WHICH school serves its country better a single-sex school or a co-educational one? There are advocates for both. The most vociferous are the alumni of elite mono-sex institutions, amongst them Pakistan`s 139-year-old Aitchison College, Lahore, and India`s 89-year-old Doon School, Dehradun.

Almost since their foundation, both have been haunted by the issue of gender integration. Most recently, Karan Thapar (a former Dosco) rose in defence of preserving the identity of his alma pater. He recalled the unsolicited advice to integrate given to Doon School by the then Indian president Smt Pratibha Patel in 2010. (She, Karan and I were there to celebrate its 75th Founder`s Day.) The Doscos to a man nodded politely but could not wait for her to board her helicopter, leaving them to continue their tradition of exclusivity.

Karan Thapar accepts that co-education `will teach young students, of both genders, how to grow up with, respect, and learn from each other`. But he then argues that `a co-educational format would fundamentally alter the school`s identity as well as its founder`s mission. That`s why Eton and Harrow have not changed`.

Eton was founded in 1440, Harrow in 1572. Between them fell my own school at Berkhamsted, established in 1541. For 450 years, Berkhamsted remained a school only for boys. In 1997, it was merged with the Berkhamsted Girls` School. There is no evidence of any consequent increase in Britain`s birth rate.

Before going to Berkhamsted in the 1950s, I was a dayboy and then a boarder at Aitchison College. My son Komail studied at Aitchison in the 1990s. He left seething, and retaliated by publishing a witty memoir Manboobs.

From 2008-2012, I served as the principal, Aitchison College. The then chairman Salmaan Taseer (governor, Punjab) and I tried very hard to steer the board towards establishing a separate school for girls on its expansive, underutilised 185-acre campus in central Lahore. The boys welcomed the idea, provided the girls admitted were not their sisters. They knew their fellow batchmates only too well.

However, Old Aitchisonians resisted.

Had Salmaan Taseer not been assassinated in January 2011, he might have succeeded in making it more egalitarian and gendersensitive. Salmaan did not study at Aitchison. (Lahore boys went either to Aitchison or somewhere else.) Salmaan, Nawaz Sharif and Shehbaz Sharif went somewhere else.

Salmaan and Shehbaz were both Anthonians. However, Nawaz`s grandson did join Aitchison;hehadanerraticattendancerecord.

Aitchison College has had many imitators, among them Chandbagh School, Muridke(modelled on Doon School), and the Daanish residential school network established by Shehbaz Sharif (then chief minister Punjab).

How long will it be before schools like Aitchison College and Doon School succumb to societal pressure and dismantle the gender barrier against girls? Soon, one suspects. And it will happen as much because of internal population needs as the fallout of President Trump`s immigration policies.

Gone are the days when top students from Pakistani and Indian colleges could hope to obtain places in American universities. They are being singled out by Trump`s upper caste administration as intellectual harijans, outcasts to be punished by deportation.

Campuses of US universities in Gulf countries are no option. ICE has long arms.

Canada, Europe and Australia can absorb only so many foreign students. It will be left to countries to strengthen and augment their own educational institutions.

China, India and many others who made education a national priority have a head start. They have their own national curric-ula. We are still tethered to the Cambridge Board and its GCSE curriculum.

While all Pakistanis applaud the present government`s efforts to stabilise the economy, there are some who would prefer anequal concentration on population control (fewer children), public health (more hospitals), better education (greater accessibility), a foreign policy without subservience, and income-generation schemes that distract citizens away from the lucrative, taxfree profession of beggary.

Perhaps importuning others for our daily bread has become part of our DNA. We think nothing of `touching` the Saudis and the Chinese for money. (The Chinese are now having second thoughts. They did not renew a commercial loan of $1 billion, which has been repaid, reluctantly.) The IMF remains our ATM of the last resort.

To Donald Trump, the world is nothing more than a plague of parasites. He claims that countries injured by his tariffs are begging to negotiate with him. His inelegant response is that they are all `kissing his a**`.

One is reminded of the actor Orson Welles` grouse to an arrogant film producer: `George, if only you had been born a cardinal. Then we would have had to kiss only your ring.` • The wnter is an author.

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