We are trained to copy...

By Tehmina Qureshi

Unlike intelligent nations of the world, who educate their young to think out of the box, we teach our children to do just the opposite...think inside the box. Not only do we rest at that, but we demoralise them too. When kids want to become train drivers or mountain climbers, parents tell them about a certain cousin of theirs who did his BBA, or BSc and is now abroad doing his post graduate studies. Copying what others do seems to be a national phenomenon... morning TV show hosts give out dresses exactly like theirs and a Pakistani break dancer calls himself Sonu Jackson!

This copy culture does the most harm to our students, who, when they can't reach outside the box, scram for whatever they get inside from anyone and anywhere, without knowing what it is, and use it to achieve their purpose, that is, passing exams.

When in school, students are taught by teachers who studied the same thing themselves decades ago, and have been teaching the very same thing for all their lives. Kids are told to do exactly as they are told, or their marks will be cut. They write and memorise the exact information  which they are given, and told to clone it to pass exams. Those who do dare to show a bit of  originality in their studying are rewarded with a loss of marks by the examiner, because that is not way everyone else does it. Next comes college where they don't make the same mistake again and rote learn their way out of college.

 In their formative years in school and college, the students only learn how to reproduce  information, not learn it for their own benefit. They have not been learning knowledge, but merely memorising pieces of information that they don't understand, and if they do, they consider it worthless.  Till now, they have copied information without being aware of what they are really doing.

By the time these students have entered university, their minds and thinking has been pretty much capped, and when suddenly they are told that originality is a virtue, they figure out how to copy that too. At this level copying has become a habit, and they are unable to do assignments or exams by themselves, hence they resort to copy-pasting. This in the spur of the moment often leads to plagiarism. Like most government institutions, even University of Karachi does not have any regulations for cases of plagiarism.

To an extent our education system endorses a kind of plagiarism. Students are made familiar with it at school level, and then the habit gets the better of them as they grow up. This pestilence cannot be curbed until the weeds at the roots of our education system are pulled out.