THE SPIRIT OF PAKISTAN
In his speech at the centenary celebrations of the Rangmahal Mission High School, Lahore, Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar, the Punjab Governor exhorted the members of the teaching profession that without waiting for any elaborate schemes to be worked out to re-orient education in Pakistan they can and should forthwith make a beginning in that direction by bringing their day to day school life in line with the spirit of Pakistan. A very sound piece of advice indeed, containing much practical wisdom.
In our issue for November 16, we called attention to this very fact. Much useful time was being unnecessarily wasted, we pointed our, over syllabi, courses of studies, textbooks, training of teachers and all the rest of the formal technique with which education, quite erroneously, has come to be identified. No such elaborate arrangements are indispensable for the educational process to start. The impression that education is impossible without books and examinations and all the rest of the paraphernalia is itself a legacy of the alien rule and a relic of the slave mentality of old.
It needs just two things for the process of education to start – the teacher and the pupil. The moment the pupil comes into the living presence of the teacher – provided the teacher has any ray of life in him – his education starts. Books may serve as “aids” in the process. The main actors in the drama are the pupil and the teacher – the pupil first, the teacher afterwards. Books, when made all in all become “escapes” from rather than incentives to sound education.
Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar is not an educationist. But his emphasis on the spirit of Pakistan in the education of the rising generation, especially at the school stage, is a suggestion that should do credit to one well versed in the science of education. Nine-tenths of education consists in the general atmosphere of a school – the non-material, intangible abstract something known as “atmosphere”. This atmosphere can at once be steeped in the spirit of Pakistan without the loss of a single day.
What is this spirit of Pakistan? Just this that we are a free people now, with a free country of our own, with ideas and ideals of our own, with aims and aspirations of our own – yea with Destiny of our own, a Destiny than which no higher destiny is imaginable. That we must make this country great bring it abreast of the most advanced countries of the world, and secure for it a place in the sun which once upon a time the Islamic pattern of state of which Pakistan is an heir enjoyed – these and similar sentiments go to make up the spirit of Pakistan and it should be the foremost concern of our educationists to inculcate, foster and inspire these in the minds of our youth. And this can certainly be done at once by any teacher, trained or untrained, provided he himself has a vision of this high Destiny of Pakistan.
In our last article on this topic, we urged that it should be somebody’s business to run up and down the country and make the teaching profession and the student community Pakistan-minded – that is to say, should impart this touch of the “spirit of Pakistan”, to use His Excellency Nishtar’s expression, to our educational system. It is exactly here however that we come up against a snag in the process. The educational machinery is manned by those who have been brought up in the spirit, not of Pakistan, but of a foreign bureaucracy. At the helm of the education system should be men who have in them a right revolutionary fervour, men who are there not only to earn salaries but to build a nation, men with whom life is a mission, not a career.
Pakistan is avowedly an Islamic state – a state where life has to be remodelled in the light and glow of Islamic ideals, a State which is to be a laboratory for making the big experiment of the Islamic way of life. This is the spirit of Pakistan. And Sardar Nishtar has rightly urged on the reaching profession, the builders of the nation of tomorrow, to rediscover this spirit and steep the youth of the nation in the same. It is this high idealism, this burning glowing faith in the Islamic way of life, this right missionary zeal to make this way of life prevail in the world that constitutes the spirit of Pakistan. Technical and scientific knowledge is an indispensable equipment for modern life. Our schools and colleges must aim at a very high standard of efficiency in these spheres. But the scientist produced by the Pakistan education system must be different from his Western prototype. He must heal rather than inflict wounds. The technicians of Pakistan must build rather than destroy. Every branch of knowledge must be hitched to the one, all-dominating purpose to make the Islamic way of life prevail on earth which is the way of universal fellowship, of love for all and hatred for none, of never-ending progress and prosperity, and of true peace of mind.
The new educationists of Pakistan must be missionaries of this new spirit of Pakistan – not the lifeless, purposeless and spineless mercenaries that they used to be under the alien rule when their sole business was to produce clerks, managers and middlemen for the foreign masters. Upon their shoulders now falls the great duty to produce worthy citizens of Pakistan. This is the meaning of the new chord struck by Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar – viz., the spirit of Pakistan to permeate our national education.
M.Y.K.
(The Light – Thursday, December 8, 1949)
