise a few issues here. First: ‘Neutrality’ of content is a fallacious idea. I know I am making a huge claim but the entire discipline of Discourse Analysis and its various traditions prove this. McCarthy, Halliday, Fairclough and many others have spent their lives working on various different traditions of discourse analysis. Fairclough specifically is known for CDA i.e. Critacal Discourse Analysis and Halliday for SFA – Systemic Functional analysis. The point is that ALL content MUST be subjected to critical analysis because every word that we write, speak or teach HAS an ideology attached to it. Many proponents of ‘objectivity’ claim having no ideology but if we think a little deeper, having no ideology is an ideology in itself. I suggest that you read major works by some major figures of discourse analysis. Our main problem is that we do not subject the content we teach to critical evaluation. We have been analysing the content of some textbooks of English that are taught in various government and private schools in Pakistan. The same problem: apparently ‘neutral’ content but with strong ideological underpinnings (one of the ways to analyse them is to keep in view Halliday’s framework of Field, Tenor and Mode).
A few other points: Salman, people who are in the academia MUST use terminology in a very careful manner =) I do not know your background but being a student of literature and linguistics and a teacher of literature, I would like to point out that terms such as ‘fundamentalism’, ‘terrorism’ etcetra are extremely loaded terms – Loaded with meaning. They are the terms which are heavily being debated upon in the West by the West itself. We all know when exactly did these terms emerge in the socio-political discourse and we must not lost sight of their history of emergence. My point is that we should be sensitive to the use of such terms and must be VERY clear as to what they mean. Similarly, you used the term modernism. What is modernism? While using the term we have to keep the history of the entire Western thought in mind because this was the term that emerged there after the Renaissance. And now we have actually moved ahead of that too. We are living the post-modern age =) What does the term mean in our context? That we have to settle on.
As for the madressah issue, I do not know if you are actually familiar with ‘the madrasahs’ that still in our country act as a beacon for imparting the knowledge of traditional sciences of religion. I do not know about your exposure of the madrassahas. But mostly in our society we have a tendency of heavily relying on the representations that we see all around. I do not want to go into the details of this issue because there are better people who can talk about it in a better manner – those who are actually a part of that educational system. Since my field of expertise lies in literature and somewhat in linguistics so I have limited myself to that only. However, I suggest that when we talk of madrassahs let’s take into account those institutions that actually lead the traditional Islamic education here in Pakistan. Institutes that are NO LESS than being proper universities such as The Darul Uloom of Karachi.
As I said, my background of being trained as a literature and a linguistic student has made me way too sensitive to the use of words (theoretical terms in this case) and representations. It is difficult for me to buy any representation thrust upon me by the society about various institutions. There are strong ideological underpinnings to these representations too. One of our teachers once quoted a poet on the issue: “ta’abeeron ki duniya mein, pyaaray apna khwab sambhaal” – that’s the crisis of our times. Since we lack self realisation, we also cannot hold on to the Dream Original.
I think I have rambled too far and I have kind of though aloud on your blog. Apologies for that =) But seriously your post got me thinking. The credit goes to you =)
And by the way, the issues that you raised abot teaching methodologies MUST be addressed because if this is not done even now, we will miss out on a lot. Apparently things are deteriorating in this regard with every passing day…
@N.A.
I must admit that I’ve been using the terms specificially in the contemporary sense. However, I must also say that’s precisely what I meant to assert while making my point about them. And even when reflected upon in their very two facets, contemporary and literal, they fit in perfectly well with the context. :).
First of all, there’s the issue of madaris. And since the sub-issue of fundamentalism was defined within this issue, I’d first go to this one. So for madaris, while you may be right (I have reservations even on that :) ) that some madaris are really no less than good universities, I must say such madaris are VERY few and far between. Maybe a dozen among the thousands of madaris around the whole of Pakistan? Even the renowned madaris I know of, in my locality, renowned for they are known well far and wide, entreat a student body which is groomed into such individuals who 1: are extremely biased towards all other factions, in fact towards everyone who disagrees with them as much as on the interpretation of some certain religious notion (that comes off first hand experiences) and 2: rule out all modern sciences as irrelevant and absolutely flawed. That, I believe, is the very seed which eventually brings out more extremist tendencies in the individuals.
That quite explains my frame of fundamentalism for them. And while you may be right in pointing out the meaningfulness of the term ‘fundamentalism’ and the likes through the instance of their emergence, that does not, in any way, undermine the originality of these terms. Recent times have only re-asserted the importance of these notions and due to their increased significance in global scenario, made them well-used and more diversely interpreted. And that can’t be used to simply ignore their actual existence and significance in their original frames of application.
As for the use of the term modernism, I simply referred to it as the set of techniques, sciences and methodologies of present-day. That’s precisely the common-place meaning of the term. :)
Coming to the mingling of ideology with education, I must say you laid out some very important points and I readily agree that education can never be ripped of an ideology. However, for long, the mix of ideologies fed to individuals in Pakistani educational system through education has only resulted in individuals having such ideas as religious hatred, a falsely inflated national ego and a highly distorted view of historic events, not to mention a mindset which is entirely incapable of questioning certain fundamental issues of history etc and thinking critically. That’s precisely where the ideology mix for the past decades has led us. And as I laid it out above, for now, an ideology mix ripped of it all and rather promoting creativity and ability of critical analysis may be the best thing to do. :)