I believe that Iqbal and his teachings/warnings have certainly been in the public eye long enough for all of us to have an opinion regarding their relevance to our existing educational and social situation. Those of you, who are genuinely interested in the issues I am about to raise, will find a more complete explication of them in many of the verses of Iqbal I have included in the essay. This is a partial list; Iqbal, on numerous occasions identifies the importance of an indigenous educational system. He repeatedly highlights the power of our culture and social values and has also warned us of the consequences of undermining our traditional values. I think Iqbal's powerful analysis of the colonial model of education system was crucial then and to develop an understanding of his teachings is even more crucial now. I feel his works on education could be re-published today and be just as relevant. Not much has changed. As a matter of fact, Iqbal still provides us with directions that we could still follow in attacking many of today's educational issues. Back to basics is not the key. I don't want to go back to anything. Forward to basics is a much more positive statement.

I do not wish to be a doomsayer. The trends are clear and the issues are serious. The ultimate outcomes however, are uncertain rather than inevitable. If I believed otherwise, I would not be in the 'business' of education. It is not my intention to condemn present teachers or administrators as a group. There are those who have no business in education, and there are those who are exceptionally well suited for it. Most fall somewhere in-between. This is true of any profession. A majority of those I have met take their responsibilities extremely seriously, seem to be genuinely interested in providing quality education to the young people, and seem to be frustrated at the difficulty in doing so. If they have collective failures and shortcomings, most of them can be ascribed to their own faulty education and to the nature of the institutional structure, which they feel compelled to change. This, of course, is the whole point of what I am about to share: you cannot fix a system that is already fixed.

The process of studying Iqbal was like a voyage where I discovered answers to questions for which I always wanted answers: What is worth knowing is the truth - the truth about our society, the world, and ourselves. Ultimate truth, of course, will always be debatable, but there can be no serious debate that schools presently teach much that is not true as if it were, and omit or suppress most of those uncomfortable truths that might incite us to challenge the status quo: What is important is to be able to think critically and independently, to be able to find information and use it to those purposes, and to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, myth and reality; the values and attitudes that should be encouraged and any that help to get an individual out of his/her isolated socio-economic class and into the common humanity, i.e.., those that promote peace, freedom, justice and all that they imply.

Iqbal unveils the authoritative and indoctrinating nature of Eurocentric education i.e. to manufacture students who are submissive and eventually 'enslaved' and 'colonized' by the pressures of modern society. I find in his writings a strong sense of resentment of mindless respect for authority that was and still is, an important part of the hidden curriculum of the schools. I refer to the authority of the school to determine what is worth knowing; the authority of the administrators to establish and enforce the rules under which learning may take place; the authority of the teachers and the book publishers to determine the form and content of what will be learned. The student, for far too many teachers and administrators, is a blank slate, an empty bucket, a garden to be weeded and shaped, i.e., raw material to be patterned, molded and processed as mandated by the 'masters'.

This is still as relevant as it was when he wrote Zarbe Kalim. With a few notable exceptions, no one encourages our students to think for themselves, to trust their own thoughts and feelings, to raise questions and investigate issues and relationships, to examine what might or might not be important to them. The curriculum and the rules have implicitly defined, on the contrary, "what is important". Questions and investigations have been constrained to pre-defined channels leading to answers already known. Issues have been limited to historical conflicts long since resolved and originality and creativity have been attacked or at best confined to art classes. When a rare teacher does try to create an open-ended situation, it is so novel and threatening that the opportunity it presents is invariably lost in the frantic effort to find out just exactly what he or she wanted. As a result of all this, many students still don't always feel comfortable expressing their own thoughts and opinions, which goes to show just how well the lesson was learned.

The end result of the education our students receive - and it seems much more received than actively comprehended - is predictable and, I think now, almost exactly what it was intended to be and exactly what Iqbal thought it would do to us. Just as Iqbal suggested that students are able to take in, store and retrieve information on demand, quickly and accurately, and in the form in which it has been presented, and able, with some facility, to paraphrase the theories, ideas, and conclusions of the experts. In short, they are fully 'schooled'. That their communication skills are virtually limited to the written word is of no consequence. Neither is the fact that they have never investigated a controversial issue and reached their own conclusions. Nor does it seem important that many are unable to think on their feet, are lacking common sense and are almost totally ignorant of what is going on in the world. Many students that I have met after launching EDucate! have shared that they have never had a truly original thought, have no convictions of their own, and would have been petrified, even had they had any, at the prospect of expressing or defending them. But none of that really matters. It is enough to have passed the exams. Nothing else is required. Nothing else is encouraged.

Not being able to learn anything from intellectual powerhouses like Iqbal comes at a price. The price we have paid is becoming increasingly evident. There is presently a crisis in Pakistan's education system at all levels. More money is being spent on education than ever before. Innovative curricula (albeit called 'back to basics') abound. More and more tests and requirements are being required of teachers. Test scores in our schools, however, keep declining; violence and vandalism keep increasing; young adults are graduating from high school unable to act as responsible citizens. Beyond all this there is the certain knowledge that what happens in school today will ultimately affect our society in a profound way tomorrow. For all these reasons, and others, it seems necessary to re-question the assumptions on which modern education rests.

The most basic assumption of all, of course, is that education is essential, or at least beneficial, to both the individual and society. This is so obvious that to question it might seem absurd. But is it true? The answer seems to depend largely on how you define education. Again a stark distinction can be found in the definition of education amongst the Eurocentric and the progressive schools of thought. According to Webster, it is "the things one learns by being taught: schooling or training." (Websters, 1965). The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, however, defines education as "the process of becoming critically aware of one's reality in a manner that leads to effective action upon it." (Freire, 1968). Most of us will immediately recognize that there is a world of difference between the two definitions, that the one does not necessarily imply the other. That difference, however, has actually developed only over the past hundred years or so. In simpler times, the correlation between schooling and the ability to operate in the world effectively was much greater than it is today. A hundred years ago, the content of education was virtually the same as it had been for generations. This was not a problem because the world itself remained much the same from one generation to the next. Children learned what their parents had learned because it was useful when dealing with essentially the same world.

But no more! The world - the physical, political, economic, social and psychological environments to which we must adapt, or have it adapt to us if we are to survive - has changed. In fact, it has changed more drastically in this century alone than in all the centuries of recorded history before it. We are beset by problems that were unknown and even unimaginable in the past, such as overpopulation and mass starvation, the threat of sudden and complete nuclear destruction, environmental waste and pollution, racial and economic confrontation, dwindling resources, increasing bureaucratic regimentation and impersonality in our human relations, and growing dependence on others for the very means of existence. The list goes on and on, and we are all familiar with it. We are the most schooled generation in the history of humankind but how effectively are we dealing with these realities of life? How well has our education equipped us to deal with these problems? How well is our present educational system equipping our children to deal effectively with the world of the future, a world that by all indications will be even more complex? I think one answer will cover all three questions: Not very well.

The reason for the failure of schools lies in the definition of their purpose, and therefore in the definition of education itself. Are the educated people those who have had a certain amount of 'schooling or training', or those who know themselves, can develop and communicate ideas, are adaptable to change, aware of realities, and able to identify problems, propose solutions, and implement them, i.e., able to deal effectively with life? Put in those terms I'm willing to wager that all of us view Webster's definition - 'schooling or training' - as woefully inadequate to describe what education should be about. Yet the reality of our schools is such that this is precisely the message that students get: education is what happens in schools, and conversely, that school is where education occurs. It is implicit in the structure of the institution...the medium is once again the message.

In the meantime, as the old saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; the rest of us find ways to make ends meet and pray we don't get sick. The issue is one of values. Humane solutions to our human problems continue to elude us because we have been, and continue to be, educated to embrace the exploitive, manipulative values of a century ago. They are no longer acceptable. If they ever were, they reflect an extremely immature vision of the world, socially, economically, and scientifically, a vision that was a logical product of its time but has no rightful place in ours. But we continue to educate our children for a world that no longer exists. Why? It is primarily because public education, like most other institutions in our society, has been gradually diverted from its true purpose in order to serve the powerful and the privileged. Universal education and compulsory schooling have flourished because they were instituted at the beginning of a period of extremely rapid economic growth, when new machines, new sources of power, new kinds of social organization and control, and vast quantities of rich and easily available raw materials made most people in Western countries rich beyond the wildest dreams of earlier times. For the past hundred years, schools have been useful to almost everyone. They have been useful to the rulers of society because they have taught most people how to live and work like machines, and to want what only machines could produce. They have been useful to the ordinary people of our society because they have held out the promise that their children could rise in the world, might even be rich and powerful themselves one day. And for a while, this was the case. But now the sources of rich and cheap raw materials that made the boom possible are nearly used up. What is left is scarcer, of poorer quality, and harder to get at...and thus more expensive. The 'endless' boom is over. Even in the richest countries, people are starting to realize that they can no longer expect what they only recently took for granted that they and their children would be richer in the future than they are now; in fact in poor countries most people face famine and disaster.

Those with vested interests in the old order of things are, not surprisingly, concerned with keeping them that way. Their interest in change is limited to preventing it, or, if change is unavoidable, with minimizing, delaying, controlling, and capitalizing on it to the maximum extent possible. School, inasmuch as it is inflicted on virtually everybody, is an ideal instrument for inculcating the values, attitudes and myths that make possible the maintenance of the privileged elite: like a high-priced hit-man, it is neat, systematic, and terribly effective. As Jonathan Kozol once observed, the problem is not that public schools do not work well, but that they do. (Kozol, 1972). It is clear that schools play a central role in maintaining and justifying an anachronistic social order. They are not educating to the realities of the present, let alone the future because school has come to serve the interest of those who want to preserve the arrangements of the past. We are 'educated' to accept, fit into, and promote a dying system because that system has not yet been completely milked dry. There is still some money to be made from it. (Reimer, 1972).

Where does education (not mere schooling) fit into this dismal picture? It seems that instead of multiplying the sources of citizenry initiative, schools now serve to limit them; instead of encouraging prompt and energetic efforts to protect and extend our freedoms, school acts to disinherit us by encouraging and rewarding docility, conformity, and acceptance of the present order as right and even inevitable, though it is neither; instead of encouraging examination of and confrontation with the problems of institutionalized greed and concentrated power, schools actually encourage the consumer orientation on which these depend, train (at public expense) the future economic elite, and have themselves become 'Big Business', one of the biggest, in fact. In short, public education now serves as one of the most effective instruments of those it was intended to protect us from. It does so in many ways. Perhaps the most obvious is the linking of social roles with school achievement. Today, of course, a high school diploma is prerequisite for almost any job; you can't even collect garbage from the streets of Karachi without one!

Progress through school depends on one's willingness to play the game and to play by the rules. The game, in all but a few schools and with all but a few exceptional teachers, might be called 'Let's Pretend', and it goes something like this: Let's pretend that you are not who you are and that this work makes a difference to you; let's pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more it bores you the more important it is; let's pretend that there are certain things that everyone must know; let's pretend that your competence can be judged (and judged objectively) on the basis of how well you can play. The rules of the game are simple and straightforward. You must follow directions, stay in your seat, raise your hand, be quiet, stay in line, control yourself, must not question the authority of the book, the teacher, or the principal to determine what is best for you. In short, you are to shut up and toe the line. The final rule, of course, is that you must play by the rules, and the ultimate rule is that you must, in fact, play at least until you're sixteen. Those who don't play very well, or won't play by the rules - and of course those who refuse, for one reason or another, to play at all drop out of the education picture at some point, and the point at which they drop out determines whether they will subsequently be paid for their bodies, their hands, or their brains, and how much they will be paid. Those who play well are allowed to keep playing, at increasingly difficult levels of competition, through high school and into their twenties in college and graduate school, after which they are finally rewarded by installation as a sort of 'apprentice-elite' at McDonalds or perhaps some university.

It should now be clear how right Iqbal was and how relevant his teachings are even today. He made it clear then and it has become crystal clear now that obligatory mass education plays a central role in justifying and maintaining a continuing hierarchy of privilege. The career and therefore the life of the individual depend more and more on the success in school. The illusion is maintained that all have an equal opportunity to achieve that success, but the facts fail to support it. The graded curriculum, by its very nature, depends on the relative failure of some, and it is the poor who fail most consistently. They begin the game at a disadvantage, almost certainly finding that what happens in school is less relevant to their real needs than it is to their more advantaged peers; they tend to experience one failure after another. They drop out, most of them, and refill the ranks of the poor.

Even beyond the issues of democracy and social justice is the issue of human survival, for those who stay in school - rich, poor, and in-between are initiated alike into the myths of limitless production and consumption by the production methods through which they are inculturated. They are prepared for specialized roles in specialized institutions, selected and shaped in terms of both skills and values. By its own bureaucratic, hierarchical, and authoritarian structure, school accustoms people to accept the single, integrated hierarchy of power and privilege that prevails in the larger society.

It is important to recognize that the structure of school has not evolved because of any organizational prerequisites for imparting cognitive skills; on the contrary, there is an overwhelming amount of research indicating that such skills are more efficiently learned in democratic, non-repressive atmospheres. The structure of school - its hidden curriculum, its message - is designed to produce and reinforce those values, attitudes, and affective capacities which allow individuals to move smoothly into an alienated and class-stratified society.

The hidden curriculum of school is dangerous because it bolsters belief in a sick society - a society dedicated to competitive consumption of everything that can be produced. It assumes that people want principally to consume and that in order to do so, they must be bound to the wheel of endless production. The whole theory of contemporary schooling is based on a similar assumption: that production methods applied to learning will result in learning. They do result in learning to produce and consume, but at what price? As a means of learning to adapt to a changing world they are absurd.

This brings us back to the two definitions of education: 'schooling or training,' or the 'ability to deal effectively with life'. We need to decide very soon to change our priorities, and change our schools to meet them. It will not be easy. It is discouraging in the extreme to note that some of the most able spokespersons for reform (the late John Holt, for one) (Holt, 1976) have reached the point of writing off the (public) schools as unreformable, and see no solution but to 'deschool' society. (Illich, 1976). That is a hard choice, but we are perhaps, at the point where there is nothing else but hard choices. Unfortunately, our own education has done little to prepare us to accept that challenge. What most of us received, from kindergarten to high school, was preparation for college. What we've had from schools of education is mostly HOW to teach. Virtually nowhere in those sixteen years of schooling have we been confronted with anything vaguely resembling a hard choice involving values, moral dilemmas, real problems of the real world, or the truth about power and privilege in our society. On the contrary, school has done an outstanding job of shielding us from the truth, insulating us against moral outrage, deadening our ability to think critically and independently, and silencing the voice within that insists we do something more than just believe in ideals.

Education reflects society. The crisis in our education reflects the larger crisis of our civilization. Our system of education is still chained to the mechanistic, exploitive, and profit-oriented values that gained ascendancy in our society a century or more, ago. That view of the world cannot survive much longer. Even if the earth's resources would permit it, those who have been systematically exploited over the years will not. The crisis facing this country centers on the necessity of redesigning our economy and life styles along the lines of human and planetary realities. The crisis in education centers on the fact that it is still preparing people to accept, fit into and promote the old colonial values. We face the very real possibility of having an entire generation trained and indoctrinated to serve a system that in all likelihood would no longer exist when the students come of age. Where would that leave them, and us? Iqbal could have well re-issued his works with up-dated publishing dates. Little has changed since his scathing analysis of the colonial schooling system.

What can you and I do about it? For me to suggest what I think we should do would be just a little too much like... school. I feel we have all had enough of being told what the answers are. If you accept the problem, you must accept the responsibility of finding your own answers. However, I am presumptuous enough to suggest the first step. That is to recognize our past, present and future realities. No matter what ideals we may hold, 'schooling or training' is the operant definition of modern education. No matter what clichés and patriotic catch-words we may hear from the rich and powerful, the politicians, and the media, the actual power of the ordinary person to direct the course of his or her own life is declining. No matter what rhetoric we may hear about conservation, ecology, human rights or social justice, we live in a culture whose dominant ethic is materialistic and essentially exploitive of both physical and human resources. Inasmuch as our own schooling has failed to educate us to these fundamental realities, we must assume - if we are serious about our lives and our profession - the burden of educating ourselves. This in itself will be difficult - few of us have learned how to learn. We have no choice, however, but to start from where we are. The first decision, then, is whether or not to make the effort to find out just what the reality of the situation is. I believe that Iqbal with his phenomenal vision and incisive identification of the truth about colonial and modern schooling, if nothing else, still gives us a point from where to begin. I hope we can now take a lead from him.