When my family came back to Pakistan in 1985, my sister and I were admitted to a relatively new school in Clifton: Beaconhouse Public School. With a foreigner as Principal, the Clifton Campus (the school, now a “system” had branches in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi at the time, perhaps 20 branches all told) attracted a lot of expatriates like myself, and I still have fond memories of exceptional teachers, great opportunities and some fantastic O’ Level results from those years. This post is in reaction to some disturbing trends in their curriculum and standards of education – trends that impact Pakistan greatly because the Beaconhouse School System graduates over 50,000 students every year, children who will one day be leaders in our country. By that token alone, the failure of the System to impart quality education to our children is something to be worried about.
Now, the structure of Beaconhouse is a tricky thing to explain, since this kind of establishment is fairly alien to the rest of the world. A feudal family, the Kasuris (yes, our current Foreign Minister himself), started this school in Lahore in 1975, and built it up from a small Montessori into a giant squid. The “squid” today has over 100 arms in 24 cities all over Pakistan, and is growing at a steady pace every year. With over 50,000 students enrolled in their schools, and an average fee of Rs. 2000 a month, they earn well over Rs. 100 million every month. Apparently, their profit margins are very low.
In 1994, my mother joined the school as a junior class teacher (classes III to IV). At this time, the expansion of the squid system was well underway, and HeadQuarters (run by Mrs. Kasuri herself, who is still heavily involved in the management of this system) was struggling to bring the many different branches of the school to one level standard. Location, minor differences in management within schools, staff and standards differed vastly from area to area. There was no way they could bring each new school to the standard of the best of their existing schools, so with each new branch they added to their roster, the standards dropped a notch, until the standards were, at last, uniform – just not very high.
At the same time, they invested in the development of a curriculum that would be unique to themselves, based on numerous Education Conferences held since November 2000, and the various experts they invited to these conferences.
Just to make things clear: I worked for a year as editor of an internal publication for the System. During that time, I received numerous articles from the Curriculum Development department. Besides the fact that the english was atrocious (and the medium of instruction in these schools is English), the concepts and theories presented were often garbled and incoherent. I gave it up as soon as a better opportunity came along, but I have seen the fruits of their “curriculum development” through my mother, and the pattern of incoherence and slack standards has not changed. The curriculum has many influences: Western, Indian, local… I came across phrases such as “cognitive learning”, “cross-curricular computing”, “applied technology”. The focus of the curriculum is heavily on technology-dependent teaching methods, which means teacher-training. What was the extent of teacher-training? My mother learnt how to use Microsoft Office, and to type. That’s it. Let me reiterate: my mother teaches junior grades, grade 5 to be exact. I guess MS Office comes in really handy when teaching 10-year-olds.
The fact is that the curriculum, which is now active in all 90+ branches of the Beaconhouse Schools, has already had to be revised twice. Children passing from grade 5 to 6 have trouble grasping basic concepts in the higher grade, and have shown considerable deficiency in basic General Knowledge, in the foundations of Social and Physical Sciences, and have the same standard of English that the curriculum department has shown, atrocious. Despite revisions, the curriculum will never improve, simply because those framing the curriculum are inept. For example, their latest Geography text suggests that rivers meander because they want to. When it was pointed out that rivers meander according to the landscape they encounter along the way, the idea was dismissed. Apparently water does not flow in a straight line. Another example: apparently the earth is tilted. Yes, that’s right, it doesn’t spin on an imaginary angled axis, the earth itself is at a tilt. So the next time you feel yourself falling to one side, take comfort: it’s just the angle at which the earth hangs in space!
I can’t wait for this generation of students to step into the real world. I think they’re in for a little shock, don’t you?