In accordance with a traditional understanding that continues to be widely followed in our region by many educationists, the process of learning in Southasia today is still largely by rote. As such, there is little or no understanding on the part of most students of what exactly they are studying, nor why. It is critical to realise, however, that education in the 21st century is far more demanding and competitive than it was in the past, due to the vast and growing knowledge base, developments in technology and an increasingly globalised perspective. It is imperative, then, to make students into active rather than passive learners to deal with this changing context – but this is a lesson that many in Southasia, and particularly in Pakistan, have yet to appreciate.
Around the world, the idea of 'quality' education has itself been forced to evolve in recent years, in three particular ways. First, in terms of the education process itself, students must be taught how to relate their learning to their day-to-day lives, with a focus on how to learn rather than depending solely on teachers and textbooks. Second, the goal of quality education has also changed, with an eye to enabling students to perform well academically and socially, and to become thinking, caring and tolerant global citizens. The third aspect is facilitating learners not only to perform well academically, but also to groom them to think for themselves. In short, we hope that they will be adaptive, mature and tolerant; and to respect ideological, cultural and religious diversity. Indeed, such skills – quite removed from the central tenets of the traditional curricula in this region's countries – have become important for a student's very survival in the globalised world. Quality education assumes the pivotal role of trained teachers who have a solid knowledge base, and have control over what to teach and how to teach it. The teachers themselves, therefore, need to be allowed to develop the expertise and self-confidence to show students the path to independent thinking and learning – and without feeling threatened themselves.
Seen from this perspective, Pakistan is nowhere near achieving the goals of quality education. Over the past several decades, education-policy documents, white papers and commission reports from Islamabad have typically been full of idealistic rhetoric, but they are not underpinned by the research required to guide educationists in the campaign for a quality education. Government policy has been marked by a conspicuous lack of a grounding in reality. The poor and worsening condition of government-school education can be seen through the prism of English-language education in Pakistan, with the spectrum of problems evident from government administration to teacher training, curriculum and reading materials. The situation has changed so little that the hyperbolic metaphor included in a British Council analysis done during the 1980s in Pakistan remains as relevant today. "The present [English Language Teaching] situation in Pakistan," B Campbell wrote in 1987, can be best compared to a terminally ill patient … who has suffered multiple injuries in a catastrophic accident or been attacked simultaneously by a great number of severe illnesses. It is not possible to restore the patient's health by curing only one of his problems at a time. All must be treated simultaneously in a coordinated way, otherwise, when one illness or injury is cured, the remaining disorders will grow worse and leave the patient sick as ever.
That 'terminally ill' patient has now been suffering from various diseases for an additional painful two decades. Over the 40-odd years that this writer has been associated with education in Pakistan, little but cosmetic changes have been made in the country's education policy, and there has been negligible impact on teacher education or teaching materials. The adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda, published in London in 1894 and long taught at the intermediate level in Pakistani colleges, was singled out by teachers during the 1980s for removal from the national syllabus. Yet the novel is still being taught today, leading many to joke that the real 'prisoner' in need of freeing is the curriculum itself.