Farrukh Khan Pitafi’s Official Website

I do not have enough patience left to watch a three-hour Indian movie. Once in a while when there comes a nice movie, my wife invites me to watch a few interesting scenes. ‘Taare Zameen Par’ is a movie whose few scenes convinced me that it must be a great movie and I am sure I will watch it someday. However, as the story goes it is about a child suffering from dyslexia and the ordeal faced by his family. A very nice and courageous choice of subject for a South Asian filmmaker I must say. There is a scene where the child goes to the school for normal children and the way the teacher treats him gives a sense of déjà vu. I must confess that I was never quite a boy genius during my school days. But I know one thing for sure too that our school system is not meant to provide everyone an equal opportunity. It is a world where the children sulk and vow to change everything when they grow up and when they actually do grow up, they forget that they were once children too. Peter Pan at least did not have to endure the humiliation of Dickensian schooling system. That is perhaps why he never wanted to grow up.

Culturally, I like a school system like the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which despite being a boarding school is a place where children want to go of their own will. No Disneyland of course, but a majestic place with good food, interesting things to learn and a lot of space to breath in. Otherwise, I have seen school systems of a vast variety and am a bit perturbed to confess that none of them seemed to appeal to me or was found properly functioning. One of the reasons is, forgive my saying it though, the raw deal we get in the name of a school teacher. Not every school teaches magic but there is no gainsaying that the things we are supposed to learn at the school are no less magical. If a child feels comfortable in the school, his curious little mind may find the answers that are nothing short of a mental feast. The question then is how to interest these young folks in being mentally present at the school? The teachers that we get at the school, at least a majority of them, do not help in making things easier. Of course, there are no Amir Khans present to rescue us in real life.
I have repeatedly asked myself why is it that the schools do not manage to find the crème de la crème to teach us. One of the reasons is that with the growing population there is such a humungous need for new schools that not everyone can do justice to it. But that is not all. Education has become a business. Those who invest in this business want good returns. As a result, while we pay huge sums in fees, only very little proportion of this reaches the teachers tasked with delivering us the goods.
That is why our teachers are usually not our role models and it is not considered a profession but a mere pastime among the relatively affluent classes. If your daughter is awaiting her pre-medical results in four months or so, you allow her to temporarily teach at a good school. Once her results arrive, she is supposed to discontinue this pastime and head for the medical college. Again it is the best adventure for the desperate housewives.
When you know you do not have emotional strength to do anything else, you choose to become a teacher. This is supposed to help you in ensuring that your children get good attention at school but other children seldom get equal importance. Then of course being a fulltime housewife is sadly and seriously an unlearning experience. The desperation etched in you makes sure that when you go to the school, you try an absolute domination and thought control.
Last but not the least, there is this vast supply of career teachers who come from poor backgrounds and either do not have what it takes to correctly influence the young minds or are usually so busy in tuitions that they seldom do justice to their professional needs.
In the schooling system in general and boarding schools in particular, there has cropped up another heartrending element of child abuse. Parents who want to send their children to the boarding schools often hold them back because there is fear of their children losing their innocence to some frustrated teacher. Unfortunately, our society is not strong enough to look into the mirror to assess its weaknesses. We do not want to recognise that such matters exist. But they do and that is a huge problem in my view. JK Rowling recently confessed that Hogwarts Headmaster Professor Dumbledore was gay, yet he is never seen taking advantage of any student. Have you ever thought what would have happened had Hogwarts been situated in Pakistan?
Sir Humphrey Appleby in ‘Yes Minister’ used to say that the only purpose of schools was not to impart knowledge, but to ensure that the houses were not set on fire when the parents went to office. Unless that is the true purpose of our education system, the entire world needs to give this matter a serious thought. The purpose of the schools is not to give children an equal opportunity in competing. The actual reason why they exist is to offer an equal chance in learning. That cannot be done unless they find their schools more attractive than their homes. This cannot happen as long as we have over bulging classes and the bullies keep walking the grounds at schools.
One very fine way to teach the children is to give them more and expect a little less from them in the examinations. This can happen only when there are animated discussions in the classrooms and cannot as long as you do not have teachers who really want to connect to their pupils and teach them at their level of comprehension, not their own. Unfortunately, successive governments have given this issue little import. The result is evident in the shape of a huge number of ill-conceived schools with fairly poor curriculum and environment. One wonders why, if there can be a higher education commission, can there be no competent national lower education commission? Until that changes and teaching becomes our first priority, children will have the right to keep singing Pink Floyd’s song: “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.”
The writer is a television journalist and a commentator on political and security issues.
Courtesy The Post

Posted on March 15th, 2008 under Main • Tags: Development, Education, Policy. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback