✒️ :.Shahid Manzoor Bhat
The renowned African writer /Novelist
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o once wrote: “The night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom.” Today, as we witness the systematic pruning of the JKBOSE curriculum, these words feel less like a historical observation and more like a current headline. This year, the name of Jabir Bin Hayyan, the legendary polymath and father of chemistry, was quietly expelled from the 8th-grade Urdu syllabus. This follows a troubling pattern: last year, the board removed the teachings of Sheikh-ul-Aalam (Nund Rishi) from the 9th grade and the philosophical giant Allama Iqbal from the 10th-grade books.
What we are witnessing is not a routine syllabus “update.” It is scholasticide—the deliberate killing of a society’s intellectual and cultural heritage.
The Erasure of the Character
When a school board removes these figures, they aren’t just deleting text; they are deleting the moral and intellectual foundations of our youth. In our culture, education was never just about passing exams; it was about Tarbiat (upbringing).
By removing Jabir Bin Hayyan, the board tells students that science is a “foreign” concept, ignoring the Islamic world’s foundational role in logic and experimentation. By removing Sheikh-ul-Aalam, they discard the very soul of Kashmiri identity—a saint who taught us environmental ethics
ان پوشہ تیلہ ییلہ ون پوشہ
and communal harmony centuries before they became global buzzwords.
Allama Iqbal’s exclusion is perhaps the most pointed blow. Iqbal’s poetry was a call to action, a plea for the youth to find their own “Self” (Khudi). One cannot help but recall his piercing verse:
تجھے آبا سے اپنے کوئی نسبت ہو نہیں سکتی >
کہ تُو گُفتار وہ کردار، تُو ثابت وہ سیّارا
By erasing these ancestors from our books, the board is ensuring that our children remain “stationary”—disconnected from the “stars in motion” who once led the world in thought and spirit.
Psychological Violence in the Classroom
The classroom is where a child learns who they are. When the curriculum systematically purges figures that resonate with a student’s religious, local, and cultural identity, it creates a vacuum. This vacuum is eventually filled by a sense of inferiority and alienation.
If our children do not see Jabir Bin Hayyan in their chemistry books or Iqbal in their literature, they begin to feel like outsiders in the story of human progress. This is the “psychological violence” Thiong’o warned about. It is an attempt to rewrite the DNA of a generation, turning them into individuals who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.
A Call to Save our Ethics
Education without ethics is merely a tool for creating efficient workers, not enlightened citizens. The figures being removed are precisely those who provided the ethical “why” behind the “how” of life.
We must ask: Why is the board afraid of these icons? Why is the intellectual legacy of our region being treated as a threat? We must demand a curriculum that expands the mind rather than one that shrinks the identity. If we remain silent, we risk raising a generation that is technically skilled but culturally orphaned. It is time to reclaim the blackboard before the chalk erases the last traces of who we truly are.
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