IN a recent presentation of my research involving 16- to 18-year-old boys in Pakistan’s state secondary education, I was asked for one important pedagogic lesson for this age group. After years of looking at the data, the answer remains deceptively simple: young people enjoy using their voices; curate formal educational opportunities for them to do so.

Historically, adolescence has been explained as a stage of life when final instruction towards adulthood must take place. As part of a period of ‘growth’ and ‘transition’ into mature thought, the young person’s voice is frequently questioned for its reliability: ephemeral at best, irreverent towards authority at worst, it should be tutored rather than consulted. Despite all that teenagers are able to perform today, they can still be berated for their inexperience: consider the disparaging reactions of many in the American government to the #enough movement that high school students organised in spring of 2018 to protest gun control laws. Similarly, in Pakistan, there persist notions of the young person trying desperately to clamber past the naïveté of childhood, but not quite having become an adult who should merit one’s full attention.

Until the run-up to the 2013 general elections, the youth was the most conspicuously absent category in electoral manifestoes and rallies. Prior to this, a youth ministry that existed to give direction to the future of more than (at the time) 90 million Pakistanis did not map an effective strategy to harness the country’s undeniable youth bulge (also known as a demographic dividend for a reason). Unsurprisingly, then, perceptions of a lack of agency amongst the young coloured both academic and policy research.

Perceptions of a lack of agency amongst the young colour both academic and policy research.

Around 2010, the British Council spoke of Pakistanis in education as largely indifferent to — even if frustrated by — their social surroundings. A 2012 Brookings Institution piece uninspiringly concluded Pakistani students had been rendered incapable of thinking beyond what their textbooks preached. Academic research on secondary and university students in Pakistan forcefully argued between 2012 and 2014 that the young voter in this country kept no faith in elections or the power of public institutions. No wonder so many struggled to make sense of the results of the 2018 general elections, in which hundreds of thousands of new voters swung alternative, whether with party or independently.

The problem with such research is not that it tells us depressing things; we all know the challenges this country faces. The problem stems from the questionable representation of young voices at the hands of poor research design, in which sampling frames are haphazardly slapped together or context remains somewhat extraneous to youth perceptions. In light of such a skew, what should a researcher do with evidence of deviance? Consider an alarming statistic from my own study: less than five per cent of 320 student participants had their attendance marked honestly by being physically present in all their classes. What should we conclude: that teachers are poor class leaders; students are en route to delinquency; the administration ineffective; or all three?

Actually, ‘boring’ classwork was impetus for 17-year-old boys to game the system. The teacher(s) with whom they negotiated truancy agreements were not necessarily poor class leaders either; they felt equally suffocated by a one-dimensional, prescriptive assessment system in which creative instruction continues to have little bearing on student performance. When students did randomly attend class, their behaviour was of a nature that would traditionally be considered disruptive.

Education ethnographers like to find out just why young people ‘act out’ in spaces otherwise defined by order and turn-taking. In 1977, Paul Willis’ seminal text on white working-class British boys put student agency at the heart of education debates. In the face of an industrial labour market, young men deliberately subverted their education to contest assumptions of class mobility narrated by their school.

In 1990, Penelope Eckert documented social categories (‘cliques’) into which secondary school students divided themselves as a means of resisting the unattuned classifications imposed by school structures on ‘good’ and ‘poor’ students.

In 2010, when Craig Jeffrey provided a fresh take on unemployed educated young men in north India, it was to argue that not all acts of indiscipline or disorder are reflective of chaos. In fact, the ubiquitous South Asian phenomenon of ‘timepass’ — and the carefree attitude it often spawns — amounted to a rich, moving social commentary on the disappointed aspirations that students simultaneously nurtured and resented.

So it was with my students, whose time outside the classroom was marked by an earnest desire to communicate with one another about ‘real’ life. In fact, one of the main reasons I was able to research boys despite being a young woman was because my research was rooted in conversation and dialogue. Being able to participate in variously sized groups from a class, religious, ethnic or gendered lens enabled the boys to speak, listen, joke, laugh, fight — all nuanced expressions of how adolescents frame the everyday world around themselves. Such behaviour is in marked contrast to acts of resistance in lacklustre classroom environments — an expression by the students of the desire to be acknowledged and heard.

The big lesson here is that if formal education does not respect young Pakistanis’ innate abilities at a particular age, they will challenge it, and find alternative spaces through which to make sense of their surroundings. Once more, the state (through its various units) will be perceived as irrelevant to educational service provision, this time in the already underserved space of secondary schooling. If what we want for Pakistan is a cohesive society that thinks critically and values quality public services like good schools, our learning environments must stop actively disenchanting the millions of adolescents upon whose thoughts Pakistan has to be realised in the next decade or two.

The writer works as a research consultant in education and is a member of the Punjab government’s UN SDG social cluster group.
Twitter: @soufiasiddiqi

Published in Dawn, October 15th, 2018