‘Education as business can neverlet intellect flourish’

LAHORE: Arfa Sayeda Zehra, a veteran educationist, has said that education that cannot help us question, cannot save us from downfall. Speaking at a session “Ijtimai Zahanat Ka Zawal? (Collective intellectual bankruptcy?) on the concluding day of Lahore Literary Festival (LLF-2020) at Alhamra here Sunday, she said the reform process could only begin after accepting the mistake first.

The other panelist of the session was journalist and human rights activist Wajahat Masood while noted playwright and writer Asghar Nadeem Syed performed the duties of a moderator.

Starting the discussion at the jam-packed hall, Asghar Nadeem Syed said every civilisation was known by its history, literature and arts, poetry, intellectuals and mediums of expression and also the questions raised by the society. Arfa Sayeda Zehra said following someone blindly by someone noted for his or her intellect was actually the downfall of the time we were living in. She said accepting challenges without preparation would always result in defeat.

According to her, the growing uncertainty in our society was the result of curbs on freedom of thoughts and freedom of expression. She said treating education as business could never let intellect to flourish. She said if people wanted to be happy, issues were brought in front of them. She also talked about Basant festival saying the festival became a history only because of killer twine used by kite-flyers raising question over our collective failure to stop the use of the twine. Referring to a statement by Prime Minister Imran Khan, she said the ruler of our time said people would get peace only in grave while the clergy of the time was of the view that actual unrest would start after one died.

Wajahat Masood while admitting that we suffered from a collective intellectual bankruptcy was of the view that illiteracy in the country was not by an accident but because of a well-thought conspiracy. He added this helped those at the helm to abolish the tradition of being answerable to people.

In response to a remark by Asghar Nadeem Syed about poor media coverage of a Nobel laureate international speaker at LLF, Wajahat said it was more tragic that people even did not celebrate its own Nobel laureates, including Dr Abdus Salam and Malala Yousafzai.

A question-answer session was also held in the end in which the audience put pertinent questions to the speakers.