Calls for reform in education curriculum

Calls have been made for reforms to Pakistan's national education curriculum following a recent report which likened it to the teachings of the madrasahs (religious schools). The schools became a breeding ground for hardline Islamist militant groups such as the ousted Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan. "In our report we discuss in detail the discrimination against gender, religion, and the glorification of the military in textbooks provided in government-run schools," an author of the report for the Sustainable Development Policy Institute NGO, Ahmed Salim, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Tuesday. "The curriculum is as bad as the teachings in a madrasah," he said. Entitled "The Subtle Subversion", the report claims that textbooks in the curriculum contain "factual inaccuracies distorting history, are insensitive to religious diversity and incite militancy, encourage jihad [holy war] and discourage critical self-awareness". Salim said: "We have recommended that the curriculum wing in the government and the textbook board be abolished." The government maintains that it continuously updates the curriculum, with the last amendments made in 2002. "If you compare the changes made to the curriculum you will see that there is virtually no difference and there is no substantial change," Salim said. An education official who didn't want to be named told IRIN that parts of the report were exaggerated and that some recommendations are being considered. According to Salim, some 70 percent of the reading material which is part of the national curriculum focuses on Islam, which, he said, promoted an unbalanced view to children. "Books used for teaching history, Urdu [national language] and social studies talk mostly about Islam," he stressed. The report was compiled after six months of research carried out by Salim and his co-author Abdul Hameed Nayyar. Highlighting the differences in the Pakistani and Western curriculum, an English teacher in the Punjabi city of Lahore has called for dozens of textbooks read under the curriculum in Pakistan and worldwide to be removed, describing them as containing "vulgar words". Shahbaz Arif was quoted in the British-based Guardian newspaper as saying that such books left children from conservative backgrounds feeling "shy and embarrassed". The books in question include such classics as: Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock", Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels".