All the scholars invited to discuss the state of history teaching and research in the country at a session on Friday on the concluding day of a two-day conference on history at the Arts Council of Pakistan were unanimous in their opinion that the state of history education at the Pakistani varsities was far from satisfactory as it failed to develop critical thinking in students.
The two-day conference was organised by the Institute of Historical and Social Research and the Arts Council in honour of historian Dr Mubarak Ali. It was titled ‘Celebrating Dr Mubarak Ali – The People’s Historian’.
The session, ‘Pakistan Mein Tareekh Ki Tehqeeq Aur Tadrees Ke Masail – Aik Mukalma’ (A conversation on the issues of research and teaching of history in Pakistan), was moderated by Dr Arfana Mallah. She lamented that although there were around 200 public and private universities in the country, the teaching of history there was generally below par which was evident from the fact that there were currently two teachers serving at the history department of the University of Sindh (SU).
Scholar Dr Sarfaraz Khan said the subject of history was far more than just the chronology of events as it covered the material dialecticism that encompassed conflicts between various classes of society.
He remarked that even after the devolution of higher education to them, the provinces had failed to develop their own varsity curricula. He added that the autonomy of the institutes of higher education was very limited and efforts to micromanage the varsities were under way, which even involved controlling their clerical staff.
When I was a young lecturer, it could not be imagined that personnel of law enforcement agencies would be allowed to enter university campuses, no matter how grave the circumstances were, Dr Khan said.
The scholar remarked that generally there was obvious deterioration in the language skills of students. He was of the view that though it is lamented that Pakistani children are not good in their mother tongues because of the imposition of Urdu, the reality is that the students nowadays are weak in Urdu as well.
He said it is the language in which an individual thinks and the decline in the language skills of students means that they can no longer think deeply. He went on to say that maybe things were better for the Sindhi language, but as far as Punjabi, Pashto and Balochi were considered, we could not build any solid foundation of knowledge in these languages.
When asked about differences in the standards of history departments of private and public varsities, Dr Ali Usman Qasmi, an academic associated with the Lahore University of Management and Sciences (LUMS), said the issues of public varsities related to the teaching of history were indeed more serious than those of private ones.
He, however, added that even the private varsities could not be praised in this regard as they considered education a business, and with the exception of a few, they were not interested in inculcating critical thinking in their students.
Explaining how the state institutions unnecessarily interfered in higher education, he recalled that once a conference was held at LUMS to teach Devanagari script, the script in which Hindi language is written, to students. The home department did not like that and wrote a letter to the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, complaining that LUMS was teaching an enemy language to students.
Dr Qasmi was of the view that if the state insisted on teaching ideology-based history to the students, it should find creative ways to do so.
Dr Ali Raza, another LUMS academic, said it was generally believed that students who had received school education from expensive private schools had a better view of history but it was not always the case.
Criticising the prevalent mode of education in the country, he said it made students hate history as they considered that the subject was only about learning the years of some events. The academic stressed the need for developing historical imagination in students so that they could think creatively about history and take interest in the subject.
Dr Raza also mentioned the lack of basic documentation on various fields in the country. He said one could easily find the information of all the cast and crew of a Bollywood film that was released in 1960s, but the same could not be easily found about a Pakistani film of the 1960s. He said carrying out such documentation could be a great service to preserving history in Pakistan.
Dr Shuja Ahmed Mahesar of the SU said that when he had reviewed in 2006 the history curriculum of Sindh, he found out that the role of Sindh in the making of Pakistan was omitted there. He explained how reforms were later introduced in the curriculum.
He also highlighted lack of historical sources in Sindh that could help paint an accurate picture of the province’s history.
He said many sources of history had been the accounts of travellers, but they had a limitation as the travellers from other areas could not avoid their biases while describing a foreign place. He added that the gazetteers written by British officers in the colonial era were useful historical documents.
When asked how the teaching of history could be improved, scholar Dr Shah Mohammad Marri said we need to continue resistance as the ruling classes always want to distort history to keep the status quo intact.