Who cares about the SNC?

Conversations surrounding the Single National Curriculum (SNC) have steadily intensified. From a curricular reform conceived of in bureaucratic offices, the SNC has become a matter of heated debate across drawing rooms in our country. But why?

One would imagine that in a country where the state of public education has long been abysmal — a situation that has led practitioners in the field to label Pakistan, “the graveyard of education reform” — our concerns on the curriculum would not begin and end with questions of whether or not female characters in textbooks are depicted with hijabs; what the religious agenda behind these reforms is; what will be the implications for elite private schools, et al.

These are compelling questions, of course, and tell us about the political bend of our time. However, many of these concerns are arising because finally, they concern us and our children. That is, anxieties are greater now about the implications elite schools and children will face given the vicissitudes of a political regime that cares deeply about appeasing conservative forces throughout the country. The truth, however, is that children in our public schools have not only long been dealing with school environments that foster rote-memorisation, low expectations, corporal punishment, evaluation systems that fail to set them up for real learning, and linguistic challenges that limit comprehension, but the average Pakistani student enrolled in public school has been consuming deeply religious and nationalistic propaganda for a very long time.

The environment at the average public school is not only deeply authoritarian, with little room for questioning or doubt, but zealous hatred of a certain neighbouring country, inaccurate histories about our political and religious roots, a tendency towards using violence to discipline, and poorly concealed animosity towards women that are too visible, have been hallmarks of the government school. Things have been bad for quite some time now, and it’s a tragedy that the little discourse we have around education in Pakistan is divorced from the historic functioning of the typical public school classroom, and the reality that an education policy reform like the SNC — one that is so politically aligned with the government of the time — tends not to last as regime change happens.

When you enter the average Pakistani classroom, one of the first things you notice is that teachers write things on the board, and students copy them down. The dynamics of this process may vary between schools; with some where discipline through violence is more common a practice than others. The content of what is actually taught is a greater problem in contexts where students are allowed and encouraged to understand what they are doing, and why they are doing it. In the absence of an environment that incentivises teachers to actually explain what is otherwise gibberish on a board, and have students draw connections between topics and their lived realities — learning cannot happen. Critiques that obsessively focus on the content of what is or is not taught in our schools miss out on the entire point: the things that are taught are hardly taught. They are put in writing for future reproduction. The real crisis is not in the content, but in the classroom.

Our students in public schools are not learning, and they have not been learning for a very long time. We need to stop getting distracted by surface-level critiques of whatever reform is the latest in our time, and dig deeper to understand why students are not learning in the first place. At the least, public education should not only matter when we think it will impact elite schools, and elite children, and debates on the future of education for an entire country should really make their way out of our drawing rooms and into our least privileged classrooms.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 9^th, 2021.

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