“At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems – the answer for all the problems of the world – come to a single word. That word is “education.”

- President Lyndon B. Johnson

To achieve their dream of providing every Texan child with access to education, Texas Democrats developed the following policy initiatives

Provide free public education : Texas Democrats believe in the right of every child to free public education and thereby provide all Texans an opportunity to achieve to their fullest potential. To ensure full accountability, public education must be 100% funded by the government. This initiative is not restricted to primary education alone, but extended to higher education and career education programs. To ensure quality of teaching, Texas Democrats propose adhering to the 22-1 class size limit, pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programs and improved funded equity to retain and attract qualified talented teaching professionals.

Improving Public Education: The aim of good education is to develop the latent talent of students and encourage innovative thinking (thinking out of the box to provide solutions to ordinary everyday problems). This is possible only when students are assessed through a comprehensive assessment system and latest teaching tools are employed. Texas Democrats are committed to improving public education in order to make a qualitative improvement in the students’ life.

• Improve Teacher Quality and Teaching Conditions : To provide quality education to students, it is important that we attract and retain qualified teaching professionals. This can only be done by improving teachers’ pay, benefits like health insurance and improve teaching and learning conditions at schools. Texas Democrats have promised to repeal regressive Republican provisions like “government pension offset and windfall elimination provision (which unfairly reduce Social Security benefits duly earned by Texas teachers and other school employees)” and “incentive pay programs (linking pay to student performance which is an unfair practice).

Ensure Safe Schools, Texas Democrats support the passage of the Dignity for All Students Act to ensure guaranteed safety for all students and support swift and fair enforcement of disciplinary standards. School campuses and functions must be weapon-free and drug-free.

Provide Tuition-Free Higher Education and Adult Education : Texas Democrats want to provide all Texans the opportunity to pursue higher education at an affordable cost at public universities, community colleges and technical schools. To achieve this noble objective, Texas Democrats propose to guarantee two years of tuition-free public college or post-secondary technical education, roll-back fees to affordable levels, expand the Texas Grants Program and reopen the Texas Tomorrow Program, etc

Texas Democrats are strong advocates of the right to education for every Texan child and support innovative approaches to ensure diversity in every Texas institution of higher education.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson believed that if you wanted to create a good “citizen”, one dedicated to the growth and success of this country, then you must create in that person an allegiance to this country. That allegiance is developed through a proper education of the content of The Constitution. And, it is developed through engaging in the use of the political process while actually seeing that process work to change the lives of those he/she interacts with. Certain Whites on the other hand, believed that if Blacks had a functional understanding of the Constitution then they would demand social justice and would be willing to fight and die for it as they had done. This of course would have disrupted the “peaceful relations” Whites had already established with Blacks since emancipation. Therefore, following emancipation, the opponents of social justice began teach History through the perspective of Black inferiority. “If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status fore he will seek it himself.”

Blacks in America had their view of the Constitution and the rights offered therein shaped through intimidation and Mis-education to the point where they believed that affairs of the government really did not concern them. As long as they were able to acquire the bare necessities in life, they were somewhat satisfied. They had to be, fore in their thinking there was no workable solution other than an all out war with the majority who seemed to control everything. Acceptance of social injustice became suitable to death.

As a people today in 2008, our view of the political process has been at best a choice between the lesser of evils during each Presidential Election. Black participation in the process has been very limited in overall numbers. And, we are distrustful of the process because it never seems to benefit us in our daily lives. So, the political process is reduced to an entertainment spectacle or something to talk about to pass the time of day. Enter Senator Barack Obama, a Black man who for the first time in the history of America seems to have a Real chance at winning the Presidency. On the fact alone that he is Black, he will get a great many African-Americans to support him. But, the full voting power of the masses of Blacks will not be realized because of our poor experience with government and our Mis-Education within politics in general. We need to re-read the Constitution, and find ways to teach it in a way that inspires us to unify affectively behind our leaders. If Barack Obama is to be the next President on the backs of our vote then we must be able to give him the full benefit of our numbers and our properly educated allegiance.

In his 1983 book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson provides three major causes for the waning of the pre-national empires and the rise of modern nation-states. One of the reasons, according to Anderson, was the rise of vernacular languages in place of what were considered the sacred languages, Latin and Arabic included. I have long maintained that Anderson misses the point as he only looks at the official use of these languages and not about the symbolic aspects of their power. In case of Arabic, for example, while it never was the official language of Muslim India, it still remains a language that wields immense symbolic power.

In fact, this symbolic power never really recedes and actually comes to haunt and shape the politics of Pakistan in the mid nineteen seventies. Those of us who are old enough to remember it probably know that until the mid-seventies, most of the government schools offered Persian as a second language. There were quite a few reasons for it: Persian, having been the lingua franca of the Mughal court, had been the language of Muslim administration of Northern India for quite some time; Persian was also a mother language for Urdu language and Urdu poetry and prose; Persian was also a language that, at least, impacted the border regions of both Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and, most importantly, Persian was the language of our close RCD ally, Iran.

In the mid seventies as the Shah of Iran was deposed, the Saudis emerged as the leading powerbrokers in the Islamic world. One aspect of their deep investment into Pakistani culture was the replacement of Persian as a second language with Arabic. This shift also suited Zia-ul-Haq who was using Islamization as a legitimating strategy for his power. We could have not guessed it then but this choice of a second “sacred” language has had long-tem, negative consequences in defining Pakistani nationhood.

When we learned Persian as a second language, we learned it as language of poetry with a deep awareness of its place in the Pakistani secular sphere; we never associated it with religion as it was not considered a sacred language, not even by our Shia brothers or sisters who, despite their affiliations with Iran, still considered Arabic the primary sacred language. Persian as a language of high culture had the capacity to structures our desires about a larger culture of art without much emphasis on religious sentiment. How many of us can very easily recall names of Persian poets: Hafiz, Saadi, Khayyam, Attar, Rumi. Now, try recalling the names of Arab poets: I am drawing a blank (This is not to imply Arab literature is not rich). The introduction of Arabic as a second language in Pakistani schools concretized Pakistani identity as inherently Islamic and restructured our desires in Islamist terms.

This language learning was no longer about its utility as a language of commerce or secular culture: its single utility was as that of the sacred language, as the language of the Qur’an. Our flirtation with Arabic, therefore, was deeply religious just as it was for those who experienced it every day in reading the Qur’an or listening to the Arabic calls for prayer. Now there is nothing wrong with this experience, for Pakistan, after all, is a predominantly Muslim country. But introducing Arabic as a second language in our schools also caused two effects: it reasserted a supranational, historical sacred and it structured our perception of the nation in predominantly Muslim terms. Thus, the children from religious minorities, for whom Arabic was not really a sacred language, in a way, could be considered less Pakistani than their Muslim counterparts. Also, as the language was sacred, our expectations of it also became religious for when we learn Arabic in the classroom we do not necessarily go looking for works by Arab authors such as Naguib Mahfouz or Aliffa Riffat. Chances are that by learning Arabic we also learn to direct our attention to the Qur’an as a sacred text but also as the most important text for a Pakistani identity, a practice that was already quite established in the madrassas. With the introduction of Arabic as a second language in our school system, thus, the federally funded school system also, in symbolic terms, became an extension of the madrassas.

Thus, while our students never learn much about the various languages of their own nation, they do learn a language that puts their expectations beyond the nation-state (Saudi Arabia) and structures their loyalty for a glorious past that never really existed but is inherently supranational and idealized. In this way, it seems, in terms of structuring of desires that inform our politics, the introduction of Arabic in our school systems has worked to weaken the teaching of the nation and replaced it with an atavistic and uncritical engagement with those regions of the world that are “sacred” but also represent the most undemocratic and repressive regimes on the planet.

For the postcolonial nations, national languages play an important role in creating a sense of the nation especially through literary artifacts. Sadly, this important role has been deeply contested in case of Urdu by insertion of a foreign and “sacred” language. There is nothing wrong with a post-national politics of a cosmopolitan national identity; in fact I find it extremely important for any nation but especially for Pakistan. But, as Fanon suggests toward the end of The Wretched of The Earth, a post-national identity-especially the one invested in the past-cannot precede the creation of a national identity. In case of Pakistan privileging regional languages and enhancing our study of Urdu and Urdu literature would help in reinvesting our desires in the nation instead of aligning our politics and emotions with a mythical Muslim-Arab past.