KARACHI, 27 February 2004 — What do Pervez Musharraf and L.K. Advani have in common? They both went to St. Patrick’s School in Karachi. The school, founded in 1861 also counts Daud Pota, Jam Sadiq Ali and Shaukat Aziz among its alumni. In its heyday and before the oil boom, many Saudis also attended “St. Pat’s”, as it is known.
St. Patrick’s Principal Joseph D’Mello is popularly known as Father Joe. The day I visited, I spoke to two yuoung boys in the playground.
“Is your school any good?” I asked them. “Oh yes, of course ma’am,” one of them replied politely, the convent’s discipline very visible. “Any famous graduates?” “Pervez Musharraf,” they answered in unison.
“Is he a good President?” I asked. “Yes he is.” “How do you know?” “Well,” the fourth graders thought for a moment and said, “Because he went to our school. Fathers would have taught him to be good.”
So what kind of a student was Pervez Musharraf?
School Principal Father Joseph D’Mello said: “Pervez Musharraf went to school here in 1959 I think for four years. He was an above-average student and in the science group. He has since visited our school and has always expressed happiness at having been a student here. He said that he never forgot some of the lessons he learnt at St. Patrick’s, one of them being, ‘The clothes maketh not the man.’”
Musharraf also remembers the thrashings he got at the school. Once he threw chalk at a boy while the class was in session. His discipline master, Father Todd, gave him a sound caning. “I wanted to sit on a block of ice after that,” Musharraf told father Joe.
Caning was part and parcel of a convent school. Is that still used as a disciplinary tool?
“No, no,” Father Joe said. “Caning was stopped in 1998. The old school of thought believed that sparing the rod meant, spoiling the child. Today we believe in respecting the child and talking to him.”
Convent schools in Pakistan always had a reputation for being excellent, especially in teaching English. Is the standard being maintained? Pakistan’s literacy rate is only 45 percent. Education appears to be totally commercialized, with schools opening in every alley, yet the standard seems to have deteriorated. What does D’Mello think of all that?
Father D’Mello, who has a Masters in English Literature and a B.Ed, describes himself as disappointed since not much had changed from the time he first entered the field of education in 1959. “I blame the government for that. It has not done much to improve the system.
Everywhere in the world, only rich people go to private schools, but in Pakistan there is such a scarcity of schools that parents are forced to send their children to sub-standard private schools. There are hardly any schools in villages or rural areas. Nobody wants to go there to teach because there are no facilities.
“Convent schools fare better. We send our teachers for training, and our tuition is also comparatively low at 1,000 rupees per month — poor students pay much less. But unfortunately the standard of English has suffered. People do not think of English as a subject. They think of it as a means to study other subjects. Not many are willing to study English literature.”
Father Joe said that children also needed to get back to reading. “Television and now the Internet have spoilt everything. Everyone wants only entertainment. They only watch dancing and movies. Most stations do not even provide educational programs. Parents have a big responsibility and must supervise what their children are watching.”
Father D’Mello and St. Patrick’s school are part of an old British tradition from which millions have benefited. But it cannot be preserved unless the government and the private sector invest in education — the most powerful engine that can drive a country like Pakistan forward.
