Our present BS programs governed by Undergraduate Education Policy 2023 are heavily burdened with non-core subjects placed in the rubric of General Education Cluster. These are 30 credit hours extended to 32 after HEC’s approval of Pakistan Studies as a compulsory course and with the addition of Understanding of the Holy Quran, these are 34 credit hours.
The burden of credit hours can be rationalized through pruning and merger of courses. ‘Pakistan Studies’ and ‘Ideology and Constitution of Pakistan’ should be merged. In fact, new course is not needed; Pakistan Studies is fine: it only needs concentration and focus. This purpose can be served by providing the Universities with a scheme of studies to be incorporated in Pakistan Studies under the same title. Now practically, Pakistan Studies has got 4 credit hours. So is the case with Islamic Studies, a compulsory course of two credit hours. With the addition of a compulsory course of Teaching of the Holy Quran of 4 credit hours (4 courses of 1 credit hours in 4 semesters, and now replaced with Understanding of the Holy Quran of 2 credit hours), practically it had 6 credit hours, and now with UHQ, its credit hours are practically 4: 2 for Islamic Studie and 2 for UHQ. Again, the focus is the issue: the course of Islamic Studies can be enriched with Quranic understanding (Quranic Arabic grammar, themes, Islamic values and history) if it is already not so. Instead of teaching this course at advanced level of every subject, International Islamic University’s model of a viva of the selected Quranic suras can be incorporated in the evaluation system for MPhil and PhD degrees for Muslim students. Two courses of Quantitative Reasoning can be merged into one. Consider the time invested in English till PhD: 5 years in PhD, 3 years in MPhil, 4 years in BS, and 12 years till intermediate. Twenty-four years of exposure to English language has not solved our issues of English. How can, Entrepreneurship, a course of 2 credit hours, make us good or even bad businessmen? Suppose it can. Can all our boys and girls in universities be business entrepreneurs? It is wastage of resources and ill-conceived investment. So is the case with Civics and Community Engagement. The basic idea of this course overlaps with Internship. What we can practically get from Internship, we don’t need to repeat theoretically in Civics and Community Engagement. Why not to blend them? Give a one-week orientation session on the core issues and philosophy of Civics and Community Engagement and then send the students in the field for community engagement. Teaching community engagement in the class is like teaching Computer Science from a book without a computer. Through such sagacious pruning around ten credit hours can be reduced, a direly needed rationalization in view of the falling government fundings for the universities, rising economic pressures because of inflation, and divided clientage because of increasing number of universities. Ten credit hours mean a significant financial relief for our universities and, of course, a heightened academic focus as well.
A better idea would be that a crash course of, say, Entrepreneurship is offered in summer and the students who want to pursue business can enroll in this course. And a dozen of this type of courses maybe offered but the students should be given options to enroll in anyone or more of them. Probably, girls would prefer to enroll in courses like Home Economics, Dietetics, Beautician Course and the like. Boys, who have economic and temperamental potential of business may opt for Entrepreneurship. I’m not gender-fixing the subjects but instead of teaching everything to everybody, students should be given open ended choices decreasing the burden of unnecessary credit hours and making the academic, intellectual, economic and infrastructural and academic investment focused and meaningful.
A society functions on the basis of hierarchy wherein the members work within their defined spheres of action. Suppose, in the construction of a building, the engineer is also doing the jobs of labor, transportation of the building material, cost management, supervision of the labor; a laborer is performing all these roles including the job of the transporter; the transporter is doing everything including labor and map-drafting for building, and so on and so forth. We can imagine the poor building or probably no building that we would get at the end. It does not increase the efficiency of the team; this kind of multi-tasking is sure to incapacitate the whole team.
When everybody is doing everything, nobody is doing anything, in fact. When we go to a car mechanic, we don’t ensure whether he has got a good understanding of Islamic Studies, Pakistan’s history, Pakistan’s national language, good roots in gender issues, and a refined understanding of human rights, etc. etc. We know that a mechanic should be a good mechanic, able to do his job well. That’s it. But in case of education, we think differently. Our university graduates should know something of every issue, but it can be achieved at the cost of every subject and, more significantly, seriously compromising the Major.
-The author, Prof. Dr. Ghulam Murtaza, is the chairman, Department of English Literature, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Government College University Faisalabad. He is the author of Straggling through Fire, Dreambox and Istifsar.
gmaatir@gmail.com
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