Smart teaching focuses on methods other than content — on how to think, not what to think.
KARACHI: This is apropos Asad Rahim Khan’s article, “A crisis of the humanities” (May 6).While education in the humanities and social sciences has suffered in Pakistan, it is by no means dead. The Institute of Business Administration (IBA) in Karachi recently launched a degree programme in the social sciences and liberal arts, Habib University is about to launch their own programmes in these subjects while LUMS, Beaconhouse National University, Forman Christian College and many of our provincial universities have run such programmes for decades (Forman Christian in Lahore for 150 years).
The issue isn’t so much that the subjects aren’t available for the students; 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 methods other 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 moralising 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 undo all the bad teaching which the students have encountered in primary and secondary school.
We continue to address education piecemeal: we pretend that what happens in class three is unconnected to what happens in class nine 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.
Framji Minwalla
IBA
Published in The Express Tribune, May 8th, 2014.
Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.
