BNU conference: ‘English medium compulsion will damage education’

‘Both teacher and student should be fluent in language of instruction’.

LAHORE:

Educationists called for greater focus on local languages and less on English at schools – not least because there are not enough teachers who can speak it – as they proposed home-grown solutions to the education crisis here on Thursday.

“Every country has its own unique situation and needs to address its issues with indigenous input from academics sensitive to the needs of education,” said Nasreen Mahmud Kasuri, chair of the Beaconhouse National University Board of Governors, at a conference to mark the university’s tenth anniversary.

Kasuri said that education had been ignored not just by the state but by the private sector too and the conference was an attempt to shed light on various aspects of the problem and posit solutions.

Lahore College for Women University Vice Chancellor Sabiha Mansoor said that there was an urgent need for developing local and regional languages. Urban and educated young people in Punjab had moved away from Punjabi, she said. “The importance of the mother tongue is well known, especially in the ethno-linguistic aspect,” she said. Dr Shahid Siddiqui of the Lahore School of Economics spoke about gender-stereotyping though language. He said schools and universities helped create identification, employing language as a tool. “Children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds are coming to these institutions with certain stereotyping … and it is here that the teachers can counter this,” he said.

Dr Tariq Rehman, dean of the BNU School of Education, gave a presentation on writing on Pakistani trucks as a “window into the popular worldview”. This was a working class art, he said, showing that art was not just for the upper class. He noted that Arabic phrases including Mashallah and Ya Allah Madad were often written on the trucks as blessings. But he also observed images alongside truck writings and some romantic prose. “Ordinary people are interested in life as it is,” he said.

Education session

Society for the Advancement of Education (SAHE) Director Dr Fareeha Zafar questioned the Punjab government’s decision to make English the primary medium of instruction in schools across the Punjab. English was introduced as a compulsory subject from class 1 in 2006. In 2009, the Punjab government announced that 588 schools would be made English medium in the first phase and then 1,764 schools in the second phase.

She said that the adoption of English as the medium of instruction was destroying the quality of education, as neither teachers nor students were comfortable with it. “At the root of the problem is the fact that English is being taught simultaneously to teachers and students,” she said.

“Language is the vehicle which takes one to learning and as such an issue which we cannot ignore,” said SAHE Executive Director Abbas Rashid. He said English should certainly be taught as a subject, but schooling should be in languages with which both the teacher and the learner were familiar.

He said that there were many private schools that claimed to be English medium. “But are these children actually learning English?” He said there was a need to revisit the compulsion for schools to be English medium in a society where teachers were not fit to teach the language nor was it widely spoken.

Maryam Durrani, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the current language policy had political purposes rather than the purpose of ensuring educational development. She evaluated the manifestos of various parties contesting the elections and concluded that while a few lacked a language policy entirely, parties like the MQM and the PPP which called for a review of the policy lacked direction.

Education management

“The state of teachers is pathetic in the Punjab, not because they don’t want to improve, but because there isn’t much being done for them,” said Dr Rukhsana Zia of FC College University.

Dr Zia spoke of her experiences as director at the Directorate of Staff Development in 2004. She said with every government change, new reforms were introduced at all levels, oblivious to the ones already being undertaken.

“There is a total disconnect between policies and ground realities, hence the greater investment in mere brick and mortar structures,” she said. Since it was easy to “make a show” of buildings, governments always focused on such investments. The focus should be on sustainable planning and capacity building, she added. “There is a closed elitist capture on policy making in Pakistan which needs to be penetrated to counter the disconnect between policies and realities,” said Associate Professor Osama Siddique of the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He stressed the need for more research and greater linkages between technocrats and policy makers.

Sumaira Noreen, a doctoral candidate at the Royal Holloway at the University of London, discussed the influence of the pre-independence era on the educational administration in the country.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 3^rd, 2013.