950803

Imran Khan launches

membership drive for

'Education Movement'

SHAHID MALIK

LAHORE: Imran Khan has launched a membership appeal for his National Education Movement in order to mobilize the public opinion to declare a war on illiteracy, the ultimate aim being the introduction of a unified nationwide syllabus, which could bring an end to the differences between the education systems for the disparate ranges of the Pakistani society.

In a newspaper article to be published on Friday morning, the founder of the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital, has made out a case for the development of what he has called community-based education, for which academics to form a think-tank would be recruited and services of volunteers solicited to act as teacher trainers in the primary education sector.

Elaborating on the concept of 'one teacher - one school', Imran Khan has referred to "a similar and highly successful scheme called Apna Sehat which approaches its members to set up preventive health education programmes" avoiding expensive bureaucratic structure. Drawing inspiration from the Pakistan, North American Physicians Association, who are running the health project, the National Education Movement has been avowedly designed to be entirely voluntary, except for a paid secretary who would be responsible for co-ordinating the whole effort.

In his article, 'Pakistan Education', Imran Khan has come out with the astounding claim that just after the annexation of the Punjab by the British towards the middle of the 19th century, the literacy in the province was around 80 percent, with over 28 thousand schools in as many villages, where one third of the local revenue was allocated for paying the teachers' emoluments. The replacement of that community-based system of education by one controlled by the colonial government brought down the literacy rate in the province to less than 10 percent, which had been predicted by G W Leintner, the first Principal of Government College, Lahore.

The article is highly critical of the policies of the successive governments after independence, which tried the ordinary people to be "lulled into a false sense of security" by brave promises of universal primary education, not fulfilled on the expiry of deadlines in 1967, 1984 and 1992. Even now "less than 2 percent of the annual government budget is dedicated to education, compared with 20 percent in Iran, Turkey and Malaysia" and a significant 10 percent in smaller states in the region like Sri Lanka and Nepal, Imran Khan claimed.

Holding the "Brown Sahibs" primarily responsible for the less than 30 percent rate of literacy, the article has attributed the perpetuation of the class system to the education set-up that has created "a westernised upper class with a deep-rooted inferiority complex and a mass populace which was largely uneducated." The existing disparity, according to Imran Khan, had stemmed largely from the forcible closure of the Medrassahs which stood on a par with the equivalent system of education in Britain but were banned by the British rulers as part of their policy to destroy the highly developed traditional Islamic structures of education in the colonies of North Africa and South Asia.

In order to fend off the fears that country would "soon become a banana republic" where anarchy could not discriminate between the rich and the poor, the National Education Movement was being seen by Imran Khan as an effort to revive the pre-colonial system of education based on the will and co-operation of the community. "The time has come for the entire country to mobilize itself as never before and declare a war on illiteracy" because "we don't have any time left for words-theories either at dinner tables or in newspaper articles," the article concludes.