Not three but six million idiots!

Children are not dropping out, they are opting out and staging a walkout on government schools.

When you were a student, did you study well when the teacher yelled at you? If you are a parent, would you keep your child in a school with no toilet, no water, no electricity, a falling roof, no security and, if you are lucky, no teacher? There are more than six million children in Pakistan not turning up for such a remarkable learning journey. And to add insult to injury they, their parents and their entire community are tagged as uncouth, unintelligent, useless, illiterate masses. The fact is that they are not dropping out, they are opting out — they are staging a walkout on a system that is simply not capable of catering to their social and economical needs. The confession that needs to be made is that education in Pakistan for the poor has become a double-edged sword — send your child to a government school with the characteristics mentioned above or to a private school of appalling quality; at least government schools do not charge for bad quality education.

What is truly disturbing is that organisations such as Unesco, Unicef and the World Bank continue to call these children dropouts. How can they get away with this insult?

Of course, there are the oft-heard complaints about the ideological and institutional constraints of schooling: irrelevance, too much pressure on children, heavy bags, overloaded curriculum, corporal punishment, too many tuitions, etc. But I demand that you look into the hidden curriculum of schooling. It disconnects us from nature, physical work, our communities, our local languages and from real world issues. In sucking away children’s time, forcing them to repeat de-contextualised information, schools kill their sensitivity, innate propensity for cooperation curiosity and imagination and, above all, diversity. Schooling, with its precise system of sorting, ranking and labelling of children, has created a modern social hierarchy that is far worse than the caste system, to the point that people who do not know how to read or write but have astonishing skills and expertise are treated with contempt. Such is the arrogance of today’s education.

American teacher John Taylor Gatto has described the purpose of schooling as ‘dumbing us down’. Students learn to not question authority and have a dogmatic faith in experts and teachers to solve their problems. Perhaps the worst thing that schooling does is to force everyone onto one path, one measure of success, one style of intelligence, one way to learn and one vision of the world.

Paulo Freire, one of the great educationists of our times, explains it immaculately and emphatically in his revolutionary book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: (a) The teacher teaches and the students are taught; (b) The teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c)The teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d)The teacher talks and the students listen — meekly; (e) The teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (f) The teacher chooses the programme content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; (g)The teacher is the subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

We have a long list of walkouts in the world already making it to the top. What is most important is to start giving dignity and respect to those who are brave enough to try something else than going through the rigours of conventional schooling.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 2^nd, 2010.