ALTHOUGH curriculum development is an ongoing process that is always changing, this does not mean that new experiments can be conducted every spring when the leaves begin to sprout.
After much consideration, a curriculum change must be made; hastily created and applied policies remain ineffective. Even though the policies’ planners and proposers are undeniably honest and primarily take socio-cultural factors into account, the long-term consequences and, more importantly, the administrative risks and expenses may be overlooked. As a result, the strain on the institutions continues to increase. The currently implemented BS programs in Pakistani universities, governed by Higher Education Commission’s (HEC) 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 34 after HEC’s sanctioning of Pakistan Studies and Understanding of the Holy Quran as compulsory courses.
The burden of credit hours may be rationalized through systematic consolidation of courses. ‘Pakistan Studies’ and ‘Ideology and Constitution of Pakistan’ should be combined; as their thematic overlap leads to an unjustified 4-credit hours. Giving the universities a study plan to be included in Pakistan Studies under the same name will help achieve this goal. Similarly, Islamic Studies compulsory course of two credit hours, expanded to 6 credit hours with the addition of 4 one-credit Teaching of the Holy Quran courses, now has been replaced by the 2-credit Understanding of the Holy Quran (UHQ), resulting in a total of 4 credit hours. This expansion can be reorganized by enriching Islamic Studies with Quranic grammar, values, themes and historical context, if not already included. Instead of teaching this course at advanced level of every subject, International Islamic University’s model of a viva of the selected Quranic Surahs can be incorporated in the evaluation system for MPhil and PhD degrees for Muslim students.
Furthermore, it is possible to combine two Quantitative Reasoning courses into one. Think about the amount of time spent studying English up to the PhD: five years for the PhD, three years for the MPhil and four years for the BS and twelve years for the intermediate, our problems with English have not been resolved despite twenty-four years of exposure to the language. How can, Entrepreneurship, a course of 2 credit hours, make us good or even bad businessmen? Suppose it can. Can all students in universities be business entrepreneurs? It is, in my views, wastage of resources and ill-conceived investment. Similar 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 do not 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 strategic refinement, around ten credit hours can be reduced, a direly needed rationalization in view of the falling government funding 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 universities and, of course, a heightened academic focus as well.
A more sophisticated concept would be to offer a summer crash course in, say, entrepreneurship, to students who wish to pursue entrepreneurship. There may be a dozen courses of this kind available, but students ought to have the choice to sign up for one or more of them. To give everyone more options, courses like home economics, dietetics, interior designing and the like could be added, along with entrepreneurship. These decisions will lessen the burden of purposeless credit hours and make academic, intellectual, financial and infrastructure investments more targeted and significant.
Building on this idea, I say, when everybody tries to do everything, in fact, no one ends up doing anything at all. When we visit an auto mechanic, we do not check to see if he is knowledgeable about Islamic Studies, Pakistani history, the country’s official language, gender issues and human rights. We are aware that a mechanic needs to be competent and capable of performing his work effectively. However, we have a different perspective on education. Our university graduates ought to be fairly knowledgeable about every topic, but this can be accomplished at the expense of all other subjects and, more importantly, at the grave risk of the Major. To sum up, specialization and clear role distribution are indispensable for effective functioning, whether in a team, an organization, or society at large.
—The writer is the chairperson of the department of English Literature and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at Government College University Faisalabad.
