Category Archives: Education

Where we went wrong

Education, Politics, Terrorism and Violence, Women

By Zubeida Mustafa

IT was supposed to be an occasion to felicitate Malala on her birthday and use her speech at the UN Youth Assembly to inspire the audience. Party representatives were to be brought together on a common platform to renew their pledge to educate Pakistan’s children, especially girls.

In this context the South Asian Women in Media, with the support of the South Asian Free Media Association, took the step of convening a seminar on ‘Women’s education and terrorism’ at the Karachi Press Club the other day.

Regrettably, the seminar failed to achieve the objective it had set out to do. It became a forum for politicking rather than focusing on the issues at stake in education. I was hoping to hear the party representatives spell out the strategies they were planning to promote education in the country. Instead we heard a lot of loud talk extolling the virtues of education, as though we didn’t know. Do our leaders believe we still have to be persuaded about the advantages of education? Continue reading Where we went wrong →

Fabricating history

Education, Health, History, Organ Trade and Donation, SIUT

By Zubeida Mustafa

THE SIUT’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Culture (CBEC) holds interesting forums periodically where renowned scholars are invited to address the members. Since ethics is a wide-ranging subject the thought-provoking speeches on a variety of subjects delivered there provide the audience some issues to chew upon.

In July, Dr Arifa Syeda Zahra, who teaches history in a Lahore college, was a guest of the CBEC and the point she drove home very forcefully and convincingly was that those who destroy history do it with the purpose of erasing the collective memory of a people. The idea behind this act of vandalism is to pre-empt change, which Dr Arifa Zahra describes as the most difficult process in individuals and societies. Continue reading Fabricating history →

Death of social sciences

Children and Youth, Education, Social Issues

By Zubeida Mustafa

THE competition for space in academia between the social sciences and the ‘others’ — namely, the pure and physical sciences, technological disciplines, medicine-related knowledge, and business and management studies — has been a permanent feature of the intellectual history of mankind.

Our one and only Nobel laureate, Prof Abdus Salam, would always be lamenting that Pakistan lacks a science culture. That not only meant that we neglect science in our universities and do not allocate enough resources for research. It also implies we do not inculcate the spirit of inquiry in our children and as a nation we do not analyse natural and social phenomena rationally and on the basis of scientifically verified information.

The treatment meted out to Dr Salam in his lifetime and after his death by this country vindicates his lament about our alienation from science. Continue reading Death of social sciences →

Writing for children

Books, Children and Youth, Education

By Zubeida Mustafa

AN email circular drew my attention to The ABC of It, an exhibition of children’s books that opened in the New York Public Library last week. The NYPL website announced that literature for young readers is important as through them one learns what books are teaching children. It also added that such books reveal a lot about the societies that produced them.

This observation provides food for thought. If I were asked to devise a yardstick to measure how child-friendly a society is, I would base it on the volume, quality, diversity, content and, above all, authorship of the children’s literature it produces. All authors and poets who have made a name for themselves in the literary world by writing for adults have always found time to write for children.
Continue reading Writing for children →

Invisible little workers

Children and Youth, Education, Human Rights, Labour

By Zubeida Mustafa

JUNE 12 was Day against Child Labour. It is a shame that we still have to observe such a day. But we must if we have to make our society less insensitive towards children.

On this occasion, Sparc, which has been struggling since 1992 for the protection of the rights of the child in Pakistan, launched a weeklong campaign focusing on child domestic labour. It demands a ban on it. This is a laudable move though the strategy needs to be well-thought-out.

As is the case in Pakistan, anomalies abound. First of all, we do not even have reliable data. How many children are there in the labour force? The government has not conducted a survey to collect information since 1996 when it stated that three million children were working in the country. Today various agencies give much higher numbers which range between 10 and 12 million (the International Labour Organisation and Unicef, the UN children’s agency). Continue reading Invisible little workers →