Education or Indoctrination? The Future of Pakistan’s Youth
- Language Imposition & Identity Crisis – Enforcing English as the primary medium of instruction disconnects students from their cultural roots and indigenous knowledge.
- Western Dominance in Academia – Over-reliance on Western narratives hinders local intellectual growth, making academia irrelevant to Pakistan’s socio-political needs.
- Media’s Role in Shaping Minds – The unchecked influence of social media and the film industry distorts history, culture, and societal values, deepening the identity crisis.
After an unsuccessful war of independence in 1857, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan said, “There is nothing but education that can help Muslims regain their right to self-rule.” On the other hand, British colonizers also crafted an education system to maintain their control for the long term and create like-minded local supporters. It was education that once led people of the subcontinent to stand for their inherent rights, and it was also education that compelled a large number of people to give their consent for slavery. Now the responsibility lies with us: what kind of education we provide to our youth.
Unfortunately, Pakistan’s education system can only lead students to a sense of inferiority, uncertainty, confusion, and incompetence. It furthers identity crises and makes ambitious minds feel burdened by education.
Among many structural flaws, one of such grave challenges is the language. In this regard, enforcing the English language as a primary medium of instruction restricts the effective endorsement of ideas to students and so conceptual clarity. Although the English language has established importance, the imposed English language can only westernize minds and disconnect minds from cultural roots instead of enhancing creativity. It also distances learning minds from Indigenous historical literature of one’s forefathers and so results in the lack of indigenously locally generated ideas that can fit into one’s own socio-political needs. Only the culture of adopting Western narratives without critical analysis can be fostered in this way.
Over-reliance on Western knowledge at the cost of local production of ideas is another matter of concern. It shows that the country itself has not built up organized, disciplined structures to sophisticatedly judge existing knowledge and generate new ideas. It directly leads to the irrelevance of academia with the market and society. Such education can only nominate youth for the length of duration that they have wasted, not the level of exploration they have conducted.
The film industry and social media have now emerged as powerful platforms posing challenges to society. Such platforms are shaping young minds. They matter a lot as uncontrolled contributors without any responsibility for factual and objective information. Now, social behaviors and state-society relations are largely affected by social media and the film industry. Unfortunately, most of Pakistan’s youth is the victim of her narrative. The obligation of training minds to build opinions based on objective information from primary sources is not being fulfilled by academia.
Factors like the homogenous imposition of the English language, an imbalanced curriculum dominated by Western materialistic thoughts, and misrepresentation of the culture and history of Pakistan through the media and film industry are some of the major causes of the identity crisis in Pakistan. Such a situation can only make emerging young minds directionless, which means having no standard to decide right and wrong. In the era of the 4th industrial revolution, Pakistan can no longer bear an outdated, meaningless education system. Otherwise, the process of changing heroes into villains and societal values into meaningless concepts will keep running as the result of constant cultural imperialism.
The pace of global advancement is quite high, and power dynamics are changing. An uncertain future of the globe is frightening. Pakistan can no longer afford an outdated and disoriented education system. The English language needs to be selectively taught where necessary instead of imposed universally. The balance between indigenous local literature and Western ideas needs to be held to widen thoughts instead of bounding them to any single worldview.
The film industry must be a source of one’s cultural preservation instead of contributing to cultural imperialism and destroying the values of society. Academia must be giving youth the sense of analyzing and sifting out the random information coming through social media. A progressive approach to educational reforms does not require big budgets but only commitment, vision, and will to prioritize intellectual growth. If we still fail to introduce crucial reforms in our education system, it will be much more difficult to come out of the cycle of dependence and humiliation.
The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Spine Times.
Muhammad Shahzad
The writer is a student of International Relations at the International Islamic University, Islamabad.
