Earlier this month, when the Cambridge O/A Level results
were announced in different parts of the world including Pakistan, I was
curious to know my own students’ results for the course I taught them. I use
the word curious instead of nervous or excited because I strongly believe that
grades are not a determinant of success, and have always exhorted this idea to
my students. However, this is not a value that most of my colleagues share, or
one that I grew up with as an O-Level student ten years ago.
During my school years, the education system and society of
which I was a part (and still am) constantly drilled a very rigid notion of
success in students, which was that success equals to amassing an impressive
amount of material wealth, and that academic excellence achieved from the top
institutions is the only route to success. Ten years down the lane, the
situation is very much the same. I understand that such materialistic values
come from being part of an increasingly consumerist society, but in our race to
outdo each other, we as a society seem to have forgotten the basic purpose of
acquiring an education, which is to become better human beings.
Generally speaking, we as parents and teachers belonging to
privileged socio-economic backgrounds seem to be obsessed with our children’s
grades in school, as if a mere grade or percentage will determine whether the
child is a success or failure in life. I blame this partially on our national
trait of possessing a dichotomous thinking; of seeing things only in terms of
black and white. Thus, an A grade means your child will excel in all areas of
life, whereas a B grade or lower means the child is just average- she/he will
survive, but barely. Needless to say, there are countless examples of
individuals who belonged to the latter category in school and later on excelled
in their personal and professional lives.
With Pakistan’s economy becoming increasingly capitalist in
nature, it seems justified that for students, getting good grades is essential
for survival of the fittest. After all, we are living in the modern age (or
postmodern, or transmodern-whatever you want to call it), and modernity
functions through the logic of separation. Thus, it seems justified to divide
and determine students’ intellectual abilities through the grading system But
what about those individuals who cannot excel academically? I am referring in
particular to students with special physical and learning needs who are made to
go through the same standardized exams as other students. The only exception is
that these students are given a little extra time to complete their papers,
which really does not make the examination procedure an easier one for most of
them. So are we, as educational institutions, predetermining such students’
futures by labeling them as failures and as dysfunctional members of society? What
is needed in our institutions (particularly the education sector) is a humbling
of capitalist modernity. Universality, advancement, progress and development
are all part of the rhetoric of modernity- but all of these are carried out at
the expense of dismissing and showing disdain for those who cannot perform to
the best of society’s expectations of them.
It is safe to say that students these days are schooled to
mimic the performance of the educational institution itself, which is mostly
about competition (with other private schools to secure the top place) , with
very little focus on imparting basic human values such as respect, compassion,
honesty and being helpful and supportive. How is it then that a child can make
friends at school when she/he is constantly preached by their teachers and
parents that they should treat all their classmates as ‘competition’? How can a
relationship based on competition be a truly honest and amiable one? As
responsible teachers and parents, we need to explore how we can correct this
problem within the academia. As institutions, we need to move away from the
cult of the self or the obsession with individualism, and move towards forming
a communal self. By this I mean that the school must organize itself as a
community that inculcates communal values in its students rather than simply
teaching them to compete with each other to get the highest grades. Only then
can we actually progress as a society which produces good Samaritans who take
responsibility for strengthening their society’s social institutions.
The writer is a
teacher of O-level sociology at a renowned school in Karachi.
