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Pakistan - Alarm Bells

 There is a whiff of change at the citadel of PML(N). Though Vice President Maryam Nawaz’s camp may rant and roar about playing centre-forward, former CM Shehbaz Sharif is back in the game. As senior Sharif extends an olive branch to PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari and says hello to PDM chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the opposition parties are very likely to set their house in order. The very pubic spat between Islamabad and Rawalpindi landed as much-needed manna from heaven, right in its lap. Amid power shows all over the country and talks to muster support for the anti-government movement, the ruling PTI would be very naive to take a breather.

Nevertheless, any political storm–no matter how confident Mr Sharif may seem–would still be less back-breaking of a crisis. For, the nightmares are bound to get even worse. If the PTI’s voters are deeply concerned by the way their bills continue to soar high, it cannot pass the buck to Ishaq Dar’s rupee melodrama. Not anymore. Neither can the government keep referring to corruption sagas of the yore to defend the freefall of the Pakistani rupee. There are no plans in sight to slam the brakes on double-digits food inflation. The mega relief package heralded as a gamechanger was widely ridiculed after the overnight price hike in petrol. Power and gas tariffs are next in line to weigh excruciatingly on poor masses. To put it in layman’s terms, Islamabad does not need any external force to reshuffle the political cards. Its apparent failure to push the proverbial genies of sugar, wheat and even ghee mafias back inside the bottle can do the job well on its own.

More worrisome is the nauseating deja vu to Ayub Khan’s spinning of the economic hats. The uncanny resemblance is hard to look past. He, too, had proclaimed to steer his debt-ridden country out of its troubles. But just like today, prosperity was low-hanging fruit to a selected few. Going by the press conferences, Pakistan is on a steady track for its economy to grow nearly five per cent. The IMF programme is back on the table. But if life is all sunshine and rainbows, why is an average Pakistani contemplating how to put two meals on his table? Clearly, something sinister has been in the making. The turnover of the ’50s Green Revolution was said to have been circulated between some 80 families. In 2021, the carcass of Pakistan’s economy is being scavenged by sugar barons, concrete captains and Mister Bigs of the textile industry. The government has, indeed, delivered its promise regarding lifelines to large-scale manufacturers. May it be the automobile industry or the construction channel, big wheels are having a night on tiles. But when would these sweeteners trickle all the way to the common man is a quandary no one in the top echelons is ready to give their two cents on! 

https://dailytimes.com.pk/838357/alarm-bells/

#Pakistan - A dark future

By Pervez Hoodbhoy

Students emerging from the Single National Curriculum’s shadow will be hugely

disadvantaged in a competitive global environment.

What awaits children studying under the Single National Curriculum (SNC) in the years ahead? The SNC is an ideological project conceived by Prime Minister Imran Khan that conjoins all regular schools with madrassahs. Doing so, he contends, will level the playing field. But now that implementation is proceeding rapidly in three provinces, parents of school-going children are worried.

The pre-SNC situation was bad enough. Pakistani children stand at the bottom end of global educational achievement, with surveys showing sinking learning levels. Inferior to their counterparts in Iran, India and Bangladesh, they are often absent from competitions like the international science and mathematics Olympiads. When they do compete, they perform poorly. The solitary exception is invariably an O-A level or IB student linked to a foreign examination system. Non-elite school students are generally unable to express themselves coherently and grammatically in any language.

This under-achievement is severely restricting employment possibilities at home and abroad. Although many students do get higher degrees later, yet, bad early education means few do well as practicing engineers and scientists. Last year, Pakistan’s software exports – a measure of brain power – stood at only $2 billion (India’s were $148 billion). Our overseas workforce is mostly unskilled or semi-skilled labour. The GIZ-ILO statistics show that only 3 percent is high-level (engineers, doctors, teachers, top management, etc); the remaining 97 percent includes labourers, house helpers, bus drivers, carpenters and electricians etc.

Poor learning habits start from Pakistani schools where kids learn examination techniques, and are taught just enough to get by. Students with low reasoning ability but high memorisation capacity – or illegal access to smartphones during examinations – emerge as “toppers”. Presently, dozens of students are scoring 1,100 out of 1,100 marks in examinations held across the Punjab. Cheating is socially tolerated. Parents – including those who emphasise religious rituals – encourage their children to cheat as a way to get ahead.

The SNC will drag down standards further. Here’s why: rote learning is a bane for modern education but is central to madrassah education where holy texts must be committed to memory. The SNC has made the rote system stronger. On one hand, everyone will need to memorise much more religious material; on the other, a single official textbook is specified for each subject. A student memorising selected parts of that book can get full marks.

What the SNC’s clueless managers do not understand is that the world has zero use for a hafiz-i-science or hafiz-i-riyazi. He will not be hired. Instead, businesses, industries and research laboratories want people with a broad scope of knowledge, reasoning capacity and ability to navigate new situations.

Of course, everyone agrees that mathematics, science and English should be taught in madrassahs. Without these, one cannot know how the modern world works. But 99 percent of madrassah students will never use mathematics or science in any significant way. So why set equal standards for both? And have the same books? The SNC requires students of both streams – madrassah and regular – to take the same board examinations and be graded similarly. Examination setters know that any “out-of-course” questions may cause hell to break loose on the streets.

Actual equity in education needs major government investment in public school facilities, teacher training and books.

It makes no sense to conjoin madrassah and regular schools because madrassahs have a very specific mission objective – that of preparing one for life after death. This explains their permanence, and is why the dars-i-nizami curriculum, developed in pre-colonial India, was never changed to accommodate new ideas. You cannot have a student asking why this or that is true. Therefore, critical faculties must be deliberately dulled; a student must accept and obey. To do otherwise could be dangerous.

Regular schools cannot function as madrassahs (and vice versa) because worldly subjects – art, business, science, mathematics, poetry and literature – have diametrically opposite requirements. Here, good education means encouraging curiosity, enhancing reasoning powers, exposing the student to a wide variety of writings and helping create new forms or new thoughts.

Experience of the Ottoman Turkey and Mohammed Ali’s 19th Century Egypt shows that yoking madrassahs and regular schools into a single hybrid system is futile. This is why Arab countries today are fast changing their curricula into modern ones. Pakistan is trying to be an exception, but it will pay a heavy price. Masses of the SNC unemployed graduates – even those with PhDs – will be the result of a failed experiment.

Can a uniform national curriculum level the playing field for all Pakistanis, rich and poor? This idea appears hugely attractive, striking a lethal blow to the abominable education apartheid that wracked Pakistan from day one. Beneficiaries of elite private education became widely separated from those crippled by bad public schooling. So, what could be better than having the rich child and the poor child study the same subjects from the same books and being judged by the same standards?

But this is wishful thinking. The old curriculum actually never stood in the way of equity. In fact, any curriculum is just a list of things to be done. Across countries that list is identical when it comes to teaching languages, geography, arithmetic and basic sciences. Actual equity in education needs major government investment in public school facilities, teacher training and books. Pakistan has extreme wealth disparities; education equity also demands these inequities be ameliorated. The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government has taken no steps in this regard.

The SNC is a fake, cost-free, propagandistic solution to a fake problem. Hypocrisy is written across its face. As affirmed by Education Minister Shafqat Mahmood, the SNC will not touch Cambridge O-A levels and International Baccalaureate. Thus, the children of parents paying a monthly fee between Rs 15,000 to Rs 45,000 per child in O-A level and IB schools have no cause for worry. The SNC is opium for the masses. The sooner we see it this way the better.

Today, some Muslim countries are trying hard to meld modernity with tradition. While their curriculum does include some religious education, they have sharply decreased the amount of time reserved for memorisation. Instead, the emphasis is on building cognitive capacity, comprehension, critical thinking skills and citizenship issues. For Pakistani children to have a future, our education system must move in a similar direction. The curriculum changes introduced by the PTI government are a menace that should be abandoned forthwith.

https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/906286-a-dark-future

 

#Pakistan - A dangerous ‘truce’

THE mystery of the government’s talks with the banned TTP persists. While sources have disclosed that “face-to-face” discussions, facilitated by the Afghan Taliban in Khost province, have yielded an agreement on a conditional truce, official confirmation is awaited. But there is enough room for concern.

A little over a month ago, Prime Minister Imran Khan had revealed in an interview to Turkish state television that Pakistan was already in talks with some factions of the militant group also known as the Pakistani Taliban. These talks have apparently led to ‘results’ and the government is set to release up to two dozen “foot soldiers” — whatever that term means in the context of a dangerous terrorist outfit that has killed tens of thousands of people in the country. Indeed, the “just a spate of attacks” the prime minister had referred to in that interview has not ceased, with security personnel being frequently targeted.

The TTP’s bloodletting cannot be whitewashed. Neither can the government afford to turn a blind eye to the group’s predilection for violating peace deals as the past has shown. What assurance do our rulers have that an organisation which left no stone unturned to carry out ferocious attacks against all — the military, government officials, ordinary people — and that has been accused of colluding with RAW is just a misguided force that is now willing to tread the path of reform? What guarantee can they give that the release of those they see as minor operatives won’t be a precursor to amnesty for top-ranking TTP commanders and masterminds? Indeed, what evidence do they have that the truce just agreed to will last?

It is true that political unrest and dire economic circumstances at home, as well as an unstable situation in Afghanistan, have made Pakistani officials doubly anxious to resolve the TTP challenge. Across the border, the Afghan Taliban, a nationalist force that fought against the recent foreign occupation of Afghanistan, face greater tests as they grapple with the task of governing a war-torn country. Besides they may feel beholden to the TTP, with whom they share tribal links, for having sheltered them when they were driven out of their country post 9/11. That may explain their role as mediator. But is this exercise, shrouded in such secrecy, the way to a durable solution?

Thousands of families have been directly or indirectly affected by the TTP’s actions, and it is only fair that any debate on cutting a deal with the group must have the input of all those who represent the electorate in parliament. Several opposition members were in government at the time when terrorist strikes were at their zenith; surely, their opinions would be invaluable. A parliamentary debate on the topic may also reveal why so many of our politicians soft-pedal religiously inspired militancy (TTP) or extremism (TLP) but are averse to engaging with rivals working in the same halls of democracy.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1656259/a-dangerous-truce