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Tuesday March 19, 2024

‘Schools need to do away with narrow-mindedness’

Experts say values of peace should be inculcated among children

By our correspondents
November 29, 2015
Karachi
We will have to change our collective psyche if we wish to become a responsible nation, Dr Ishrat Hussain, the dean of the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), said on Saturday.
“If you are narrow-minded, parochial, and innately biased, it will reflect in the curriculum. That is what children will learn,” he said at a panel discussion titled “Educating for peace” held in the course of a two-day conference, “School of Tomorrow: Educational and Cultural Festival 2015”.
He said Myanmar, Cuba, and North Korea were “pariahs” but the first two had returned to the fold of civilized nations.
North Korea, he added, was still sticking to its old ways. Referring to the radical changes that occurred in the 1980s, he said in the case of such changes, a country always had to face adverse repercussions 15 or 20 years later.
Talking about the IBA, he said the institute encouraged students to travel overseas and when returned with completely changed perspective and views.
Dr Hussain was of the view that schools should be a domain of the local government, the provincial government should look after colleges and institutes of technical education, and higher education should be handled by the Centre.
Speaking on the occasion, social activist Naeem Sadiq said there was need for removing guns from schools, and from the overall society, to inculcate the values of peace among children.
Blaming the State, he said in the early 80s, arms had started flowing into our set-up and today according to an estimate, there were 20 million guns with civilians.
He said raising walls and employing armed guards would just accentuate the situation. “Let the schools come forward and foster an atmosphere of peace and love whereby the collective psyche of the student community undergoes a sea change,” he added.
Dr Paul Beedle from Cambridge, UK, cited the example of the period of sectarian strife in Northern Ireland and said the UK government had set up integrated educational institutions that took in both Roman Catholics and Protestants with the result that students did not think along sectarian lines.
He said the experiment had proved to be highly successful in the period of strife and mayhem.
Dr Beedle said teachers inculcated values among students. “They should help students to achieve peace within in because they could only fully discover themselves and their potentialities once they were fully at peace with themselves.”
The session was moderated by noted anchorperson Sidra Iqbal. She pointed out an interesting anomaly. She said while at an elite institution like the University of Karachi, female students were drubbed for playing cricket while in a depressed conservative locality like Lyari, a girls’ boxing team was being formed. Dr Hussain upheld the example of Lyari and said that it was absolutely fine if girls wanted to play any particular game. “It mustn’t raise eyebrows,” he added.

Theatre production
Later at the conference, a theatre production, “So Not a Dream”, a bilingual adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, was staged..
The play was performed by students of the Beaconhouse College Campus Karachi and directed by Sunil Shankar and Joshinder Chaggar.
There was also an enthralling Dastangoi session, a revival of the Urdu oral storytelling tradition by Fawad Khan, Nazar-ul-Hassan and Syed Meesum Naqvi.