Independent Education in Pakistan

by amir taj

At the Kennedy School yesterday, I had to hear Ahsan Saleem, board member from Pakistani education NGO The Citizens Foundation. He spoke to the group about implementations and challenges of the independent schools which the foundation runs.

Funded entirely by private donations (the vast majority from Pakistanis in-country and the diaspora), the schools are built and operated in areas where government schools are not present or have been rendered totally ineffective. They follow the government’s standard curriculum, preparing students to be able to enter the mainstream education system at post-primary levels.

Some of the issues brought up at the presentation were: why bundling clinics with the schools is difficult given local politics, sustainability and evaluation metrics, and how financial contributions on the part of each family are determined.

Given the sorry state of public education in Pakistan, earnest efforts like these are really heartening to hear about. I would speculate that a further influx of donations and physical resources could help this effort scale up even further, and as Mr. Saleem mentioned, help strengthen civil society in Pakistan.

Masculinity and the Muslim Experience

by DMahendra

As many of you know, I am currently trying to explore the dimensions of Muslim masculinity. I thought I would share a series of open-ended questions, and responses I came up with recently when trying to dig deeper into these issues.

1) What makes Muslim men uniquely who they are?

• Economic background: poverty/wealth, blue/white collar work, old/new/no money
• Family dynamics: nuclear/extended, provincial/transnational, fathering/mothering
• Sex/Sexuality: homo/hetero/queer spectrums, sexual history, sex education
• Education: (non)patriarchal academics, level of education, textbooks
• Networks: Religious/secular friends and colleagues, provincial/transnational
• Geographies: urban/rural, homo/heterogeneous, (im)possible “dual life,” access to different spaces, mid-ethnic/transitional, migration, agriculture, male-female ratio
• Politics: manhood (un)tied to franchise/representation, masculinity and political expediency
• Environment:  Gender & food/nutrition, architecture

2) Which life events might be crucial?

• Loss: parent(s)/family members, job, significant other, virility (impotence), political/social rights, natural disasters
• Psychological/Physical traumas: military/law enforcement brutality, abuse by family/friends/intimates, displacement/refugees, witness male role models commit violence/neglect, starvation, paralysis/mental impairment, developmental issues (physical/cognitive),
• Foundations of hegemonic masculinity: peer reinforcement, success through patriarchal action/oppression, media of hegemonic masculinity, religious/political authority granted over women, microagressions from men/women regarding masculinity

3) What types of interventions might result in more gender egalitarian thinking?

• Middle school/high school men’s awareness building
• public advocacy (PSAs in Muslim publications, mosque advocacy)
• better sex education
• addressing all-male peer groups (basketball teams, clubs, men’s religious organizations)
• encouraging religious scholarly discourse on masculinity
• including women’s scholarship more prominently in the Muslim community
• media (music, movies)
• Arts and Culture (books, visual art exhibits, dance, public art, museum partnerships)
• Internet  (online campaigns)

Just some thoughts…but how to narrow it down?

Authority, Authoritarian

I’ve recently come across three different instances which all revolve around thinking about systems of authority and the authoritarian.

1.

One was reading Khaled Abou El Fadl’s Conference of the Books. Fadl writes time and time again about how various claimants to speak for Islamic ways of living and thinking bump up against the indiosyncracies and challenges of an individual’s life. The debates on hijab, gender roles, Islamic law, and and others are the fine grains on the picture of this overarching tension. In certain countries the authorities become authoritarian when they coerce, jail, beat or kill those that may disagree with their interpretation of Islam.

2.

When political debates arise, such as the current row over healthcare reform in the US, authority is invoked from all sides. On the left, Governor (Dr.) Howard Dean has been stumping for the proposed healthcare legislation, leveraging both his political authority as well as his medical background. One the right, Conservatives for Patients Rights has poured in billions of dollars into defeating the bill, and is headed up by Rick Scott. He invokes his authority of running a hospital corporation for over two decades. They may be on different sides of the issue, but their tactic is the same: to come off as the authority, and to paint the other side as foisting the wrong viewpoint on the American populace in an authoritarian manner.

3.

Third and last, I read about two new skyscraper projects; one going up in downtown Bangkok, and another in Tribeca in downtown Manhattan. What do they have in common? Variation on the modern glass-box. From what I can gather, these sort of ambitious, large-scale developments project and authority that extend far beyond themselves – what is initially built for the wealthy and corporate sets a trend that impact what the everyperson comes to expect. Eventually, building trends become authoritarian e.g. we are forced to choose between steel-and-glass or brick-facade, because other design concepts are not affordable or scalable enough.

How do balance authorities in a field? What are the danger signs of an authoritarian trend? With today’s expertise shaped by public perception and credentials received as much by influence as by hard work, balance of authority is hard to gauge. Furthermore, authoritarians coerce those in their domain/field not always through direct and frontal means: often it is the illusion of choice or “no better option” which empowers an authoritarian paradigm. It seems best to keep plugging away at reversing both spin from sources of authority and attempts to impose one viewpoint through authoritarian means.