Pakistan: Special note. The second part of yesterday’s PBS show Frontline concerned the condition of the public school system in Pakistan. It has collapsed in nearly every respect.
The video report noted that nearly half of the 65 million school age kids in Pakistan do not attend public schools. It did not follow-up that datum to report that a large percentage of the children not in public school learn to read and write in religious schools associated with mosque. The madrasah teaches boys and girls to read, write and recite the Quran, among other basics. In many regions and cities of Pakistan, attendance at the madrasah is the only path to semi-literacy for the children of the poor.
The collapse of the public school system has been the subject of editorials and studies for decades. The video report was not newsworthy on that account. It was significant that the overcrowded, open air school that was the subject of the video is in Lahore, one of the largest cities of Pakistan. The visual setting looked like a remote tribal village, not part of a large urban center.
Of great interest were the reporter’s brief interviews with a pre-teen Pakistani girl who attended the open air school in Lahore. The girl believed in education and said she wanted to be a teacher. Concerning the US, she said her teacher told her to hate America.
The vast majority of Pakistanis outside the political elite hate the US. The polling data of the past decade is consistent and unambiguous. A question that has been dodged invariably is who formulates the anti-US attitudes, irrespective of the tens of millions in aid sent to Pakistan. This video showed the face of the man who taught the young Pakistani girl to hate the US. It was her class teacher.
This is a profound discovery because it means that anti-US attitudes are being instilled at very young ages and reinforced through the duration of primary school education. In short, Pakistani kids grow up learning to hate Americans because that is what they are taught in public school. In the madrasahs, they are taught not only to hate Americans but how to fight American soldi4ers … and to die by suicide-murder bombings.
No agency in Pakistan or elsewhere views primary school teachers as agents of subversion. The Pakistani government is unwilling or unable to restrain the anti-American political bias of teachers in its failed school system. There is no tradition of protecting children from adult prejudices.
The Frontline video was stark, but, on balance, it understated the education problems in Pakistan by not addressing the insidious, seditious and subversive ideas nearly half the children of Pakistan receive in the madrasahs.
Phi Beta Iota: Howard Bloom, our Zionist colleague with a big brain and a big heart, points out in Global Brain–The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century that both Israeli and Palestinian children are brain-washed and both believe, by the ages of five to seven, that the others are pigs and monkeys. The US education system is not much better, see for instance Weapons of Mass Instruction and Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Will Durant nailed this in 1916 with his PhD thesis, still in print and still relevant, Philosophy and the Social Problem–The Annotated Edition. America has wasted fifty years and trillions of dollars as well as millions of lives, mostly of others, tryingto dominate the world with weapons instead of creating a prosperous world at peace through education. America has failed humanity because the American government has grown into what one Libertarian scholar calls Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect. The American public is slow to rouse, and rousing now, but absent a Strategic Analytic Model, a general commitment to Electoral Reform as the “one thing” that all can agree on, and absent some sort of broad coalition to expell BOTH Democrats AND Republicans from Congress in 2010 and 2012, we fear that another decade of insolvency, ideological idiocy, and global impotence is America's lot.
