Opinions

Historical fallacies and expired version of education

By Mahnoor Jahangir

In the era of globalization and free flow of information, it is very important to teach and learn true history. In today’s Pakistan, almost ninety-five percent under-40 population has been taught an untrue and distorted history, which causes social iniquities and promotes falsehood in each and every discipline. We have witnesses in schools, colleges and universities taught and still propagating bogus history and glorifying intruders and plunderers.

In the past, writers were always influenced by kings, rulers and favored the story line of the powerful imperial forces. Now, is the time to expose the falsehood, half-truth, slogans and statements tailored to the needs of the old rulers, martial law regimes, and stuff cooked up by faceless panels and short-sighted policies of undemocratic regimes and pseudo political classes.

The cumulative effects of these shoddy writings are horrifying and stunning. The inbreeding from these repetitive, incoherent and subjective books compulsorily prescribed in all schools, colleges and universities of the country generate hypocrites, blindfolded zealots, fundamentalists, intriguers, timeservers and ignoramuses with the highest degrees. To wake up the bulk of our uneducated parliamentarians, teachers caught in the race for commercialism and tuition subverting the educational system and, above all, to educate the baffled parents, someone should come forward to pin down the true history. To educate the true picture of history, we must now briefly look at a parallel but totally different education system and its teachers to find out if economy can buy a better knowledge of history. We must abolish the different kinds of system in private and state run schools in each province, Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.

Private schools offer nothing different from the government schools, except the medium (language) in which they teach; their standards of teaching in English is also very low.  The only reason for their existence and proliferation is the ambition of the confused middle class to be seen to belong to the upper middle class. For the fulfillment of this desire, the confused middle class pays at least ten times more in fees and funds to the private schools. This is first step to build the class society to oppress and exploit further already deteriorated spectrum of the state. In these circumstances need emerges from want and awareness.

If there is something missing in my life and the deficiency angers me, I feel the need to protest. Even then, I may not be able to protest because I don’t care or I know that the expostulation will be useless or for some other reason. Even if driven by need and ability, I may still refuse to protest because I am a coward or I fear reprisals or I am weak or I have been asked to keep quite. In our colleges and universities students political and religious groups are allowed to protest for their chosen teachers, admission quota and other illegal means but not allowed to protest to change the false history, plagiarize and bogus science textbooks like mathematics, physics, chemistry and IT books. Conscious students must organize demos against the poison they are being fed.

The minds of children are being damaged systemically, pitilessly and irreparably.

The contributor studies psychology at COMSATS, Islamabad. She hails from Hunza. 

Related Articles

One Comment

Back to top button