ON independence, Pakistan inherited the colonial system of education, the primary purpose of which was to develop lowerorder thinking skills (ie, remembering and understanding of a text without considering its context). To date, nearly all public and most private schools continue to engage with teaching and learning practices through this narrowly conceived view of education.

Our schools, the key service providers in the education industry, therefore remain more focused on promoting students than on developing their critical thinking skills.

They mostly treat learners as passive recipients of knowledge and expect them to reproduce faithfully whatever they are taught.

Resultantly, our schooling system produces graduates who can remember and comprehend a text, but lack any ability to critically engage with it or question it. Such graduates find it difficult to apply the 1(nowledge they thus acquire to real-life situations, or analyse and evaluate it, or create any new knowledge out of it for others to benefit from.

Our teachers, in their approach to instruction, either function as tellers, or information loaders, or, in the worst instances, as dictators. They approach the curriculum as if it can be reduced to a set of textbooks; something that can be reproduced if you complete a set of discrete tasks. Both of these are major issues plaguing our education system. In such a situation, teaching in a formal educational setting can do little apart from what has been discussed earlier: routinely letting students graduate to the next grade level, with the expectation that they will be able to efficiently reproduce what has been told to them by their teachers through textbooks. It cannot help learners make sense of their learning in their individual lives.

Perhaps these challenges are slowly being acknowledged, because Pakistan in now starting some work on improving the state of education in the name of reforms.

However, the efforts made so far seem too little to be able to bring any meaningful change in the state of schools and schooling in the country. This is because they suffer from a lack of ownership and strong collaboration among key stakeholders. Other issues include a lack of commitment from successive governments; little attention on investing in teachers; poor allocation of resources toeducationalinstitutions;agenerally lackadaisical approach to education; as well as conflicting interests of donor agencies, etc.

The current reforms programme thus cannot help learners become knowledge creators with critical thinking skills. A par-adigm shift in schooling practices with the intent to radically transform them is what is really needed. This transformative approach will develop teachers as agents of change, who can construct and reconstruct their identity as critically reflective practitioners who are both aware of global trends as well as their contextual realities and can create new knowledge by experiencing all levels of learning (eg, the six levels of Bloom`s revised taxonomy: ie, remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating).

A change in thinking (ie, critical thinking skills) and actions/outcomes (ie, learners as knowledge creators) can only be possible through the critical engagement of learners in learning, teachers in teaching, researchers in conventional and unconventional ways of knowing, and other stakeholders in creating an enabling environment for these activities.

To achieve these objectives, stakeholders, especially policymakers, will have to focus on training teachers to empower themwith the knowledge, skills, attitudes and expertise they need as change agents. Thus, transformative change will begin at a personal level (eg, from the teacher as criticalcreative `pedagogist` and student as a conscious learner). Once a learner starts practising looking inwardly atthe self and identifies areas for improvement with the help of critical self-reflection, they can challenge the status quo the egoistic view of being. Critical self-reflection is one of the most powerful ways to overcome the idea of `I know better than the others`.

The practice of critical self-reflection helps the learner (both teacher and student) experience powerful learning using all six levels of Bloom`s taxonomy.

Here, the role of the teacher changes from the conventional mode of a `teacher as a teller` to a `teacher as a facilitator` who focuses on how to enable learners to become knowledge creators. Educational institutions become service providers which promote higher-order thinking skills. However, we as a nation need to reflect on our own beliefs, values and practices and come out of our comfort zone to experience transformative learning in our lives. • The writer is head of the department of educational development at Karakoram International University, Gilgit sadruddin.qutoshi@kiu.edu.pk