Too often our education debates are framed in narrow technocratic terms: budget percentages, enrollment figures, out-of-school numbers, as though statistics could name what is wrong. But a single day in a typical classroom reveals the deeper truth: our education system does not fail by accident; it fails by design. It is engineered to produce inequality and alienation: clerks, not citizens; imitators, not creators; subjects, not free women and men; a language of instruction that obscures more than it teaches; exams that reward obedience, not understanding.
The education system mirrors the state itself – authoritarian at the top, passive at the bottom, incoherent in the middle. The conclusion is unavoidable: our education crisis is not peripheral. It is the epicentre of our national emergency: a country that cannot teach its children to read, reason, imagine, cannot govern itself, cannot innovate and cannot sustain democracy. It condemns its people to irrelevance in the global order. It suffocates. Yet if classrooms become places of inquiry, participation and liberation, renewal becomes possible.
That is why our education debates about ‘access’, and ‘quality’ often miss the point entirely. Doubling enrollment is not progress if we merely double the reach of an oppressive pedagogy. Without ideological clarity, reforms become a way of doing the wrong thing better.
So, what, then, is the alternative?
A new book that I have edited offers an alternative. It is not a policy tweak, but a reimagining of the entire system. ‘Education for All: Liberation, Leadership and Renewal’, by the late Prof Khwaja Masud, weaves a lifetime of work on education into a single, bracing manifesto of critique and renewal. Its central claim is that Pakistan’s crisis is education itself. And because this crisis lies at the root of all others, it must also be the place of our renewal. If the classroom is where inequality is reproduced, it must be the place of our liberation. Against authoritarianism, it must affirm participation; against bureaucracy, it must affirm community; against dependency, it must affirm human freedom.
The book refuses to treat education as a narrow ‘sector’. Instead, it asks the question largely absent from our education debates: what kind of human being do we want our schools to produce? If the goal is to form citizens capable of judgement, empathy, imagination, then everything must change: curriculum, language policy, examinations, teacher training, school governance.
By placing Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, John Dewey, Martha Nussbaum and others in conversation with our reality, and drawing on the wider tradition of the pedagogy of the oppressed, the book emphasises that education is never neutral. It either domesticates or it liberates. It teaches people to accept their place in a hierarchy, or it equips them to question, disrupt and transform it. Colonial education domesticated us. Independence changed the flag, but not the classroom.
Confronting this legacy requires more than reform; it demands a new approach to education that draws deeply from the global reservoir of emancipatory ideas, and plants them in our own soil, shaped by our traditions and aspirations.
Three interlocking principles make that possibility at once visible and compelling. First comes liberation, the understanding that education is a political act, one that enables the oppressed to become creators of their own history. That means moving from a ‘banking’ model of education, where teachers deposit information into passive students, to a problem-posing model, where teacher and student inquire together. Dialogue replaces monologue; questioning replaces blind acceptance.
Next comes creativity: the harmony of truth, goodness and beauty – the highest purpose of education. A student who cannot imagine alternatives cannot participate meaningfully in society. We must restore beauty to the heart of learning, alongside truth and goodness; invite the young into the adventure of understanding and transforming their nation.
Third comes leadership, which must begin with teachers, for the destiny of a people is written in the character of those who teach and carry the torch of civilisation: from Socrates, Makarenko and Feng Youlan to Stewart and Cummings of Gordon College, to S M Naseem and Aly Arcelawn of Quaid-e-Azam University, and to the countless unsung teachers in our towns and cities who live that truth each day.
From these principles flows a compelling vision of renewal: schools accountable to their communities; examinations that test reasoning; teaching in the mother tongue that bridges to Urdu and English; integrating manual and intellectual labour; universities that serve society rather than reproduce privilege. None of these ideas are new. What is new is the way they are tied together by a single vision: education as humanisation.
If we choose renewal, as argued above, we will build a society that is free, creative, and humane. And if, as H G Wells says, human history has become a race between education and catastrophe, then we must make education the central struggle of our time – and ensure that it wins.
The writer is a freelance contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]
