This August 14th, millions of Pakistanis will celebrate the nation’s independence, donning the green and white and hoisting the flag high. At the Aga Khan University, we will join our fellow Pakistanis in honouring those who laboured and sacrificed for our freedom, and in declaring our pride in our country to the world.
As we do so, we will contemplate the connection between our work – and that of our fellow educators across the country – and the quest for independence.
That quest was a search for freedom, autonomy and self-determination. So too is the effort in which the nation’s teachers and researchers are engaged: to build an educated citizenry. Educated individuals are above all free individuals. They possess a capacity for independent thought and judgment that liberates them from intellectual dependence and prepares them for citizenship.
And they possess a value in the marketplace that liberates them from economic dependence and enables them to advance the country’s development.
To say this is to acknowledge that independence is a work in progress. Pakistan’s founders sought, as per Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s Allahabad address, to allow Muslim India “to mobilise its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.”
Can we say that we have achieved this goal when only half of class five students can read a simple story or do basic division?
An appreciation for the power of education led Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III, to build upon the work started by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and lead the campaign that resulted in the creation of Aligarh University – a cradle of the Pakistan Movement.
It led his successor, His Highness the Aga Khan, to found the Aga Khan University and its teaching health system which has significantly contributed to the cause of education and healthcare and towards the development of a vigorous intellect.
Today, we need a fresh infusion of the spirit that inspired Pakistan’s founding and that of many of its outstanding institutions of education and health care.
We need to advance the unfinished work of independence by redoubling our efforts to develop healthy, educated and free individuals.
When the crescent and star rise this August 14th, I will be thanking our nation’s educators and health professionals for their untiring efforts to fulfil the promise of independence.
Dr Sulaiman Shahabuddin
AKU President, Karachi
