Our generals say India’s spy
agency RAW is up to its nasty tricks again. No evidence provided but, okay,
we’ll buy the story for now. There are two good reasons. First, it’s safer not
to question the wisdom of generals. Second, they speak from deep experience,
having long played the spy-versus-spy game across borders.
So let’s provisionally assume that India’s spies have engineered the odd bomb
blast here and there, and send occasional gifts to the BLF or other militant
Baloch movements.
But RAW’s alleged antics are pinpricks compared to the massive and irreversible
brain damage that Pakistan’s schools, colleges, and universities inflict upon
their students.
Imagine that some devilish enemy has perfected a super weapon that destroys
reasoning power and makes a population stupid. One measure, though not the only
one, of judging the lethality of this hypothetical weapon would be lower math
scores.
Read: RAW instigating terrorism, says army
No such scores are actually available, but for over 40 years my colleagues and I
have helplessly watched student math abilities shrivel.
Only the wealthy customers of elite private schools and universities, tethered
as they are to standards of the external world, have escaped wholesale dumbing
down. As for the ordinary 99pc, with the rare exception of super-bright students
here or there, some form of mental polio is turning most into math duffers.
Imagine that an enemy has perfected a super weapon that destroys reasoning
power.
Does being poor at math really matter? After all there are plenty of intelligent
people everywhere, even brilliant ones, who hate math and therefore are bad at
it. But this is only because they had dull and uninspiring teachers who never
taught them that math is a beautiful exercise of reason, one step at a time.
Once on track, you quickly realise that math is the most magnificent,
surprising, and powerful of all human achievements.
The success of the human species over other forms of life on planet Earth
depends squarely on mathematics. Without math the pyramids could not have been
built, navigation would be impossible, electricity could not have been
discovered and put to use, factories and industries would not exist, computers
and space exploration would be unimaginable, etc.
Here’s how bad our situation is: in a recent math class, I had rather typical
18-20 year-olds from non-elite schools. They had studied geometry but their
teachers had not exposed them to the notion of proof — the step-by-step process
in which one starts with a proposition, carefully constructs arguments, and then
triumphantly arrives at the conclusion.
Instead, they were taught math as a hodgepodge of recipes. A few they
remembered, the rest were forgotten.
I nearly wept to see that barely three to four students out of 60 could prove
the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. None could prove that similar
triangles have proportional sides. Quite a few had difficulty with fractions,
some did not know how to take the square root of four or nine or unless armed
with a calculator, and translating even simple real-life situations (like
compound interest) into equations was difficult. Twelve-year-old kids in Japan
or Europe would have done better.
Their teachers are still worse. Earlier I had the misfortune of teaching math
courses to college math teachers. In their late 30s or early 40s, most were
staid and stable family men who had come to university, expecting to get a
higher degree and hence a higher pay grade.
But for all their years of teaching math, they were blanks. Diluting my
nominally ‘advanced math’ course to a beginning level course did not help. My
conscience could not allow a single teacher to pass.
Could the use of English — a difficult language for all except ‘O’ and ‘A’ level
students — reasonably explain this dreadful situation? I am sympathetic to this
point of view and therefore use Urdu exclusively in my physics and math
lectures, both in distance learning modules and in real-time teaching (except
when a university’s regulations require that I teach in English). But this
barely solves 10-20pc of the problem.
So then is the math curriculum at fault? It certainly can be improved but almost
the same topics in math and science are listed in Pakistani curricula as would
expectedly be covered by a similar cohort internationally. In fact, primary
school children in Pakistan are expected to carry a bigger burden than overseas
kids.
The impediment to learning proper math is just one — wrong learning goals, wrong
attitudes. Mathematics does not require labs, computers, or fancy gadgetry. But
it does demand mental capacity and concentration. Nothing is true in math unless
established by argumentation based upon a rigorous chain of logic, with each
link firmly attached to the preceding one. The teacher who cannot correctly
solve a math problem by following the defined logic will suffer loss of face
before his students.
Contrast this with the madressah model wherein truth is defined by the teacher
and prescribed books. The teacher’s job is to convey the book contents, and the
student’s job is to appropriately absorb and memorise. There are no problems to
be solved, nor is challenging suppositions or checking logical consistency
either encouraged or even tolerated.
Limited to religious learning, such learning attitudes are perfectly fine. But
their absorption into secular parts of the education system is disastrous. The
hafiz-i-science or hafiz-i-math, which are copiously produced, carry exactly
zero worth.
Giving logic a back seat has led to more than diminished math or science skills.
The ordinary Pakistani person’s ability to reason out problems of daily life has
also diminished. There is an increased national susceptibility to conspiracy
theories, decreased ability to tell friend from foe, and more frequent resort to
violence rather than argumentation. The quality of Pakistan’s television
channels reflects today’s quality of thought.
For too long education reform advocates have been barking up the wrong tree. A
bigger education budget, better pay for teachers, more schools and universities,
or changing instructional languages will not improve learning outcomes. As long
as teachers and students remain shackled to the madressah mindset, they will
remain mentally stunted. The real challenge lies in figuring out how to set
their minds free.