‘Chaand kya hamara peecha karta hai?’, ‘Ham manfi alqaab logo par kiun lagaatay hain? Ham yahan tou dignity keh baaray mai parh rahay hain?’ and ‘Zindagi mai kaisay algebra istemaal hoga?’–the whirlpool of a child’s inquisitive mind. The budding that questions. The mind that seeks. The system that turns away.
It is evident our education system refuses to cater to the lived realities. To the possibilities that children explore. A major chunk of it is tied to the role of the secondary language’s influence. We are prey to a prevailing complex in the postcolonial era. We enable it at every step. The cost is thought.
Conformity excels, and critical thinking dies. The particular death is a poisonous one, and it envelops the whole society.
English powers the system. It excludes those that are imperfect. How the language erodes and diminishes is a reality we live in. The highlight is the foreign language corrupting the capacity to think. A child will be shunned. ‘Speak in English’, and the thought is invalidated. How can thinking flourish? We are stuck to a rigid curriculum which abolishes growth. The curriculum is alien to our local languages.
We focused on the significance of learning a language, and overlooked the understanding that learning in your native language provides a strengthened cognitive base that enables critical thinking. Research points out that as we directly transcend the thoughts in our language, the brain focuses entirely on analysis and thought-provoking experiences. It doesn’t have to process the decoding and translation- which skips the nuances and evaluations. This is why many concepts are inaccessible to students in a classroom that is devoid of identity. Learning itself is reduced to rote-memory mechanisms that don’t let minds stray away to endless prospects.
Detachment persists as the class exchanges in a vacuum. Indigenous narrations, local realities and traditional wisdom are wholly absent. The child is isolated. Exploration is barred, and they walk the monotonous path.
The contribution of the superiority attached to the curriculum perpetuates the sense that what’s otherwise is false. That it’s ignorant, and it’s baseless. An example of reaction to local herbal treatments and capitalist medicinal advancements is explanatory. The contrast also delivers in the jeopardy of conscience. The extended discourse on what’s right being exclusively foreign and what we live by being inherently wrong is the catastrophic dilemma. It existed then, it thrives now. It is powered by the mechanism that lingers. The concepts of dignity, justice and wide plethora are imposed, rather than delved exclusively in context. Whatever questions that survive, are lost in linguistic transitions and anxieties. The complexes prevail where the student resists to participate- shattering confidence.
In rural or under-resourced schools, the mentors themselves have existed in rote systems. To empower, they repeat a curriculum that is devoid of context. Education is understood to be aware of phonetics and abstractions. Learning never trickles down. Their language is never cared for. The disastrous consequences are evident. The thought is absent. What makes up 26.6% of the population, they never are emboldened to succeed. It is imperative to note that roughly 25 million of youth is not even in school. These intersect to a horrifying reality- revealing our priority to education. How can we even boost critical thought?
What is ours is brutalised. Silence echoes through the nation. To shatter the chains of colonialism as we internalise it, requires extensive resolve. Society needs to think, to challenge, to question so as to progress. A hounding hindrance is evident- which would wither away as we would begin to cherish our languages. As we would leave away our insecurities and stiffness. As we would begin to hear the young voices.
Afterall, what can we expect when we can’t think on our own? When we can’t think in our own way?