Lessons in ‘patriotism’?
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
By Farah Zia
My son’s birthday that falls on Feb 4 is like a weekend every year, because Feb 5 is a national holiday, declared as “Kashmir Day” (instituted by Nawaz Sharif when he was Prime Minister) ostensibly in support of the Kashmiris. For the common people, though, like other gazetted holidays in Pakistan, Feb 5 is less about remembering Kashmir and more about getting a mid-week break -- time to relax.
We usually throw a lunch on Kashmir Day to celebrate my son’s birthday after which it is time for me to leave for office.
This year was no different.
On the way to my office in downtown Lahore, it is not unusual to see banners all around or to come across a rally or two, demanding an early resolution of the Kashmir issue.
This time, apart from the Shabab-e-Milli and other such ‘religious’ organisations, there was a sequence of banners on Lahore’s Mall Road carrying pictures of Mian Nawaz Sharif and his brother Mian Shahbaz Sharif. Most of them bore the usual inane versification. One banner that caught my eye read “Hindu bania muzammat se nahin murammat se maney ga” roughly translated as “The Hindu money-lender will not mend his ways through persuasion but will have to be physically fixed”.
It made me be angry. Or angrier, should I say. I was already feeling really agitated about an lesson called “Yom-e-Difaa” or “Defence Day” that my son had to do in his Urdu class a few days back. As I read it for him, I found it a pack of sheer lies and a classic case of how young impressionable minds are being indoctrinated through textbooks.
I could make the connection between the Urdu lesson and the banner on display and how difficult it is to work, or even yearn for peace in such a scenario.
My son, a student of grade 7, goes to a private school in Lahore. I find his history book quite amazing, so different from what we were taught as kids. It is reasonably neutral, academically conceived and quite knowledgeable. It moves logically from one civilization to the next, without exception.
I have no problems with his Islamiat course either. Most of it is about rituals and Islamic history. It does not instill fear in his mind the way ours did, though his Islamiat teacher often utters some strange views that I find totally unnecessary.
It is his Urdu syllabus that I find most dangerous. He has two books for Urdu, one a selection of literature and the other prepared by none other than the Punjab Textbook Board. The latter is compulsory for all children in mainstream school systems. Children in private schools read it partially.
The students are being fed a strange concoction of half-Islam and half-patriotism in the name of Urdu. Once again the Islam part is innocuous; some stories about the life of prophet are actually inspiring. The patriotic stories are scary, to say the least. This is what the Yom-e-Difaa lesson was all about. The way it constructs the ‘enemy’, distorts facts and creates a false sense of superiority is bound to stay in the minds of impressionable young children and turn them into inflexible conservative adults who refuse to move beyond their extreme views.
We in Pakistan have made a mistake of looking only at madrassas as seats of indoctrination. Our mainstream schools, private and public, and the very textbooks prepared by our textbook boards are where we need immediate reform.
The amn ki asha (hope for peace) will be realised only if we stop building war scenarios and worshipping war heroes in our text books. Only a sensible citizenry can question the mainstream political parties that simultaneously glorify peace and war.
– The writer is Editor,