‘Education imperative to eradicate ignorance, extremism’

Karachi

Pakistan today is struggling against the twin curse of ignorance and bigotry and the best way to fight it is education, and more education.

These views were expressed by noted educationist, social activist and Managing Director Sindh Education Foundation Anita Ghulam Ali, while speaking as chief guest at a dinner hosted by the Oxford University Press (OUP), Pakistan, to celebrate 60 years of its operations in the country, at a local hotel on Wednesday evening.

“We have to usher in an era of intellect, depth of vision, and knowledge which would be the best way of nurturing a society where tolerance, intellectual magnanimity, and compassion reign supreme.”

In her characteristic, inimitable, brutally frank, and hard-hitting style, Ali said the need of the hour was to import educational material and printing paper to make education more widespread and not those bullet-proof cars at a colossal cost to the exchequer, a colossal waste of the people’s money, for the safety of “not too popularly elected” representatives.

She lamented that today society had people with highly confused minds occupying the topmost places in each and every walk of life, which, she said, was to the utter detriment of the country.

In lighter vein, lauding the services rendered by the OUP, Ali mentioned the Oxford Dictionary and said that it came in really handy, especially when she had to look up the exact meanings of Latin terms like suo moto, prima facie, and others. However, she didn’t look up the meaning of habaes corpus as it was so obvious “with so many people being killed in the city daily” an allusion to the word corpus. She said Pakistan had to take prompt and realistic decisions on many issues of education, including the medium of instruction and the status of English in light of the present global technological and scientific revolution. She paid glowing tributes to the Oxford University Press and Ameena Saiyid, OBE, Managing Director, OUP, Pakistan. “Ameena has been a highly positive influence on education and intellect in Pakistan,” she said, while lauding Saiyid’s services to Pakistan through, perhaps, the largest publishing house in the country.

Ali lauded the OUP’s efforts in promoting quality education and quality textbooks by being part of the global research endeavour. She also congratulated the OUP on being the first and only multinational in Pakistan to have appointed a lady to head it, which, she said, spoke volumes for the magnanimity of the Oxford University Press in the UK.

She also made a disclosure, it being that she quit Musharraf’s cabinet in protest against public funds being (mis)channeled into Musharraf’s referendum of 2002.

Earlier, Air Marshal (Retd) Azeem Daudpota, praising Oxford University as the world’s most august seat of learning, narrated how his father, when he went to study at Cambridge in 1924, wrote back to say that he should have gone to Oxford instead of Cambridge as Oxford had the best department for Asian studies. He said the same Oxonian tradition was ever so evident in the performance of the OUP, Pakistan.

Earlier, Ameena Saiyid gave a lucid account of the 60 years of the OUP’s operations in Pakistan, beginning 1952, through its years of infancy, the crises it had to grapple with, and the notable publications brought out by the organisation, notably Field-Marshal Ayub Khan’s “Friends, not masters”. The book, she said, sold 50,000 copies, but when Ayub was unceremoniously removed in 1969, the OUP was left with a surplus of 10,000 copies and then most of them were destroyed when angry mobs ransacked the OUP’s Lahore warehouse immediately after the Field-Marshal’s ouster. In a touching tribute to the OUP, Pakistan, she said, “My decades with the OUP have just been like an hour glass, filled not with sand but with diamonds.”

Posted in: Karachi News