DENIZENS OF ALIEN WORLDS

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most children travel less than 2 kms and very few travel more than 5 kms to their schools.
However, girls do have to travel long distances in Balochistan and Sindh which is
difficult and unsafe for them.
Schools are very dull and stringent places, often painted blue, and with broken
glass panes. They are highly regimented with semi-educated teachers forcing their pupils
to memorize passages out of badly written, badly printed and extremely dull books.
Classrooms are overcrowded with 41 girls and 38 boys per teacher in the primary schools
of all provinces except Balochistan. In Balochinstan, the most deprived province of all,
there are 48 girls per teacher (PIHS 2002).
After ten years of schooling students sit for examinations held by the different
Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education. Most of the examination papers are in
Urdu (except in Sindh where they are in Sindhi) and English is like a sieve which
separates the ‗sheep‘ from the ‗goats‘.
Influences of Textbooks on Urdu-medium School Students
Textbooks are one out of many influences on a person‘s worldview. How
significant the influence may be depends on many variables---teachers, peer group
pressure, family and friends, childhood experiences, exposure to discourses other than
textbooks---and cannot be easily determined. What can be determined, however, is the
intention of the writers of textbooks; the policy guidelines of those who get the textbooks
written; and the values which the educational authorities responsible for writing and
disseminating textbooks in educational systems support.
In general these values belong to the ‗in-group‘ i.e. they are values and
perceptions which support one‘s own group: nation, ethnic group, religious group,
ideological group etc. This necessitates the creation of an ‗out-group‘ or ‗Other‘ which
must be held in opposition to the self. The ‗Other‘ is generally created on the basis of
selective data and in this process of creation it is transformed. It may either be
romanticized or demonized. Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1978) tells us how the
European scholars of the Orient created an image of the ‗Other‘ which made it the
‗Other‘ of the Occident. Said further postulates that this justified the conquest of the
Orient in order to ‗civilize‘ it.