Curriculum for Art Craft and Culture

It is amazing to see that before 1980 the curriculum in Pakistan was much more diverse and inclusive. The learning experiences designed for students were much more rich and contextualized. We were growing up when the radicalization and indoctrination begin to happen in this country. The way school curriculum was injected with a fixed mindset, changed the narratives of the next generation. I must say that the curriculum planners were intelligent enough to infuse all sorts of hidden curricula within textbooks. Recently me and my research fellows conducted a research in Rawalpindi district only to identify the skillset which can be included at middle and secondary schools curriculum. We identified more than 100 skillset within these categories - industrial skills, occupational skills, arts and crafts. After completing the research we started to look deeper into the education of Arts and Crafts. We found various models around the world where curricular and co-curricular activities are designed to enable the children for learning local arts and crafts in such a way that they can become economically active on the basis of these skillsets. Only in the region of Rawalpindi we found 39 different art and craft categories which could be taught at school age. These skillsets ranged from older crafts of namda bani to the recent ones like computer graphics. It was amazing to see there are so many forms of performing arts which could be taught easily at school level but the over emphasized religiosity has completely taken over the education. Music, singing, drama and dancing are some of the skills which were taught at schools in the first thirty years of independence but then these were slowly and gradually removed from all curricular and co-curricular activities. I have conducted studies with my graduate students in the areas of peace education and health education and can clearly see how the removal of all healthy and peaceful activities from our curriculum impacted the two generations who studied in schools beyond 1980. Glorification of war and power as well as religious intolerance was infused in such a way that the learners and their parents could not directly see what is happening but the outcome is visible to all of us and who can say that we did not face the music. Recently I heard education minister of Punjab has proposed things like "a cap for boys and a scarf should be made a part of uniform as well as there should be no co-education in private institutions". Hence in the 21st century when on the one hand me and my research fellows are trying to make local skillset included in the curriculum to enable our learners compete in global markets; on the other hand the leaders of the country are pushing this nation back into the same radicalized and polarized social scenarios through the same indoctrination. As an educator I believe that the art, craft and any other cultural activities help us to think beyond the text books, express our independent thought and the power corridors are not willing to have such freedom of thought and expression because it threatens them. True democracy has never been experienced by our elders and they don't want the next generations to experience it ever. At the end I must encourage all those private institutions and small groups who are keeping the arts n culture alive in this country and breaking through the hegemony.