History: A Lesson or Burden

Maham Kamal Khanum

‘We study his­to­ry to learn from mis­takes made in the past and remem­ber our roots’, taught the first chap­ter of my his­to­ry book back in grade 7. At the end of grade 10 when I stepped out of my O ’Lev­els His­to­ry exam I tried to remem­ber if this pur­pose had been ful­filled. Sad­ly, I real­ized it hadn’t been.

Recall­ing the whole jour­ney of learn­ing days and dates, I felt that most of my time was spent in com­ing to terms with the par­a­digm shift that took place in the form of the sub­ject trans­form­ing from His­to­ry to a part of Pak­istan Stud­ies. I had spent con­sid­er­able time in ear­ly sec­ondary school under­stand­ing the pat­terns of World His­to­ry and with­in a vaca­tions time my learn­ing was con­fined to just 2.4% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion.

Glad­ly, I man­aged to accept this too because of an excep­tion­al teacher that I had but as soon as the trans of her class­es broke I found myself sat­u­rat­ed and bur­dened in redun­dant facts and fig­ures about Mus­lims los­ing hope, rec­ol­lect­ing them­selves and Hin­dus and British break­ing them again.

Per­haps it was the bur­den of this sat­u­ra­tion that kept most of my class­mates annoyed of a sub­ject like His­to­ry for most of 9th and 10th grade. By the time it was May almost all of us decid­ed that we will nev­er study His­to­ry ever again in our lives, espe­cial­ly to give a CIE exam.

The 200 years of col­o­niza­tion were told to me beau­ti­ful­ly but the word ‘inde­pen­dence’ sound­ed iron­ic at the end when I had to fol­low a mark­ing scheme made all the way in Eng­land to answer ques­tions about the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent.

The books pre­sent­ed all the infor­ma­tion so tact­ful­ly that I wouldn’t even come close to devel­op­ing an opin­ion about the inde­pen­dence, Jin­nah or any­thing else in the course. And this very fail­ure is the rea­son why you end up ques­tion­ing what was the point of learn­ing all this when you are left as insen­si­tive to your his­to­ry as you were before study­ing about it.

Speak­ing of the books, I must say that all the key authors of Pak­istan Stud­ies’ books very skil­ful­ly guide stu­dents through the exam and ensured A*s if fol­lowed thor­ough­ly. How­ev­er, the con­flict between the sub­ject and the approach towards it lies here. If Pak­istan stud­ies is con­tin­ued to be taught for an exam with­out plac­ing events in a glob­al per­spec­tive, caus­ing stu­dents to dis­own it, it will remain a dis­liked sub­ject with no point of teach­ing it.

I won’t deny that it is taught in depth and a broad­er per­spec­tive in uni­ver­si­ties and advanced stud­ies but the truth is that many who could have been more inter­est­ed in the sub­ject are deterred from it way before they reach pro­fes­sion­al col­leges.

It scares me that if this remains the case, our gen­er­a­tions will remain illit­er­ate of their past and live with delu­sion­al and inco­her­ent knowl­edge of his­to­ry.

Maham Kamal Khanum is an O‑Level grad­u­ate, about to begin Inter­na­tion­al Bac­calau­re­ate at The Inter­na­tion­al School, Karachi, aspir­ing jour­nal­ist, blog­ger and intern at The Express Tri­bune.