Among the many crimes of the Pakistani state is its mutation of the social sciences into a disfigured medium for crudely-conceived state propaganda. Instead of transmitting knowledge gained from centuries of scientific exploration in this all-important discipline, Pakistan’s official sociology textbooks regurgitate the uncensored fantasies of paranoid generals, ultra-nationalist bureaucrats and hyper-patriarchal clerics, geared largely towards serving the hegemonic needs of a tiny, mostly Punjabi, male elite. Instead of providing young minds with the theoretical means to understand the social world, these textbooks are written with the express purpose of reproducing pliant, unquestioning, unthinking subjects even in academic disciplines supposedly geared towards critical inquiry (in the true spirit of the colonial tradition).
Barring some elite islands of exception, this approach has infected all our spaces of learning and dialogue, and permeated across wider society. It is no accident that we have legions of ‘educated’ folks in Pakistan who simply fail to understand how the Baloch have legitimate grievances with the state; who cannot comprehend the reality of institutionalized discrimination against minorities and the working poor; who can’t see the glaring gender apartheid in our public spaces; who can’t seem to fathom that it is considerations of gendered power, not spiritual devotion, that underpin our obsessive defence of anti-women patriarchal traditions; who can’t even wrap their heads around why authoritarian military dictatorship may not be a very pro-people model of governance.
Years of teaching gibberish in the name of the social sciences has left us a society largely unequipped with the tools to understand structures of power, systemic oppression or social processes beyond the simplistic binaries wrought by moral judgment. In the absence of explanatory frameworks, every social problem becomes a conspiracy of evil foreign forces out to get us rather than an outcome of concrete historical and material processes. All poverty and suffering becomes an outcome of moral depravity and corruption rather than observable structures of exploitation and exclusion in place for years.
The rot runs much deeper than the religious seminaries and the military’s factories of jihad. We have bred a generation that does not know how to think. No amount of military operations or summary executions can purge this mental decay.
Note: The excerpts below are from the intermediate level sociology textbooks recommended by multiple boards including the federal board (http://www.fbise.edu.pk/…/Detail%20of%20Textbooks%20at%20HS…), the Aga Khan board (http://examinationboard.aku.edu/…/List%20of%20Recommended%2…). Karakoram board, and other boards in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The authors are also recommended for reading by the University of Punjab: http://pu.edu.pk/…/Course-O…/Elective-Subjects/Sociology.pdf
and the Higher Education Commission’s approved sociology curriculum:
http://www.hec.gov.pk/…/Curricu…/Documents/573_SOCIOLOGY.pdf
