I stand here in awe of this august body because in addressing you I am mindful of the reality that I am neither an educationist nor the son of an educationist. I am at best a ‘meddlesome cleric’ who has been lured into giving this lecture. The reason for my accepting it is simply my passion for the subject rather than any ability. So please bear with me if I wander into my own hallucinations, but I hope that someday these might turn into a vision and in the end, a reality of what education should be at least in my native land of Pakistan and in other similar situations.
In looking at this subject of globalisation and living relationships as experienced through the Church-related education system, one needs to examine both its beginnings and where it stands today. We all recognise that this system was introduced through the modern missionary movement during the European colonial expansion of the last few centuries. Therefore I propose to look back and take some nostalgic glimpses into the mind-set of the pioneers and also to look at its present reality by using Church-related education system in Pakistan as a case-study. This I’m sure would reveal how such a system has defined our living relationships with its global implications.
It all began with a clear conviction by the pioneer missionaries that education along with health-care are the instruments through which one not only meets human needs but also interfaces with the community at large. Incidentally this became of paramount significance in situations where there were people who practiced faiths other than Christianity. But overall there was a deep conviction that it is through this diaconal ministry that people’s hearts were to be won for the Christian faith. H.P. Thompson in his book Educational Missions at Work. A sketch of the educational work of the SPG in the mission field, published in 1938 gives us some interesting glimpses of those early days:
Only Christianity looks on people with the belief that God has endowed them all with powers of body and mind and soul that are meant to be developed to their highest capacity. Christianity is dynamic, while other religions are static. And so schools, no less than hospitals, spring from a Christian inspiration, and wherever the Gospel goes education follows.
The early missionaries in the American colonies, gave much of their time to instructing the Negro slaves of the planters, and sometimes the Red Indians too, although many of the settlers were ‘strangely prejudiced with a horrid notion, thinking that the Christian knowledge’ would be ‘a means to make their slaves more cunning and apter to wickedness’.
The missionaries soon found that… the level of life among such people appeared to them to be uncivilised and degraded; only some measure of culture could raise it to a better level, so schools were started and with much greater success…Western civilisation is at first sight dazzling; it seems to be the secret of the white man’s power, and others long to learn that secret. It becomes also the key to comparatively well-paid employment, in all the glory of a black coat and a white collar, which seems the height of ambition.
There’s another example of a much later encounter when Mahatma Gandhi visited Edwarde’s College, Peshawar (the only tertiary level Anglican foundation in Pakistan) on 4 November 1938 and a dialogue took place between him and the then Principal of the college, the Revd Kenneth Jardine.
K.J: I would be grateful if you would give me your opinion of the value to India of a college with a religious purpose such as Edwarde’s College has.
Gandhiji: If you mean by religious purpose, missionary purpose, in my opinion it has no place. But if by the expression you mean a moral purpose, that seeks to turn the students towards God and a Godly life, such colleges have a definite place not only in India but everywhere.
K.J: You once advised all Indian students to study the life and teaching of Jesus while they are in college. Would you still give this advice?
Gandhiji: Most emphatically yes, only my advice was of a general character viz. that the students should study the lives of all the great teachers of mankind. What you are referring to was a course of lectures I delivered on the Gospels. It was the beginning of a series that was to cover the teachings of all the other great faiths in the world.
K.J: But when I tell others of the life and teaching of Christ I cannot help telling them also what an enormous difference He has made to my own life – the joy and knowledge of God I receive from Him. So that if they ask me how they may know God, how can I help telling of my own experience? If they then wish to try the same path and ask me to help them to find God through Jesus, could I possibly refuse to allow them to come with me and become Christians?
Gandhiji: I have written a great deal on this matter. In saying what you have said just now so frankly, you have not succeeded in saying the whole truth. What I mean is this. At the back of your mind must be the idea that the other faiths are either false or not as true as Christianity. If my interpretation of your view is correct, I regard it as a profound error. No one has the right to judge for others. There is no reason why Buddha or Krishna or ‘Mahomed’ should not mean precisely the same thing to a Buddhist, Vaishnava or a Muslim that Jesus means to you. What I should do in your place is to invite Buddhists, Vaishnavas and Muslims to be better for your contact as a missionary.
As we turn to the case-study of the role of the Church in education in Pakistan and its impact on living relationships; let’s remind ourselves that this role has been of a truly pioneering nature which has withstood the passage of time and is still being acclaimed as one of the best private sector endeavours to have served the nation. The essential motivation for this role was not to set up educational institutions per se, but simply to obey the call to serve God’s people in their ordinary lives. The early fathers felt the compulsion for this cause as they wanted to offer the blessings of education for all with the hope that it might also become an education for life. So these places became areas of the Church’s ministry where one could offer and share God’s love in Christ to all and sundry, and in the process also equip them for a wholesome life. It is interesting to observe that today, in the whole of South Asia and for that matter in Africa, there isn’t a major city which does not boast at least of one premier institution which has been pioneered by the Church. These institutions have become the backbone of the educational system in those countries.
However we also need to take a pause and briefly look critically of our role in this field. The first question which one is forced to ask is whether we helped to perpetuate a system of education which was mainly devised for the ‘subject people’. I think it is fair to say that all our undergraduate institutions became part of the ‘BA-syndrome’ which simply means that without much discernment the goal of education became simply to acquire a basic degree. This of course has stifled our nation and has produced a bottle-neck of people who have been trained for nothing except to sit at desks and assume that they have acquired a wholesome education.
Secondly, one needs to ask if this system in the recent past has become elitist in the guise of achieving excellence. We must blatantly ask ourselves if we have ignored the poor and even as a cover up, have devised a system of social segregation, which tantamounts to educational apartheid!
Thirdly, we must honestly ask why we have remained so impotent towards our cultural ‘black holes’. By this I mean, why our institutions have not played a more decisive role in raising the moral standards of the people in order to negate the incessant pressure of corruption and incompetence? We have been self-congratulatory in claiming that the products of Church institutions have been well groomed human beings and that at least they have not been producing the Talibans of the Madrassas. But the overall reality of fundamentalism and militancy does not seem to have changed much.
My list of critical questions could go on, but let this be sufficient as a reminder that perhaps all has not been what one so often claims, and that in moving towards the future one seriously need to take cognisance of these and related factors. We must not be the practitioners of any system where the rich are welcomed but the poor are denied, where the products of a privileged schooling enter higher education automatically but others are turned away, where the so-called ‘merit system’ becomes the ultimate criterion for acceptance and those of true human worth are never given any chance.
Our pioneers in the church were conscious of this, and so all these educational institutions which today are recognised as premier places of learning were primarily set up with this in mind. These institutions were meant for all. Therefore, my submission would be, that these church-based educational places, must retain the original character; that in offering education we are offering God’s love and that in serving education we are serving God’s people; and that this be available for all and it should mean ALL, regardless of class, creed, race or gender.
In moving towards the basic concept of education for life especially in the Pakistani context, it is universally accepted that one of the fundamental aims of education is to prepare people for life in Society. This broad aim includes a number of more particular aims i.e. to prepare people for productive work, for life in community, for participation in culture, for responsible citizenship, and not least for grappling with the important moral challenges which society is likely to face during their lifetime. The creation of a just and harmonious society is clearly one of the most serious challenges facing both Pakistan and the world at large, and all students must be prepared to respond to it. I believe this is a challenge which the church must take up. I believe if we have to take the path of serving God’s people in this land through education, then we must rise to this task. For the purposes of our deliberations here, I’m offering a three-fold petition as a kind of litany, by using the refrain, "save us from….."
1. SAVE US FROM CORRUPTION. The most serious question that our educational system of the past and present has to answer is, as to why or how our society has become so corrupted. We seem to be completely and thoroughly impregnated with it at all levels of society. The only defence that I can offer for this is that it seems to be part of the ‘esse’ of human nature. My own life’s experience has shown me that it is everywhere in this world, and the difference between different societies is based upon degrees and can be measured in relative terms. But that should not let us off the hook. There are a number of basic questions which arise, some of which are: how can we alleviate corruption? Can we prepare our students to challenge the curse of corruption and themselves to become practitioners of a new mode of living? Can it be done through cleansing our culture, by rediscovering the values of our religion, or what? Culture, certainly, has a very close relationship with education, in fact, it can be termed as co-implicative. It is interesting to go back in history a little where we come across the good old Aristotle, who in discussing the Nicomachean Ethics maintains that it is not the function of the educator to define the end, the telos, of the educational programme. It is rather the politician determines what the good life is and who the good citizens should be. Presumably, Aristotle’s experience of politicians must have been much more felicitous than ours. If we were to trace back influences to their sources, I think we would not be greatly in error if we were to say that it is the culture that sets the aims of education. At least it does in two ways: firstly, by indicating the kind of good citizen the educational process ought to produce, and secondly, in the intellectual content by nominating the skills, expertise, ability to think and express one’s thoughts. I wish to further submit that culture provides the philosophy of education upon which different parts and stages of the educational programme maybe structured.
Sometimes this philosophy of education gets fossilised to produce a situation where a stereotyped and antiquated system of education becomes the norm. The monoliths of course, become the major obstacles to any progress in education. What am I saying here? It is simply that if the education system cannot heal and transcend a culture, then such a system needs drastic surgery, and I believe ‘Church-related education’ should take this as its major task. Save us from corruption.
2. SAVE US FROM SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT. My second supplication is to look at the whole area of citizenship. What kind of people has our education system produced? Have they been part of a society of tolerance and harmonious living or not? The way our society has progressed in the last fifty years, we seem to be increasingly moving towards a monochrome nature of life which is extremely aggressive and intolerant of others. The whole richness of pluralism, both in cultural and religious terms is often perceived to be a threat to the Society. What we need to move towards is some kind of a pluralist democracy in which there is a shared commitment to democracy in society, justice combined with freedom for individuals and for communities to define and pursue their goals, values and lifestyles. The education system should be equipping its young citizens with the knowledge and skills which they require in order to play a full part in maintaining, criticising and developing a pluralist democracy and should also be helping them to want to live in such a society. It is disturbing to note at times that large number of us tend to live under the delusion of self-aggrandizement. We take pride in having the nuclear know-how but are oblivious to its suicidal realities. We love to show off our armaments but fail to justify the fact that almost seventy percent of the nation’s resources are being spent on such machinery. What kind of citizens are we when we know that most of our people do not have the basic amenities of life, and issues like child-labour and bonded-labour are rampant amongst us? I think church-related education should increasingly engage in studies on peace and warfare, the provision of energy for life and human rights especially where it concerns the dignity of labour and the provision of basic amenities like drinking water and sewage free zones. Save us from self- aggrandizement.
3. SAVE US FROM IMITATION. Some years ago, there took place an International Youth Conference in Bangkok. At the end of the conference there was a group photograph taken, where some youngsters held up a banner showing an imprint of a coca-cola bottle and underneath it was written ‘ save us from imitation ’. It was a symbolic gesture but a real cry from the heart because those of us from the Southern nations seem to have become imitators par excellence. In my part of the world (NWFP) we take pride in the fact of being the most skilled imitators and copiers of any sort of guns that you can lay your hands upon. It is perhaps one of the most frustrating dilemmas, as to why we just fall short of our own inventiveness. Sadly, yet again, we will have to turn on our education system which has comprehensively failed to nurture our youngsters as innovators and creators. It is partly due to this fossilised philosophy of education (to which I referred earlier), that we have failed to grasp the reality that technology-based education is an essential requirement for us today. If one goes around our educational institutions, one would be horrified at the paucity of resources available for such a purpose. As one travels across the world one observes a continuous flow of inventions, both big and small by renowned scientists and by high school students; inventions in space-technology and inventions such as the simple studs which once put in the middle of the road, can show you where you are going or not going at night or when lost. It is an absolute must that education system in Southern countries must be technology-based and invention friendly. Save us from imitation.
Just before I conclude may I sum up this case-study with the hope that the Church-related education system in Pakistan (and perhaps elsewhere) is available for all, regardless of creed, cast, race, or gender, and that it prepares people for life. Such an education system should inculcate: firstly, to fight and reject corruption in the Society; secondly to be willing to uphold a pluralists democracy for all people and thirdly, that a spirit of inventiveness and ingenuity is inculcated so that students become inventors rather than imitators. My friends, I would like to end with an immortalised saying of one of the earliest pioneers, a cobbler from England turned missionary turned educationist, William Carey by name. He said, " expect great things from God, attempt great things for God". And those of us who still consider themselves to be missionaries for this cause: go launch into the deep, fly higher and into the beyond upon the wings of the eagle; but whether you go into the depths or into the beyond-put your trust in the source and reason of our being-the One who has fashioned and destined us in every cell of our body and who embraces each breath that we breathe. It is in His name, in His service and ultimately in His love that we encourage one another to keep steadfast on this path of offering education for all and education for life.
Mano Rumalshah
Bishop of Peshawar: Church of Pakistan, York, 22 June 2005
Diocesan Centre, 1-Sir Syed Road, Peshawar-25000, Pakistan
Tel: + 92- 91-5279094
Fax: + 92-91-5277499
E-mail: bishopdop@hotmail.com
