Arming Pakistani teachers to defend against Taliban
February 20, 2015
For years, the Taliban has threatened Pakistani students who are attempting to get an education and the government has made some progress in stopping them, but not nearly enough. Well-over 1,000 attacks on Pakistani educational institutions have ended in the same way, with dead bodies on the floor as a result of defenselessness. But now, the government is paving the way for teachers to stand and fight to protect their students’ freedom of education—with guns.
Pakistan’s war on education has reached new extremes over the past few months. On December 16, the Taliban launched one of its biggest attacks on school grounds ever when seven armed militants tore into the Army Public School in Peshawar and massacred more than 140 people, 132 of which were children. The Taliban claims that the invasion was in retaliation to previous military assaults on tribal regions, so that others may “feel the pain of how terrible it is when your loved ones are killed.” However, the attack on completely vulnerable teachers and young students can be seen as nothing more than a cowardly and desperate attempt to obstruct secular education.
There are other security measures that schools will receive, which include higher boundary walls, surveillance systems and privately contracted guards. However, there are glaring problems with having only those preemptive means: many schools are not able to afford such an extent of security and once the terrorists breach whatever security those schools have, without armed teachers, the situation will begin to look a lot like it did beforehand.
Opposition to the notion of having armed teachers, who are mainly female, seems to root from a perceived lack of confidence in having women purposefully wield guns, although many have shown aptitude in training. The growing militarization of Pakistani schools also hit a nerve with adversaries, which argued that “pens belong in our hands, not guns,” as Muzammal Khan, president of Peshawar’s All Teachers Association, said.
I too doubt that arming teachers will stop terrorism in schools completely, but perhaps the opponents of this action don’t realize that Pakistan is at a desperate time regarding the protection of education, and such desperate times call for drastic measures. The teachers who have resolved to defend their students even at the threat of death provide the confidence for kids to return to school and learn. Pakistan needs to demonstrate that it is not afraid of the Taliban and its cowardly assaults on children.
Let this be a reminder of how well we have it here in Diamond Bar. I may undeniably be guilty as well, but hardly any of us realize that countless others are put to death for the sake of education, even in the upper middle-class society of Peshawar. As for the people of Pakistan, they must remember that nothing is worth losing the freedom to learn and they must continue fighting until this war on education is won.
