EDITORIAL: Good news about curriculum
Daily Times, December 8, 2006
According to a report, Islamabad has made important changes in the new Pakistan Studies curriculum to make sure that the textbooks don’t indirectly prejudice students against the non-Muslim minorities of Pakistan. It will also set the record right regarding the economic, social and cultural basis of partition apart from the religious faith of the Muslim community. The curriculum directions for class 9 and 10 will restate the application of the Two-Nation theory to pre-partition India and also explain that in the post-1947 period the Pakistani state does not ‘exclude’ non-Muslims and potential non-Muslims from the ambit of one Pakistani nation in which all citizens, regardless of caste, colour or creed, have equal rights. Excellent. This is a reflection of the true facts of history.
A curriculum is not a syllabus. It is a centrally issued guideline for the making of syllabi in the provinces that print the textbooks. Until now Pakistan’s curriculum embodied a form of Pakistani nationalism that was obsessively anti-India falsifying the past and present to keep the nation hating India. Since hating India had the corollary of fighting wars with India, the curriculum also idealised war. Then came the apotheosis of jihad in the Zia-ul Haq era when Pakistan became the frontline state and began its covert low-intensity conflict in its neighbourhood. After he went, the civilian rulers were hardly in power long enough to change the poisoned textbooks. Indeed, some civilians actually wanted the Zia indoctrination reinforced!
Then, in 2002, at an NGO in Islamabad, Dr Nayyar got together a group of scholars to examine class one-to-twelve textbooks in the subjects of social sciences/Pakistan Studies, Urdu and English. The books had been prepared on the basis of the curriculum set by the Federal Education Ministry in its Curriculum Wing. The Wing had been manned by a certain kind of officers who served governments of all stripes without any minister challenging their modus operandi. The ‘guidelines’ reflected orthodox, reactionary views that were disguised as “Islamisation”. But if a minister had ever looked at the vocabulary used and the direction given by the Wing to provincial textbook boards, he would have tried to reform the Wing and replace the civil servants working there with more enlightened individuals. But, by and large, education as a subject has never appealed to any intellectual politician, most probably because it was feared that he would clash with the country’s proclaimed ‘ideology’.
The philosophy of education followed was summed up in one Curriculum Wing directive of 1995: ‘In the teaching material no concept of separation between the worldly and the religious be given; rather all the material be presented from the Islamic point of view’. The general directive for textbooks implied that Pakistan was for the Muslims alone; that Islamiat was to be forcibly taught to all students, whatever their faith, including compulsory reading of the Quran; that ‘ideology of Pakistan’ (not defined) was to be internalised as faith, and hate was to be created against the Hindus of India; and students were to be urged to take the path of jihad and shahada.
That didn’t stop overnight after Dr Nayyar’s critique surfaced. In fact, even under President Musharraf, a lot of venom was secreted against Dr Nayyar for writing the report. Fortunately, reason has finally prevailed. Now the Curriculum Wing says it has reformed itself. Thankfully, the pre-partition period will not cherry-pick the great exemplars of the Muslim past. When we did that we usually rejected pluralist and consensus-building rulers like Akbar and eulogised the tough jizya-imposing kings like Aurangzeb. We also chose religious leaders who, apart from damning the Hindus, also apostatised Muslims they thought were in the wrong sect. Indeed, when in the 1980s, General Zia began his war with the Shia community, all fatwas issued against the Shia were from these very religious leaders whom we had put in our textbooks!
President Musharraf and his education minister General (Retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi have to be congratulated for starting the process of cleansing the books that our children read. But what has been revealed so far in the report are details about two sets of textbooks in just one subject. Care has to be taken to present the other subjects in such a way that no section of the population in Pakistan feels left out or discriminated against, and no state in the world complains that we teach our children to hate it. The emphasis on violent jihad must be reduced since jihad is not one of the ‘five pillars of Islam’. In a nation-state there can only be national wars at the risk of destroying the national economy and impoverishing the masses.
Last funny note: the report says the curriculum recommends devoting a special chapter to the minorities where they will be taught the 11 August 1947 address of the Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. It says: ‘the minorities of Pakistan are also discussed with specific reference to Quaid-e-Azam’s speech of August 11, 1947, defining their status.’ But the fact is that the 11 August speech was not just meant for the minorities, it was meant for all Pakistanis, especially Muslims who were told that in Jinnah’s Pakistan there would be no such entities as ‘minorities’. *
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