By Zubeida Mustafa
A FEW months ago, I attended a seminar on education where the Sindh education minister was the chief guest. When he rose to speak, a mob of demonstrators gatecrashed the premises to register their protest. The government had conducted a test to fill teacher vacancies in schools. Very few had passed the test and been recruited. Those who failed to qualify were demanding a job as their entitlement. In the melee, the right of the child did not figure even once.
By Zubeida Mustafa
A STORY that went viral recently was of a little boy whose teacher marked his face with a black dot. The other children were then asked to shame him. Where did the child go wrong? He had spoken in Urdu in a supposedly English-medium school. It was shocking and I felt the pain the child must have felt when he was so humiliated. This was no less than a cardinal sin that was committed against the child, against our national language and against all those children who were made to participate in this hate game.
ON Feb 9, 1984, Gen Ziaul Haq dealt an existential blow to Pakistan when he banned student unions. They were never truly restored though several civilian governments followed him and each promised to remove the ban.
By Zubeida Mustafa
POETS have mourned their unsung heroes. We have our own celebrated poet Mirza Ghalib saying,
(“Not all manifest themselves as lilies and roses/ What faces must lie buried in the dust.”)
Continue reading A beautiful mindBy Zubeida Mustafa
UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report, launched recently, points to a basic flaw in the education systems of South Asia. It is the inequity that the fast-growing private sector in education has spawned. The GEM report does not say it in so many words but the fact is that inequity is stratifying society itself.
Continue reading Society stratifiedBy Zubeida Mustafa
PROF Alexander Key was spot on when he suggested in his talk at a private university in Karachi that students should be offered more options in the field of liberal arts to teach them to think in multiple ways about the world.
Continue reading Liberal arts tabooby Zubeida Mustafa
THE magnitude of the flood calamity notwithstanding, there is hope on the horizon. The flood has exposed the farce of education in rural Sindh. Now we also know it is a myth created by the authorities that parents do not want to send their children to school.
Continue reading Calamity & schoolsBy Zubeida Mustafa
WILL Ali Akbar Hashmi’s hard-hitting speech in the National Assembly on Independence Day cause our parliamentarians to rethink education in Pakistan? Hashmi is a student who shed light on the plight of out-of-school children living in poverty.
Continue reading Why de-school?By Zubeida Mustafa
IN South Asia’s patriarchal societies, writings by women giving their perspective on sociopolitical issues in the early 20th century are not easily available. Diaries are even rarer. Happily, we now have a valuable addition to this genre. It is a diary introducing us to the views of a 24-year-old woman from Hyderabad Deccan, who went to England for further studies. It was my privilege to have a trained preforming artist, Shama Askari, read it out to me.
Continue reading Home thoughtsBy Zubeida Mustafa
“DO not follow in the footprints of your elders. Create your own footprints,” is what Dr Mubarak Ali would exhort his students when he began his academic career as a lecturer of history at the Sindh University (Hyderabad) in 1963.
Continue reading History lessons