Bloom thought American education was perverting the old ideals: that pursuing success came before the pursuit of love and liberty. Education was meant to improve the soul, said Bloom, not impoverish it. That’s where the crisis of humanities came in.
Sadly, it was a discussion Pakistan never began. Humanitarian crises are what people like to read and report about here: the floods, the blood, the terror, the lack of things basic. With all the humanity around us, studying the humanities, the realists tell us, would be whistling in the dark.
They’re wrong. It took serious, sustained negligence to get us here; serious, sustained innovation may yet get us out. But creating that kind of intellectual atmosphere — between hardline madrassas on one end and society magazines on the other — grows less and less possible with every passing day. If the fount of fresh thinking lies at society’s door, this is one society bent on draining it dry.
While our humanitarian crises may be directly proportionate to our humanities crisis, the latter isn’t considered much a crisis at all. A place as hard as Pakistan, we are told, needs as many able-bodied engineers as it can get, sociologists, not so much. Of 31,000 students at the University of Karachi, just 9,000 opted for the social sciences last year.
How did this happen? To name the serial offenders, there’s the state: to be exact, the Ministry of Education’s Curriculum Wing. The wing’s wise men have proven the heavyweight champions of driving our social sciences six feet under. Its only son, glorious Pakistan Studies, has been twisting something as fluid as history into dead propaganda. Thanks to them, the story of Pakistan, in all its rich human complexity, reads like Pravda.
Students that stayed awake in class now know Ghaznavi was more saint than a power-hungry warlord, that Akbar was both a heretic and a womaniser. They know Shivaji ‘the Mountain Rat’ knifed us in the back — literally. They know the world begins when Muhammad bin Qasim invaded Sindh, but forget he was executed three years later by a bitter caliph. Partition provides the story’s sad ending and little is taught after, i.e., Actual Pakistan Studies.
Yes, Pak Studies, is an indisputable, agenda-laden bill of goods that stamps out any hope of critical thought and it sets the tone. For its part, the state pulps our history into national security cereal, and the rest of our educational sphere has problems of its own.
Some are procedural: rote learning is a convenient cop out for underpaid teachers and unengaged students, and guarantees success at everything from religious seminaries to the British Council. Others are economic: for an aspirational middle class, studying Socrates does not a safety net make — technical training, on the other hand, is tried and tested. Of course, Pakistan is uniquely disadvantaged that even its un-aspiring upper class concentrates on bad restaurants and Prada bags instead.
Others are societal: teaching isn’t incentivised, nor are teachers afforded social status. A recent Gallup survey studying Pakistani parents’ vocational preferences for their children showed 40 per cent wanting doctors above all else, right before army officers and engineers. Few cared for pursuits more poetic.
Others, still, are cultural: no one reads. Plagiarism is not only popular, it seldom carries the sort of sanctions most self-respecting varsities would enforce. Diversity of thought is considered dangerous and, as a direct result, retards research.
Then there’s the Powers That Be theory: that asking questions is heresy for those that hawk religious literalism. That understanding one’s rights is poison for the landed class. That alternative histories may free people from the state’s ideological fetters. True or not, said powers are certainly looking the other way.
This is a shame. British scholar Terry Eagleton recently wrote of the vistas at stake, “What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future.”
The social sciences enrich every aspect of the human condition, but there are other, more selfish reasons for us to embrace them. If Pakistan were to respect the humanities, it would tap mines of human talent that desire nothing but progress. And that same talent would ensure Pakistan is better understood, better diagnosed and, ultimately, better run. But how to get there?
Our private seats of learning require forsaking just a little of the commercial for the social. They may yet produce human talent that values literature over lawn fashion.
For the vast majority of students, however, the state holds the key. The curriculum needs overhauling — hard narratives work well for North Korean demigods; a place as deep and different as Pakistan should be allowed to make up its own mind. Procedurally, the way we teach must be made interactive, challenging convention must not be taboo anymore, and plagiarism must carry penalties.
Of course, none of this will last if the state doesn’t ensure retention, i.e., carving out the kind of intellectual and economic space that could both welcome and absorb our social scientists. This means plowing the funding for underpasses into research facilities and scholarships instead, raising that research to implementable policy, and recognising the value of a liberal education.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “We seem to have forgotten that the expression ‘a liberal education’ originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only.”
We have something of the reverse here. But if society is to be made livable, the social sciences must be shown to be what they always were: a worthy pursuit.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 6th, 2014.
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COMMENTS (13)
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Social Sciences??
Why do you need Social Sciences, when all History, Economics and Political Science is already available to you in an omnibus of a Book. Further, a subject called Philosophy, which permeates all Disciplines under Humanities, asks questions about existence and nature of God. How does a State that derives its Sovereighnty drom God, allow such questions to be raised.
An excellent perspective on how we should change our national obsession for doctors/engineers and also about building our societies. Progress into a hopeful future is only possible if we have a healthy civil society who knows how to collaborate, have pride in themselves, their heritage and knows that only tolerance for differences can lead out of our present quagmire.
Generally well-reasoned, but the quotation from Thoreau is rather ill-advised. We are living in the 21st century, not in a day where elitism was prevailed. The world far more advanced then ever imagined during his time and possessing skills is paramount if one is to make any progress in this age. However, education in the humanities can be included to supplement the technical education.
Congratulations Asad Rahim for writing an excellent article.
Although I might want to write here a whole article in support of your argument, I would rather, the readers go back to this article and re read it.
And then, apply it to themselves and propagate its essence within their families and friends.
@Framji Minwalla: "....In a country as condescendingly moralizing as ours, this failure has as much to do with the refusal to question and critique as it does with the refusal to teach students how to accomplish this...." . @Framji Minwalla:*s comment was a breath of fresh air. I wish more commentators on ET pages have the same intellectual depth and maintain similar sobriety
Brilliant as per usual
Social Sciences are very important and no doubt we as a nation need to do a lot to harness and cultivate such disciplines, but i Must say, author has presented a smoke of writing, with exaggerating a lot and twisting things, the author is trying to visualize Pakistan in his own figment of imagination, induced by some self-induced philosophical moment that he might have had, Mr Asad, keep it real, you are NOT Socrates, so spare us your moment of brilliance.
While education in the humanities and social sciences has suffered in Pakistan, it is by no means dead. IBA recently launched a degree program in the social sciences and liberal arts, Habib University is about to launch their own programs in these subjects, And LUMS, BNU, Foreman Christian, and many of our provincial universities have run such programs for decades (Foreman Christian in Lahore for 150 years).
The issue isn't so much that the subjects aren't available for students to study, it's the lack of qualified teachers, innovative pedagogical strategies, and a complexly imagined understanding of how undergraduate education might be constructed. Smart teaching focuses on method more than content, on how to think, not what to think. Yet teachers and politicians and parents and yes even our media continue to focus on content and not process.
In a country as condescendingly moralizing as ours, this failure has as much to do with the refusal to question and critique as it does with the refusal to teach students how to accomplish this. This shouldn't come as a surprise. University faculty are underpaid, overworked, and don't really have the time to give students the individual attention they deserve or need to undo all the bad teaching students have encountered I primary and secondary school.
We continue to address education piecemeal, as if what happens in Class 3 is unconnected to what happens in Class 9 or to university sophomores. Without a more holistic approach, and not the kind of stupid one that advocates one education system for all, we are destined to reproduce the kind of mediocrity we have come to expect as the Pakistani norm.
Suffice is to say that a society, a culture, a country that hides the truth and doctors school books with false and made up history is pathetic indeed. If drivel and junk is passed as history,..then the future looks bleak.
We will be very lucky if Pakistan could retain even the appearance of a civilized society in the near future.The writer wishes for a reverse gear which does not look to be happening.
very interesting points. This is something I've personally noticed too. This crisis permeates related aspects like finding your own sources of information and being able to sift through a mass of knowledge
Important subject and nicely expressed. One aspect you did not stress was that people learn from what they see and they see semi literate leaders, who think that dressing sharp and driving in 18 car cavalcades is a substitute for knowledge / intelligence and an endorsement of power........change has to radiate from the top along with the other measures you so nicely enumerated.