Liberal arts is an important academic discipline for university students in Pakistan. It is also the only antidote to apathy currently prevalent in Pakistan. Take, for example, a young motorcyclist violating traffic signals with impunity. You see him and realise that law abiding citizens have become a rare species in the country.

I propose that, a liberal arts education is sine qua non to inculcate civic mindedness.

Liberal arts as a discipline is a conglomeration of several disciplines and sub-disciplines that deal with the society, culture and relations people forge while living in a common space. Mckenzie Perkins, a writer and researcher specialising in South-East Asian religion and culture, education, and college life, states: a liberal arts education emphasises the development of critical thinking and analytical skills, the ability to solve complex problems, and an understanding of ethics and morality, as well as a desire to continue to learn. “The key element in defining liberal arts is the intent to combine practical, concrete information, like data and statistics, with theoretical knowledge, like ethics and philosophy. Literature and history are equally important branches of knowledge to strike socio-cultural equilibrium among the literati of any social formation.

“Through these disciplines, society and individual tend to weave a relationship, which becomes the basis of a human collective. They also preclude an individual to become one-dimensional. This kind of learning produces well-rounded students with strong critical thinking and analytical skills, and the ability to adapt and work well in various fields of study,” as stated by ThoughtCo.

These days subject-specific university education is in vogue. The multi-disciplinary focus that liberal arts warrants is rare.

The feeling of urgency to emphasise on the need for liberal arts education has come back to me ever since I started teaching young people. Most of them are unique in their approach to their fellows, particularly the marginalised ones. They hold independent opinions couched in sophisticated parlance and frame pertinent and profound questions. Truly, it is a pleasure to listen to them.

The other day a student asked me an interesting question. Does education imparted to us create a sort of emptiness that leaves us convulsed and self-alienated? It was a simple but not an easy question to answer. It involved what has been taught to them and whatever they have learnt through reading on their own. Such convulsion is, in most cases, caused by free-thinking, by employing rationality as the seminal instrument of analysis.

In a religious society, rationality as a fundamental source of explanation of the phenomenon around you inculcates a feeling of self-alienation. The young, thinking mind struggles to forge connections with people around them. For the last 30 years or more, some elite educational institutions have introduced discursive practices, predicated on the binary opposites, which did not exist in universities of yore.

The concept of modernity; colonialism, imagined or otherwise, and travesties associated with it; post-colonial studies and critical theory have given a distinct orientation to a select group of university students. These epistemic theories and concepts have been borrowed from foreign universities and introduced in the curriculum taught in universities in Pakistan. These concepts encapsulated in these disciplines and discourses are divergent to our national narrative.

Colonialism has never been a part of the core ideology of our founding fathers. It was never a political aim or objective for the All India Muslim League. Perhaps, Pakistan is the only example of a post-colonial polity that has not taken cognizance of colonialism as the ‘other’ to its own ‘self’.

While living under the colonial rule, the Muslims, who saw Pakistan being founded, had no consciousness of colonialism and associated travesties. They have lived under colonialism but haven’t experienced it. Such an experience generates consciousness that underpins nationalism in post-colonial states.

Similarly, Pakistanis, despite living in the modern age, don’t have the consciousness of its being modern — because a majority of the educated people are clueless about modernity. They do not know how modernity is impacting them collectively as well as individually. The categories of colonialism or modernity hold no relevance to the educated Pakistani.

Thinking young people, including some of my students, tend to construct their identity by considering colonialism as the ‘other’. They live in the modern age and are conscious of the phenomenon of modernity. Since they are the first (or at the most second) generation exposed to themes pertaining to colonialism or modernity/post-modernity, their understanding of the prevailing situation confronting Pakistan and the analysis accruing thereof alienates them from the mega-narrative resonating right, left and centre. The dissonance stirs them to ask critical questions.

I think, it is the beginning of an auspicious end.