The UNESCO as well as many linguists agree that children
should get their basis schooling in their mother tongue. Pakistani schools, as
I have argued in my article published in this section earlier (Dawn 23 November), generally impose
alien languages upon them. There is, however, one school which makes a
conscious effort at giving respect to a language other than English. As it is
an elitist English-medium institution for small children it has provided a
model which can be replicated.
I heard of this school from its principal, Yamima Mittha,
whom I had known when she was a schoolgirl herself. She told me that in her
school, Mazmoon-i-Shauq, she taught little children through English and Urdu.
One day I went to see the school in a posh sector (F 8/3) of Islamabad. It was
a mild October day (29th to be exact) and Yamima’s office was
comfortable without being cooled or warmed.
Yamima told me that she got the idea of establishing a
school of her own when she was looking around for a school for her own
children. One reason she disliked the schools she went to was because they had
open contempt for Urdu. Besides, the children were taught all about Western
festivals, even Halloween and Valentine’s Day, but knew nothing of indigenous
ones such as Baisakh. They also had
no ideas about our art forms such as dancing. Yamima’s mention of dancing came
as no surprise to me because I knew that her mother, Indu Mittha, is a highly
accomplished dancer and dance teacher. Then she told me to have a look around
at the classes.
‘But’ tell me how do you
actually teach in Urdu and English here?’ I asked her.
‘We have designated
Urdu-speaking and English-speaking teachers’, she replied.
I learned that the Urdu-speaking teacher only spoke Urdu
with the children. The English-speaking one only spoke in English. Yamima, for
instance, was an Urdu-speaking teacher. As principal, she argued, her choice of
Urdu---despite her own English schooling childhood---raised the prestige of the
language. The message being conveyed to the children was that Urdu was nothing
to be ashamed of. It was as prestigious as English and the children need not
look down upon it.
Then we went around to the classes. The school only has
playgroup, kindergarten and two levels. There are between twelve to fifteen
children per class though the senior most class is smaller. I found one class being
taught in English while another one was going on in Urdu. Yamima talked to
everyone except me in Urdu and I, rather confused as to what my designation should
ideally be, talked in a mixed jargon which would have got me thrown out of the
school promptly had I been a teacher there. The way of teaching was most
interesting. The children worked on themes. As the theme was Africa they did
all sorts of things on Africa. They even found bones of a fossil in the garden
(buried by the school authorities of course). And they made pictures and wrote
the names of animals in English as well as Urdu. There was at least one Urdu
term I did not know but this I did not tell the children.
The youngest children were a treat to meet though one of
them did not condescend to tell me her name. The other one made up for her
friend’s reticence by reading out half the lesson in an animated voice I asked
the children about their languages and they told me about them. But Punjabi
children, I suspect, said they spoke Urdu at home. This is generally true but
that is the parents’ fault not that of the children.
I asked her whether she got good teaching material in
Urdu. She told me that this was a major problem since most material, including
videos, were in English. However, she and the teachers tried to find or create
material in Urdu also. Later I saw science books with lessons in both
languages---again containing terms I could guess at but ones which were not
part of my daily vocabulary. Moreover, though these were very small children,
their handwriting in Urdu and English was fairly good---something I cannot
claim for my writing in any language!
Besides teaching in two languages, the children are
exposed to music and dancing. They learn that this part of the world had its
own culture of which music and dancing were forms of art. They also do
handiwork. Then there is a gym, a rather modest room in the basement, which
contains a punching bag. Children can punch it to let out their energies and
aggression. Since I had heard from someone that children are told to imagine
they are punching the teachers they are angry with I asked Yamima if this was
so. She denied this vehemently saying that they were not supposed to imagine
anyone or tell anyone that they had anybody in mind. All that she wanted was to
provide a chance to the children to get some exercise and channel their
hostility, whoever it might be against, in this healthy form. I told her that
psychologists actually recommend this kind of activity. She replied that this
was exactly why she had started it to
begin with.
The teachers are all Montessori trained and the salaries
are better than in other schools of this kind. As she said, the best investment
for a school is in its faculty. I especially enquired about the autonomy, the
space, given to the teachers because the contemporary trend in Pakistan is to
curtail teachers’ autonomy by excessive monitoring and very strict lesson plans
etc. Yamima told me that space was given to them in the sense that they had a
voice in determining what was to be taught. However, there was monitoring too.
What struck me as excessive was that all the teachers had to sit with the
principal every day after the children left in order to discuss the events of
the day and individual children. I thought this was too tough on the teachers but
Yamima defended the practice in the name of efficiency.
While meetings and monitoring do contribute to
efficiency, they overburden the teachers, take away their freedom to teach in the
way they want and lower their self-respect. Personally I prefer the former
practice of giving the teachers a completely free hand to teach as they wish. I
know that this means that some teachers will not teach much but such people do
not teach very well even when being monitored. And in any case such people are
very few and there is no profession in which they do not exist. The presence of
a few black sheep does not mean that such draconian regimentation should spoil
the fun of teaching for all.
Anyway, on the whole I found Yamima’s school an excellent
place for children. It is probably the only elitist school which tries to
create respect for our own culture and language. In my opinion the state should
ensure that mother-tongue teaching at the primary level should be a commonly
accepted practice. There should be teachers who speak only Punjabi (in Punjab);
only Pashto (in parts of the N.W.F.P); only Sindhi (in parts of Sindh); only
Balochi or Brahvi (in parts of Balochistan) along with Urdu (the link language)
and English (the international language). Yamima’s experiment in creating
respect for our true self, our identities, should be encouraged and
replicated---all aspects of it including the indigenous music and dancing---so
that we do not become defective clones of alien cultures.