Few years back, when I was a school student and a good listener of music, I was a big fan of guy named Shehzad Roy, a young and dynamic musician with great looks and voice. His songs were my favorite ones like "Dholna". After few years he became a big Pakistani Pop star. Shehzad is the guy who sung the Kalam-e-Iqbal "Khudi ka sirre nihan- La ilaha illalah" and after listening that song there is lot of respect for him in my heart and then he established an NGO for the betterment of education in Pakistan. It seems OK. Everyone appreciated him a lot but now in 2013 he come back with the new vision and agenda.
On March 2, 2013 I watched his program "Chal Parha" a documentary series about the Pakistani education and schooling system. In the previous episodes of the series, he analyzed and identified various points where our education system lacks, like financial problems, lack of proper funds, proper training of teachers and other things. It sounds good to me and I appreciated his efforts. but the last episode was about the curriculum.
As a teacher I know that our curriculum has not reviewed and redesigned time to time according to new trends. I always criticize it during my lectures in-front of my students and other meetings with other educationists and board officials.
In the above mentioned episode of Shehzad's documentary series he mentioned some points to be noted by the official to improve the curriculum. Some points are:
On March 2, 2013 I watched his program "Chal Parha" a documentary series about the Pakistani education and schooling system. In the previous episodes of the series, he analyzed and identified various points where our education system lacks, like financial problems, lack of proper funds, proper training of teachers and other things. It sounds good to me and I appreciated his efforts. but the last episode was about the curriculum.
As a teacher I know that our curriculum has not reviewed and redesigned time to time according to new trends. I always criticize it during my lectures in-front of my students and other meetings with other educationists and board officials.
In the above mentioned episode of Shehzad's documentary series he mentioned some points to be noted by the official to improve the curriculum. Some points are:
- Competitive publishing
- Accountability of review committee
- Adapting international books into regional languages according to our tradition
- Publishing of teaching guides of text books
- Eliminate exercises that encourage rote learning
- Curriculum should not be developed to provincial discretion entirely
Ok, all points are valid and acceptable but I am concern about the next point and that is:
- Remove discriminatory contents (Based on Gender and Religion) and tradition of presenting the twisted history in our books should be end.
What does he mean by discriminatory contents based on gender and religion and twisted history? Simple answer, to secularize the education system of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, got it?
I watched the entire episode and Shehzad only spoke about the religious topics in text books. He mentioned chapters about our great heroes of our glorious past in our Urdu and English text books. Even he mentioned about the a chapter about Allama Iqbal and highlighted the paragraph about the views of Allama Iqbal about "Two Nation Theory" and declare it as "Hate Speech" against minorities.
He forgot that we, Muslims were the minority in united India and still Muslims are the oppressed minority there. The creation of Pakistan was necessary to maintain our dignity and religious identity and our new generations should be taught the Ideology and history about the creation of Pakistan (Importance of Two nation theory).
I could not find any chapter based on gender discrimination in our text books.
He asked about the subjects Urdu and Social Studies that why topics based on religion are included in them. He demanded to eliminate the chapters about the historical Muslim personalities and our war heroes. I don't know what is the matter with these type of people, why are they so allergic to Islam and Islamic history and the Ideology of Pakistan. The text books are the main source of building up the mind set of a child and a child should be taught about his history and religion and this is the universal rule in education. When I was a kid I learned about the Greek mythological characters "Atlas" and "Samson" in my English book published by Oxford press. On the same series of English books, I read about the stupid fairy tales like "Little Red riding hood", "Hansel and Gretal", Pied piper and so on.
Why should our children read about the stupid Greek mythology and nonsense fairy tales instead of our Islamic history?
The another concern of the Mr. Roy is that our books teaches about wars and war heroes a lot. In his little understanding of history, people like Haider Ali, Tipu sultan, Muhammad bin Qasim, Mehmood Ghaznavi, Sultan Salahuddin Ayubi and many others are the war lords and they have nothing to do with the peace, prosperity, harmony and progress and the chapters about them should be eliminated from the text books because these chapters are promoting violence.
Shehzad does not understand that history teaches us what happened in the "Past" and what is going to happened in the "Future".
Shehzad, go to America and remove all the material regarding the American revolution ,War of Independence and French revolution from the curriculum. Because Pakistan did not invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Vietnam, Korea and many more and killed hundreds and thousands of people all over the world.
Mr. Javed chaurdry said that we should teach our students that we wanted freedom and we achieved that goal but don't tell them why we want the freedom and making of Pakistan i.e Ideology of Pakistan. How stupid is this.
And about the twisted history. Shehzad claimed that twisted history is being taught by our text books. Who the hell is he to decide that the written history is twisted. People like him are twisting the history to achieve their agenda. They are demoting Muhammad bin Qasim and promoting Raja Dahir. These people are stupid enough to understand that we are Muslim today because of the Great Muhammad bin Qasim.
In April 23, 1999 a conference was held in Berlin, Germany. In this conference a deceleration was released and purpose of that was Global wholesome, Global unity and Global mutuality.
It was declared that we should concentrate on the primary and secondary education.
A system should be developed that should have the same principles and morality. For this purpose the NGOs should be brought forward that are based on the western donations. And now Pakistani media is also well funded to achieve that goal. The Agha Khan board was formed also for the same purpose.
It is all about to secularize the Pakistani in every aspect. Americans and Europeans are spending billions of dollars in the form of funds given to the NGOs, Schools and Electronic and Print media to wipe out the principles of religion from our lives and control our minds..
Shehzad should try to reveal the hidden secret of "Khudi".
خودی کا سر نہاں لا الہ الا اللہ
خودی ہے تیغ فساں
لا الہ الا اللہ
I completely believe that you are totally sincere in your concerns but allow me to raise my concerns as a fellow Pakistani.
ReplyDeleteBut before I write, I want to request to read my views calmly and think about them. If you disagree with you, that's your right. However, one can't disagree with history since it right there and one can deny it.
To begin with, majority of my primary and secondary education was carried out in Urdu medium school studying official text books so I do feel I can reliably talk about it. (I even studied in a Madrassa for a couple of years but that is not directly related here so I'd rather omit it)
Starting with the depiction of Muslim conquerors in glorious light, I do firmly believe that the picture depicted by text books is completely biased. Of course, text books are designed to make us patriots and make our national and cultural identity firm, but the question is, what is in fact our national and cultural identity? Weren't Mehmood Ghaznavi and bin Qasim external invaders who invaded India purely our of political and economic reasons (and to accomplish it, slaughtered thousands of people)? As for Tipu Sultan and Haider Ali, yes, they can be regarded as our national heroes since they fought against the British invaders and imperialists. But regarding Bin Qasim and Ghaznavi our 'heroes' and 'liberators' is completely wrong.
I remember a whole chapter in Social Studies book of eight grade (Muasharti Aloom) was devoted to Crusades of 11th and 12th century in which Christians were depicted as brutal monsters and I (and of course other students) were left with the impression that Christians are only our enemies and all they want is to erase Islam and killing every last Muslims. Not a very reasonable indoctrination, won't you agree? And once again, people living in Indian sub-continent hardly have any relevance with the Crusades.
Yes, we should stress more on the scientific and philosophical achievement of Muslims AND our Indian ancestors (who are, indeed, our true ancestors). We have a history of 5000 years going back to glorious Indus Valley Civilization, one of the oldest and most artistic civilizations in the world, and we are taught virtually nothing about it. In fact, our history starts from 712 AD when Muhammad Bin Qiasim invaded India. Before that, we are not taught anything. If anything, we are taught that before Bin Qasim India was the abode of sub-human Hindu people who had no culture and no regard for human values. This is completely wrong. The scientific and philosophical achievements of Ancient India were as remarkable as the achievements of their contemporary Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle.
[carrying on]
ReplyDeleteYes, we should teach our students about Muslim scientists and philosophers and devote whole chapters to them. But we should also pay thorough attention to the scientific and philosophical achievements of our REAL ancestors who lived in India before the advent of Islam. We are Muslims, that is fine, but are we so insecure and confused that we are ready to completely block our the legacy of thousands of years that perceived us?
Speaking of secularism, since you are a teacher, which is the noblest of all professions, you would know that even in the Western world, the seeds of secular and humanist tendencies were sown by Medieval Muslim philosophers like Ibn Rushd and Ibn Since. Why on earth do you consider secularism an enemy of Islam? Secularism is NOT an enemy of Islam. It merely promotes a tolerant society where people of all faiths, INCLUDING MUSLIMS, can co-exit in harmony and practice their religion. And once again, the idea was promoted by our very own great Muslims philosophers while Europe was still in Dark Ages. And we decided to completely ignore their glorious legacy and instead make heroes of invaders who literally ruined the scientific and philosophical traditions of India. Do you, again as a teacher, know that the glorious institute of Nalanda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda) was ruined by Muslim conqueror Bakhtiyar Khilji (another of our 'heroes') just to show off his victory?
Out text books teach us that Muslim conquerors can never do any wrong and it was always the other enemies who provoked us into action. This is wrong once again. If you don't want to show the true picture of these conquerors then it's far better to skip them from books and instead focus more on our scientist and philosopher ancestors. That would be far more productive for our kids and youngsters, don't you think?
Finally, as a teacher and a scholar, you should also be aware that it was General Zia who altered our education and promoted the projection of Holy Warrior as a hero. He specifically instructed the education boards to bend education on deeply religious lines, the fruits of which we are reaping today in the form of intolerance in society.
I hope you would forgive my typoes. Humans being tend to get emotional. :)
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