‘Current education system, a prison to ideas of west’

Two-day national conference on education starts at NUML

The prevailing education system in the country is borrowed from the west, which gives us knowledge but not wisdom. Rather, it is a prison of ideas of the west and we are blindly following them, not knowing the fact that this system is hampering the minds of our youth.

These views were expressed by Riphah International University (RIU) Vice-Chancellor (VC) Professor Dr Anees Ahmed while speaking at a two-day national conference on education titled ‘Education in the 21st Century: Expectations, Challenges, and Possibilities’.

The conference has been organised by the Education Department of the National University of Modern Languages (NUML).

Referring to Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s speech at the first-ever education conference in December 1947, Dr Ahmed said that Jinnah envisioned an education system which focuses on character-building but we never followed these teachings.

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He further said that countries such as China, Japan, France and Russia focused on a single language at the national level and all of their programmes are in their national languages but they still managed to excel in every field at the global level. On the other hand, Pakistan never gave much importance to its national language.

“I am not against the indigenous languages but we have to have one language at a national level,” he said, lamenting that Pakistan was once a colonial nation and hence never tried to think critically and follow what Quaid-i-Azam or Allama Muhammad Iqbal said.

He elaborated that there are many native languages and cultures in China but you will never see them giving preferential treatment to speakers of a specific language the way fellow Pakistanis do.

NUML Rector Major General (Retd) Muhammad Jaffar said that education is imperative and inevitable for us in every walk of life. Let us remind ourselves through this conference how important it is for us to realize and acknowledge the role of education with all its dynamics in present-day Pakistan.

The rector added that NUML has paved the path for the promotion of research and improved and adaptable educational paradigms. It is moving ahead with considerable efficacy and system.

NUML believes that the essential rule of education is research and it has a fundamental role in the development of civilization, he said, adding that higher standards in research adopted by our faculty and scholars are very encouraging.