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PAK301 - Pakistan Studies

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    PAK301 Assignment 1 Solution Spring 2021

    Question No 1
    Do you think that Two Nation Theory became the basis of creation or °Pakistan? Justify your
    Answer with five relevant points.
    Solution
    The two-nation theory is the basis of the creation of Pakistan.
    The Two-Nation Theory served as the basis of demand for Pakistan by the Muslims in British
    India. There are two major nations in British India. The Muslims are not a community but a
    Nation with a distinctive history, heritage, culture, civilization, and future aspirations.
    5 Relevant Points:

    The Muslims wanted to preserve and protect their distinct identity and advance their interests
    in India. They wanted to order their lives in accordance with their ideas and philosophy of life without
    being overwhelmed by an unsympathetic majority. They demanded safeguards, constitutional guarantees, and a federal system of government
    with powers to the provinces for the protection and advancement of their heritage, identity, and
    interests. They demanded a separate state when neither the British nor the Hindu majority community
    was willing to offer those guarantees and safeguards. Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations, with their own customs, religion, and traditions;
    therefore, from social and moral points of view. They demanded separate electorates, but when they opined that Muslims would not be safe in
    a Hindu-dominated India, they began to demand a separate state. The League demanded self-determination for Muslim-majority areas in the form of a
    sovereign state promising minorities equal rights and safeguards in these Muslim majority areas.

    Question No 2
    What were the socio-economic and religious causes behind the War of independence (1857)?
    Justify your answer with five relevant points.
    Solution

    The socio-economic and religious causes behind the War of Independence (1857):
    5 Relevant Points:

    Rule of Law, socio-economic justice, equity and fair play. Equality of opportunity to all citizens irrespective of caste, sect, religion or region. Religious and Cultural tolerance. Respect for human dignity and rights. Protection of the rights and interests of non-Muslims and freedom to practice their beliefs and
    religions.
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    The role of governments is key in mitigating the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education delivery and outcomes. Effective response guidelines for governments stress the need to plan for long-term disruptions and strategic adaptation, and to coordinate, communicate with and support the education workforce, including and especially the head teachers and teachers. Much like the health response to the pandemic, an effective education response requires planning for phases. At the onset of the emergency, most countries mounted a rapid response by leveraging technology to start home-schooling mechanisms that can help cope with lost instructional time. The second phase requires policy planning for managing continuity of instruction when schools reopen, including ensuring children return to schools, instruction takes account of potential learning losses during time away from schools, and teachers and school leaders are fully supported as they work to realise these goals.

    In this blog I consider what these guidelines mean for Pakistan’s large, diverse, federated education system. I argue that given the scale of operations and the nature of entrenched inequities, the key guiding principles should be to address inequalities and to strengthen decentralised governance and service delivery. Existing data, vulnerability assessments and rapid evaluations can help inform policy for more effective COVID-19 response.

    Multidimensional inequalities define the shape of the challenges faced by education systems today

    As a result of global school closures, it has become immediately clear that the children at risk of dropping out and those who are likely to experience the most significant learning losses are the ones from marginalised backgrounds. Poverty, gender and location are intersecting to entrench exclusion for already-marginalised children. Existing data sources help establish the scale and scope of the challenge.

    Federal and provincial governments in Pakistan have moved quickly to start airing curricular content for K-12 via television channels. This is the correct strategy, given televisions are much more widely owned than radios: according to DHS 2017, 62.5% of the sampled households had a TV compared with 11% who own a radio. However, these averages hide stark inequalities. For example, in Punjab children in households in the poorest homes (only 17% of whom have TVs in their homes) are much less likely to be able to benefit from this policy initiative than children in the richest households (95% of whom have access to television). The numbers for Sindh are similar: 96% of households in the top quartile have televisions, 20% in the bottom quartile have televisions.

    Accessing these opportunities and initiatives becomes more complex and unequal if priced technologies such as cable channels or internet and smart phones are used: Less than 1% of the poorest households sampled for Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) 2017 owned a computer, and while 82% of them owned a cell phone, only 4% had access to internet. District officials in Punjab share that internet and cable infrastructure is common and reliable in urban areas. Children further away from cities are much less likely to have access to instructional content sent through smart phones and aired on cable channels. Officials distinguish between parents who own smart phones and those who do not, a divide that is significant because many government school teachers in Punjab are relying on WhatsApp for communicating with parents. Parental occupations directly impact the opportunities children can take advantage of; during the crop-cutting season, many in rural areas are likely to be helping their parents harvest crops

    The gendered experience of exclusion from access to technology and the increased burden of care on girls is a key dimension of inequality during this disruption. A recent blog about access to digital learning demonstrates that girls are much less likely to have regular access to any form of technology. Inequalities in access worsen for girls in rural areas and those in the poorest households. The increased burden of care in the households during the pandemic is much more likely to have hit girls the hardest, making it much more likely that they are effectively excluded from accessing COVID-response measures around education. Globally, women and girls carry out three times the amount of unpaid care and domestic work than men and boys, and this load is likely to have increased during periods of school closures and lockdowns. As COVID-associated health and economic shocks threaten to push millions into extreme poverty, girls are more at risk of dropping out of schools.

    Learning losses are likely to be unequal also

    Being in school matters for learning. Research on teaching and learning in government schools in rural Pakistan shows 10% learning gains after a year of regular schooling for children in grades 3, 4 and 5. These gains are threatened by school closures for reasons listed above.

    The World Bank has outlined three scenarios of learning losses that governments should prepare for when schools reopen:

    there is a loss of learning for all students due to school disruptions;
    the lowest performing children fall further behind while the well-performing children move ahead – this is predicted based on the ability of the families to support children in keeping up with reading and writing and access to assets such as televisions and a good internet or cable connection;
    there is a sudden and large increase in numbers of children for whom learning falls because of an increase in numbers of drop outs.
    Government schools in Pakistan are likely to find themselves facing the second or the third scenario. Furthermore, provinces stand at various levels of capability for testing and also delivering learning gains. Pre-pandemic learning data show much less variation in children’s ability to read in local languages in the early grades across provinces (between 72 and 80% in grade 1 were able read letters); there is much higher variation in skills in higher grades (68% children in rural Punjab could read a story in local language, while only 40% in Sindh could do so) (ASER, 2018). This is true for Maths and English literacy as well.

    It will be imperative to assess children when they return to school to establish learning losses, which are likely to vary for children given differential access to home support, technologies and differential exposure to health and economic shocks.

    Medium to long term continuity will need to account for inequalities

    Ensuring that policy responses address inequalities requires systems that can: mobilise quickly to collect information about the situation of teachers, schools, students and communities; repurpose their workforce to support new goals for coping in the crisis and managing continuity; plan for changes in instructional calendars and goals; make space for experimenting with new techniques that have proven to be effective for improving teaching and learning.

    Data for identifying at-risk children

    Strengthening of data systems has been one of the key areas of progress in education system development in Pakistan over the past couple of decades. All four provinces in Pakistan have well-functioning Management Information Systems (MIS) that collect data on operations of schools on a regular basis. These systems can be quickly repurposed for planning for COVID response. Tangibly, this requires individual and community level information about children who are more at risk of dropping out, those who aren’t able to access home schooling measures/technology, who are in households that have experienced health and/or economic shocks during this emergency. Given the proximity between schools and homes, teachers and head teachers are best placed to provide this information. District officials in Pakistan are confident that teachers and head teachers have (or can quickly gather) information needed for identifying different cohorts of children.

    Plan for strategies for resumption of attendance and reduction of drop-outs of the most at-risk

    All four provinces in Pakistan have girls’ stipend programmes in place for maintaining enrolments through high schools. These may need to be expanded and the stipend raised (even if as a one-time measure) to increase the likelihood of girls returning to schools.

    Education departments routinely rely on teachers to run door-to-door campaigns for school enrollment and for improving attendance at the start of a school year. However, placing the entire burden of the task on teachers and school leaders detracts from their instructional responsibilities. Given the scale and scope of disruption, teachers and school leaders must be supported by running a dedicated, large-scale coordinated, public awareness campaign when schools reopen after the COVID closures. This can be combined with targeted text messaging and personalised visits for children who are living in localities or households identified as high-risk.

    Small scale rapid evaluations of various measures as they are implemented can help assess impact and correct course.

    Plan for assessing children to inform remedial and differentiated teaching strategies

    The past decade has seen investments in building capacities for generating learning data in classrooms in at least three provinces. These foundations can be used to generate sample-based assessments for system-level diagnostics, combined with best practices in formative assessments that can help teachers direct instruction at an individual level.

    Provincial education departments are working on readjustment of curricular goals for the year to make them more realistic, with advice from subject experts. Remedial instruction strategies, proven to be effective, can be combined with rationalised goals to ensure all children, particularly those excluded from instructional support during school closures, are able to catch up. Finally, this emergency presents an opportunity to test strategies that allow teaching children at the right level, rather than prescribed student learning objectives (SLOs).

    It is imperative to incorporate the experience and voices of teachers in planning for instructional continuity. Chronic shortages in the system means teachers in government schools across provinces in Pakistan acquire experience and skills on the job for teaching multi-grade classrooms. These skills may offer a foundational concept that can be built on to equip teachers with effective strategies for teaching differential ability students in the same classroom.

    Decentralised systems are likely to be more effective and resilient in responding to disruptions

    Achieving the tasks set out above require very large education systems to be able to plan, repurpose and implement fairly quickly. It becomes clear in conversations with various stakeholders involved with government response to COVID-19 that provinces will be benefiting now from reform efforts undertaken in the past couple of decades. Effective response to emergencies is contingent on repurposing of existing structures that reach schools, teachers and communities, and are responsive to local contexts and problems. In so far as this is true, decentralised structures are better primed for the job. At the provincial and district level, this requires:

    capacity for data collection and utilisation (including data on at-risk children, teaching and learning);
    staffed structures in place that link higher tiers of governance with small clusters of schools;
    capacity to deliver on-site, continuous teacher training and support programs;
    flexible financing for schools.
    Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) have made the most progress so far on reducing teacher shortages, building system infrastructure for on-site teacher training, putting in place the human resource and technical capacity of education departments at the district level to support teachers and head teachers, collecting teaching and learning data and utilising data for policy planning, and making financing available to schools. Punjab and KP have added this depth to their district level delivery and governance structures over the past decade: the tier of Assistant Education Officers (AEOs) in both provinces are managing between 10 and 40 schools. In Sindh in contrast, Talukka officers are managing up to 100 schools. Sindh and Balochistan may need to invest simultaneously in building these systems while planning for coping and continuance strategies. All provinces will need to empower teachers and head teachers as key actors in their response plans.

    Real-time systems level analysis of structures and functions, as well as qualitative documentation of management and response practices at various hierarchical levels and across provincial contexts can potentially generate important insights about delivery and governance mechanisms that make education systems more resilient to crises.

    Reff

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    @zareen said in PAK301 Assignment 1 Solution and Discussion:

    • What is the impact of Allahabad Address (1930) presented by Allama Iqbal on the Muslim politics? Justify your answer with at least five points. 5 points

    • Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal ranks amongst the Muslim intellectuals who left a deep impact on history. He inspired Muslims of the Sub-Continent and beyond. He infused a moving spirit and identity in the Indian Muslims. He presented a framework of their political future and talked how that would help to achieve the goal of Ummah. He presented a vision and dream in his Allahabad Address.
    • Allama Iqbal was a great poet and philosopher who gave the idea of Pakistan; Muslims were ignorant it was Allama Iqbal who aroused the Muslims through his poetry & also played an effective role in All India Muslim League. Allama Iqbal presented his idea in his addresses at Allahabad 1930. His address left an ever lasting impact on the politics of the subcontinent. After this address there was a new hope and enthusiasm for Muslims. It cleared all the political confusions from the minds of the Muslims and made them release their destination.
    • He addressed I can see: “Punjab, N.W.F.P, Sindh and Baluchistan be amalgamated into a state, self-government within the British empire or without it. The formation of such a consolidated North Western Muslim state appears to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North West India. To India, it will offer peace and security due to internal balance of power”.
    • He asserted that there is only one way to eliminate the riots and bring piece in the subcontinent is to create a separate state for Muslims. He also developed a national and religious spirit in the Muslims by his address to the Muslims of Subcontinent. Muslims came to know that how they can individually contribute with Muslim League for a separate state.
    • Through his address Allama Iqbal also protected Muslims religious identity. Iqbal’s address is a forceful and logical presentation of the Muslim case in India. Iqbal presented a review of the political and social situation of India and solution of the ills befalling India.

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    Who did move the resolution in Delhi Convention for a separate state?

    Hussain Shaheed Suharwardy
    Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad
    Quaid-e-Azam
    Sardar Abdurrab Nishtar

    Why was The Simla Conference of 1945 failed?

    Because of Overconfidence by the Congress leaders
    Coldness by F.M. Lord Wavell the Viceroy of India
    The criticle approach about Muslims by the Hindu Press
    Due to Quaid-e-Azam’s demand to have all the Muslim seats to be allocated to the Muslim League

    When the title of Sir was conferred to Allama Iqbal?

    In, 1916
    In,1922
    In, 1932

    Which political party formed its govt in NWFP after the elections of 1945-46?

    Muslim league with the support of Unionist party
    Unionist party with the support of Congress
    Khudai Khidmatgar with the support of Congress
    Congress with the support of Unionist party

    Which document reflected the aspirations of every Muslim living in India?

    Lucknow Pact
    Delhi Proposals
    Nehru Report
    Jinnah’s Fourteen Points

    Which party formed government in NWFP after the elections of 1937?

    Unionist Party
    Khudai Khidmat gar party
    United Party
    Muslim League

    For whom the term “AKALIS” was used in 1945?

    The members of Khudai Khidmatgar Party
    The members of Khizar Hayat Tiwana group
    The members of Unionist Party in Punjab
    The participants in the Delhi Convention

    When did Chaudhry Rehmat Ali write “Now or Never”?

    In, 1930
    In, 1931
    In, 1932
    In, 1933

    When was Delhi Convention held by the Muslim League elected members?

    March, 1945
    April, 1946
    May, 1944
    March, 1946

    “Adjacent units where Muslims are in a majority, as in Northwest and East, should be constituted as Independent States where the constituent units will be autonomous and sovereign”. Which document this text belongs to?

    Allama Iqbal Allahabad Address 1930
    The Lahore Resolution 1940
    Fourteen Points of Jinnah, 1929
    Delhi Proposals, 1927