(Mis)education of a Toronto-stani

Sana Ahmed considers how being shuttled between Pakistani and Canadian school systems shaped the learner she is today. In the end, the two places may not have been so different.

MY family moved to Toronto from Karachi, in 1989. But that was a tentative move and it was not until 1996, when I turned 12, that we settled here for good. As a result, I spent part of my childhood in Karachi, but reached adulthood in Toronto.

This immigrant background gave me a unique perspective on two seemingly different worlds. Adding to my knowledge of the contrasts between each world’s values and cultures, I have developed a keen sense of how the education systems in both countries operate.

Pakistan’s education system has some obvious setbacks. Besides some elements of regiment and state control over the curriculum, it also has definite religious and nationalist undertones that bias the content.

For example, even though I attended a private school, I still had to take compulsory religion classes and the morning assemblies featured students reciting prayers and religious excerpts.

Pakistanis also have a tendency to harbour rigid opinions about the partition of the subcontinent, mostly due to their short-sightedness when it comes to critically examining their national history.

During the time I studied in Karachi, I can’t ever recall questioning the actions of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, or the “politician” who founded Pakistan. History books and teachers also failed to be critical of him or other politicians. Instead, students were simply indoctrinated with the image of Jinnah as a saintly “father of the nation”.

Since Partition is a sensitive issue, especially for Pakistanis, one’s ability to challenge Pakistan’s state structure or Partition-related aspects of the country was limited. You would be labelled unpatriotic and unappreciative of the sacrifices of Muslims at Partition if you questioned the history too loudly.

Canadian schools, by contrast, at first seemed full of diverse, unfiltered streams of beliefs. Teachers encouraged me to ask questions and be myself. I genuinely liked going to school and that attitude became apparent in my grades.

However, I soon realised that the Canadian education system was also guilty of self-aggrandisement. We were told to herald our “multicultural” identity – even if all that meant was eating samosas and buying “ethnic” clothes.

My English skills and my accent were immediately deemed “not Canadian enough” and the instinctive reaction was to place me in “English as a Second Language” (ESL) classes. Although ESL did not faze me so much at the time, I now realise how secluded it made me feel, especially at that young age.

These days, my ESL experience seems beside the point, because I got over the emotional trauma that it may have caused. Instead, I have become attuned to other more important issues about my Canadian education.

For example — and I was shocked at this realisation — it was not until my second year in university that I first learned about the other group that had “settled” Canada. As was the case in Pakistani textbooks, Canadian textbooks too often glossed over or greatly minimised important issues, such as the treatment of native Canadians. Up to that point, aside from watching those almost-laughable “Canadian Heritage Moments” on TV, I hadn’t been aware of the years of suffering experienced by Aboriginal Canadians as a result of Canada’s “settlement” by Europeans.

University has definitely been an eye-opener, because things that I could not grasp or understand at a younger age – both in Karachi and Toronto – have suddenly started to make sense. But this development cannot be attributed to one particular static phase in my life, even if its crystallisation may have occurred at a university in Toronto.

I have had the luxury of receiving education both in Karachi and Toronto to help fine-tune my abilities to reason and question.

I can recognise the differences and similarities in Karachi and Toronto’s education systems better due to my exposure to both.

I now know two things for certain: just how misconstrued politicians’ intentions were about India’s partition, and the implausibility of Canada’s stance as peacekeeper, given the context of how the Americas were “settled” at the expense of the first nations.

The writer is a History major at the University of Toronto, Canada