Teachers can play a pivotal role in banishing violence: Javed Jabbar

Karachi
Teachers in Pakistan’s conditions today and in the near future have to recast their as a four-fold responsibility.
They have to be a transmitter of genuine knowledge; a catalyst to initiate progressive change within the minds of the pupils, even as conditions in their homes and areas remain stagnant or worsen; a trainer of youth, imparting the practice of non-violence. Thus, they become quite unacknowledged but effectively true leaders.
These views were expressed by former federal minister and Senate Forum for Policy Research member Javed Jabbar while delivering the keynote speech on the inauguration of the two-day ‘I Am Karachi: Teach For Peace’ conference at the Dawood Public School on Saturday. The conference is organised by the Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers (SPELT).
Quoting Aristotle’s dictum ‘Teaching is the highest form of learning’, Jabbar said that in the country’s 67-year history, there had been an increase in literacy, upped lifespan and setting up of new schools and universities.
Yet, he said, today there was a large force of out-of-school children. Of the Sindh government’s 22-percent allocation to education, 12 percent has gone to non-development expenditure. Forty-two percent of the schools don’t have bathrooms and 40 percent are without boundary walls.
Talking in the context of the teachers’ role in mitigating violent trends and ushering in a peaceful society, he said teachers were catalysts of change and transmitters of quality knowledge.
They, he said, were the preservers of values in an age of devaluation, adding that teachers could cultivate a society where people had inner peace even while there was violence in the outer world. “Teachers create diversity; and celebration of diversity is the key to peace and tolerance.”
Teachers, if they were to make it their mission to dissuade children from violence and intolerance, would go a long way towards mitigating violence in society.
Earlier, the honorary executive director of SPELT, Zakia Sarwar, alternating her very chaste Urdu with English in her speech, termed the SPELT initiative highly innovative.
She said that over the years an atmosphere of extreme fear had been created. There can be no dialogue amid such an atmosphere and dialogue is imperative to cultivating peace and tolerance in society.
“We have restricted ourselves to ideas that just promote bigotry. Teachers could play a pivotal role in banishing this pernicious trend from society. We just focus on our children’s marks. The responsibility revolves around parents and teachers to cultivate noble values in the children and give them more gentle mindsets than just marks.”
Amin Hashwani, a leading member of the ‘I Am Karachi’ consortium, reminded the guests that the first 15 years of Pakistan’s existence were its golden years: there was intellectual magnanimity, society was far more tolerant, the word “bigotry” existed in the dictionary only and our economic progress was remarkable; it was after that that the rot began.
“We should not follow the politicians and their slogan of a ‘Naya (New) Pakistan’. We should struggle and yearn for the ‘Purana (Old) Pakistan’.”
Welcoming the guests earlier, Huma Thaver said: “No generation has had to see such violence as today. We have to examine the core issues. We hope that will enable the participants to usher in peace.”
The inaugural session was followed by workshops pertaining to violence and ways and means of mitigating it.