In my school days, I was made to believe that proficiency in English and an acquired taste for Western music and movies and icons of popular culture were the hallmarks of a ‘successful’ person.

But, as I understand, seeking fun and joy in ‘imported’ ideals was the consequence of a kind of a detachment from the ‘others’ that our elite schools were breeding quite successfully.

By ‘the others’ I mean the socially and intellectually ‘backward’ majority who didn’t share our ‘global’ tastes in dressing and recreation and what not; and, hence, were responsible for much of the ills that plagued our country.

I saw two extremes here. On one hand were the masses who were duped into believing in our ‘glorious’ past, and on the other, we the so-called elite were in awe of our colonisers — the British — who had built us trains, developed world-class educational institutions and, of course, taught us to love their culture. Or, at least that’s what our school curriculum had us believe. We were convinced that our past was gloomy and that there was something inherently wrong with our values, which was why we had always lagged behind.

Contemporary discourse in Pakistan traces this growing cultural polarisation to fundamentally two distinct education systems serving two separate social classes. While the Cambridge School System may cut off our children from the politico-social realities of their own country, the matriculation system makes little or no effort to raise them as capable leaders of tomorrow.

In Prime Minister Imran Khan, I have found a strong advocate of this belief. He seems to look at the issue through the same lens. For him, the solution lies in a single national curriculum aka SNC, appropriate for our national context and history. Here, standard Urdu and English find equal representation, given the former’s significance to the nation and the latter’s importance at the international level.

Psychologists tell us that children tend to absorb information more easily in the language they speak. For improved outcomes, they say, children must be educated bilingually, starting with a concentration on their native language with a gradual increase in focus on the second language.

While the importance of English language in this day and age cannot be underestimated, a vast majority of the country doesn’t know the language. For many, the gap between the language of curriculum and the language of conversation is quite troubling. You process your thoughts in the language you speak but read in another language without having command over either. How are then children from families unfamiliar with the English language expected to survive in an English-medium system?

To my mind, another issue that this bilingual approach addresses is Pakistani society’s identity crisis vis-à-vis the linguistic relativity hypothesis. The idea that ‘language affects how we think’ has been a recurring theme with many Muslim and Oriental thinkers. Twentieth-Century Pakistani-Austrian scholar Muhammad Asad saw it in relation to our education system and raised concerns over the imposition of English language. To him, language, when composed into literature, almost always bore the cultural and historical heritage of the civilisation it was native to. As such, the imposition of English language at school level could mean that Western texts would become the students’ primary consumption. Consequently, we could have an entire generation that would be completely alienated from its roots.

The story of Pakistan’s education system and its outcomes is perhaps not much different from what Muhammad Asad warned of. In a deeply polarised society, the SNC intends to bring everyone, from across social strata and cultures, to feed on similar intellectual sources.

Recently, I stumbled upon my sister’s grade-4 textbook of the SNC-aligned social studies. I noticed that it is in Urdu, but all the names and terms have been translated in English.

To my pleasant surprise, the book touches on a variety of socio-political topics, from constitutional rights and citizens’ responsibilities to our system of governance. Again, it took me back to my early school days when I used to wonder how the sultans and emperors of the world had been so well versed in philosophy and governance in their teenage years, and how they had grown up to become conquerors. Think Sultan Mehmet and Alexandar the Great, for instance!

Strange that I was to find an answer to these mysteries, decades later, in a grade-4 textbook. Holding the book in my hand, I could imagine the children being able to tell what a federation is, or the judiciary, or the executive, right in their grade 4.

My intention here is not to comment on the content of the SNC which may indeed be far from perfect. However, I wish to invite an open-minded discussion on the goals of the new curriculum. Many critics (of SNC) show no goodwill in helping improve it; they only seem to channel their energies in writing it off. For once, let’s hope that the SNC is able to produce leaders. Our Cambridge and matriculation systems could essentially breed followers.

The writer is pursuing a   bachelor’s degree at York    University, Canada. He is also a freelance writer, and tweets @Khan_Bahadur