A nice article which appeared in the Daily Dawn Magazine of 2nd September 2007, primarily targetting Convent Education. The writing is pretty good and justifies her wish to take out the school newspaper. I am sure the Headmistress would be biting her nails.
School or shooting gallery
I myself attended a convent in Karachi, one of the better known ones, and more likely than not, many of this magazine’s readers’ children are probably enrolled there too. Out of the 13 years I spent there, 10 were sheer bliss (since I didn’t know any better) and the remaining three proved to be a sort of educational hell.
As an avid reader and aspiring writer, by the time I hit the eighth grade I had decided on journalism as the perfect career for me. After all, I was getting straight As in English Language and Literature and I was more of a people person than a lab rat. Medicine, the field my parents had chosen for me as The One, didn’t seem as glamorous as being a desi Christiane Amanpour. Burdened with their disappointment and tut-tut-ing, I turned to school for comfort. I figured starting up a school newspaper would be ‘oh so much fun’.
The school administration, however, turned out to be worse than the bureaucracy my father has to face at Nadra. They wanted a prototype of an issue of the newspaper; eager as I was, I spent two months working on one, forcing my unfortunate father to drive me to page-makers and printers and collect estimates and so on.
One fine school day, I submitted it in to the headmistress’s office. It came back to me through a lowly secretary, a harsh ‘unacceptable’ scrawled all over the front page.
Unacceptable! Can they say that to you? Was my work ‘unacceptable’? Did she not know how utterly impeccable the spellings and grammar were in all those articles I personally typed up and laid out on all those pages? Has there ever been another eighth grader in the history of that God-forsaken school who had come up with a whole newspaper on her own?
There was no accompanying note saying ‘Tone it down, and I’m sure we can work things out’. Nothing else at all. I was simply unacceptable. I cried that night, having learnt a harsh lesson: school would not get me far in achieving my ambitions.
Three years later, as I was leaving the institution for my A-levels at a high school situated in Old Clifton, I faced the headmistress once more. She asked me why I wasn’t applying for the A-level programme at my beloved convent, my alma mater, the school that had given me ‘everything’. I merely replied, “I deserve better.”
It’s not common for students to dislike their learning institutions to such an extent. It scared my parents, to say the least. They thought I was a sadistic little thing, relishing the thought of the day that hell-hole would burn down.
But exactly what had my convent given me? An education? I could have gotten better, much better, at a number of other schools in Karachi. Discipline? My supervisor in my last year at school once ordered a security guard to ‘jail’ us in a confined area beside the reception. We were a dozen girls who had come to school for extra classes before taking our O-levels; our supervisor, who doubles as a receptionist at some random hospital and who for some reason called hair ‘hairs’, thought we were being rowdy. Might I inform you that three of those girls were student council members, including yours truly. And as far as I could see, we were far from rowdy; we simply couldn’t find our chemistry teacher.
People argue, “But St. ---- must have given you something you cherish!” I must admit it did, but without knowing it. I met my closest and oldest friends there. We hung onto each other through the worst years of our school life, collectively rolling our eyes at teachers who couldn’t teach biology to save their lives. We perched protectively on our own little bench in the vast school ground, helping each other get away with breaking rules. The school didn’t seem interested in cultivating our talent; one of my friends was a wonderful singer, the other a writer, another could speak perfect khaliss Urdu and had the potential to be the star of our make-believe drama society.
But no. The entire student body was treated as one big teeming mass of potential criminals (please recall the aforementioned make-shift ‘jail’). Extracurricular activities were limited to sports and that again was limited to the boys since we had nobody on the sports staff willing to coach us basketball. Girls strutted around school making goo-goo eyes at them, while debating what kind of wedding they would want. Believe it or not, no less than four different teachers lectured us in our last year on the importance of marriage and children and how we girls must ‘understand our limitations’.
I’m all for finding a husband and raising a family but you simply DON’T insert this message in between lectures on biotechnology. On top it all, an Islamiat teacher in our tenth grade class quite subtly told us of her views regarding the Taliban and basant (‘it is HARAAAM!!’)
Get real. Our teachers had a responsibility towards us and that solely referred to teaching us the syllabi and encouraging us in our strengths. Instead, we got Marriage 101. Even at the age of 16, when the rest of my brainwashed classmates were giggling over potential proposals and picking out their rishta pictures (I’m not exaggerating, I saw some that robbed me of my sleep at night), I realised that something was grossly wrong at this institution. I had teachers who were intimidated and even suspicious of my fluent English while I stumbled on without any help in Urdu. I was targeted in a vicious character assassination campaign by a teacher who, and it delights me to give you this information, was fired once my mother got through with her. Admittedly, I got justice but school isn’t supposed to be like a shooting gallery with the students being vulnerable pigeons. Rather than working for us and with us, our beloved convent worked against us.
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