Viewer discretion advised

As I flipped through the channels while watching TV, I stopped at one which had a bold message across the screen.

As the show in question started, my mind drifted off to other terrains. All I need to do is switch to one of our news channels and, lo and behold! Images of violence and gore grace our screens day in and day out. Heck, you don’t even need to switch channels. If you’re living in Karachi, walk out on the street. No one will come to you with a sign that says, “Discretion advised, things are going to get messy here”, before a bout of target killing ensues at the whim of a group of lunatics who believe only a certain sect/class/race of people have the right to live. 

The impact of violence on our country can be seen by the fact that when you enter “violence” in the search bar on the internet, the fifth result on the Google page is “Major incidents of terrorist violence in Pakistan, 2011”. (Missed taking a screen-shot and even though the result page is different now, Pakistan still features on the top somewhere.) There was a time when hearing of a bomb blast used to make us exclaim in horror. Now, we’re surprised if we hear of only one. Why is Pakistan thus gripped by this never-ending cycle of terrorism and violence? If you were to ask us this question, you would get varying responses depending on which school of thought that person belongs to. The “liberals” will tell you it’s due to the “extremists”. The religious “fundamentalists” will say it’s an American conspiracy to destabilize Pakistan (meaning we were actually stable at some point?). Your random Taxi driver will say it’s a Jewish conspiracy or India is behind it. You will hardly hear anyone say, “The problem lies within us. Intolerance, suspicion and hatred has been so deeply ingrained within us over the years that its inevitable outcome is the violence that has now gripped the entire country”. Why you won’t hear anyone saying that is because “self-acceptance” is a trait we lack amongst others. 

Pakistan, however, is not just all negative adjectives. If there’s any good that I see in my country, it’s potential – lots of it. In the form of our youth that constitutes a staggering 63% of the entire population. If you were to ask me the solution to the many problems in our country, I would say channelize this colossal potential in the right direction, and the best way of doing that is by education. The “education” I’m referring to is not a catch-phrase that is thrown about by NGOs or a statistic to show that we are meeting the Millennium Development Goals. It is very aptly put by John Dewey as, 


“Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself.” 


If we were to consider it as Dewey puts it, our education system needs some serious revision.

1. Knowledge imparted needs to be accompanied by examples of practice in the real world. Knowledge is incomplete without implementation. Our national education system mostly relies on the rote system and our students leave school without any clue as to how they should apply what they learnt in their lives. 
2. As a nation we are physically extremely inactive. Some members of the elite class have started frequenting gyms on a regular basis but our middle class hardly engages in any form of physical exercise in their daily routine. Schools also don’t give importance to sports as part of the curriculum any more. Exercise and sports are a great way of venting the negative energy within us, necessary in the times we’re living in. 
3. Religious education needs to focus more on the individual’s character building. Along with teaching the Arabic text, effort needs to be made to understand the content of the Quran and its implementation in our daily lives. Islam, in essence, is an extremely tolerant religion and the text should not be misused to make our youth think otherwise. 
4. Wisdom passed down over centuries in the form of storytelling should not be replaced by a completely Westernized approach to education. We need to stay true to our values to retain our identity. 
5. Give the true version of history. Everyone has the right to know.

All in all, we need to focus on nurturing well-rounded individuals and we need to also understand that this process will take time. No one, especially not the government, can wave a magic wand and change this nation for the better overnight, because unfortunately, in real life you can’t change the channel to what you want.