Feature 
 

Directionless

The education system in Pakistan at present represents a convoluted mess that comprises a tug-of-war between the haves and have-nots and will take years to put back on rails.

By Dr. Taseer Salahuddin | May 2020


Any planning which is ambiguous about its purpose is bound to fail. Achieving a goal imperatively requires having a well-understood strategy agreed upon by all the stakeholders. Before we start discussing ‘quality education’ as one of the 17 global goals for sustainability, especially in context of Pakistan, we must define what quality education is. And why do we need to educate our masses? To answer the question, two major debates are needed; philosophical and technical.

On the philosophical end, prima facie, it appears that the whole world needs to have the same standards of ‘quality education’ for sustainable development. To further complicate the matter, countries accept both philosophical and technical global logic for using education for sustainability. ‘Education’ is a process with an inbuilt intrinsic value which leads to multiple qualitative aspects of human development. It cannot and should not be limited to means to a specific end, especially ‘sustainability’. Unfortunately, the whole world has transformed slowly into a capitalistic school of thought that impacts all thinking ideologies of human lives. Commercialization of education as a tool to sustainability is actually accepting a much inferior role for this legacy of prophets.

Therefore, instead of giving prime importance to ‘sustainability’ as a driving force of ‘quality education’, holistic human development encompassing spiritual, social, personal and communal development should be at heart. Why is this philosophical debate so important? It is because the current commercial education system considers humans as factors of production and ‘saleable commodities’.

The whole purpose of education in this respect is to train human capital with maximum marginal productivity. This, however, is misleading humans from their true purpose of creation. Contents of the current education system are designed in accordance with the purpose of ‘sustainability’. That is why, in the past two decades, a major deteriorating shift in the Pakistani curriculum has taken place. There was a time when, from a very tender age, poets, intellectuals and philosophers like Iqbal, Hali, Manto, Saadi and many others were taught. There was an obvious effort to build a solid spiritual, philosophical, emotional and humanitarian base of the students.

This is completely missing from today’s curriculum due to failed attempts to modernize our education system. Countries like Japan, Indonesia and Finland, which stuck to their value system as the core of their education structure, today have the most productive and effective societies academically. Studies show that the general communal trust and cooperation levels in these countries and their positive impacts in almost all spheres of life are very evident. Pakistan needs to realize that instead of following a multitude of international syllabuses, a tailor-made centralized education system is required for overall development of the country.

This leads to the second major challenge faced by the government of Pakistan in trying to give ‘quality education’ to the general masses. There is a multilingual, haphazard, multi-format education system where there are madrassahs, Urdu-medium government schools and various levels of English medium public and private schools with no central planning and control. There are schools following American, English, Japanese, Arabic and many other educational policies.

In every lane and street of urban areas, a private school exists with its own curriculum and planning that is not approved by any authority. In the rural and backward parts of the country (where the major share of the population resides), there are hardly any private schools. Government schools in these areas are mostly ghost schools with only buildings and marked areas with no teaching staff and no students. There are schools that charge parents in US dollars, claiming to be imparting international standard education and then there are schools where the fee is received in the form of boiled eggs and ‘pakoras’ from students’ homes.

This leads to economic, social, regional as well as political discrimination between students of these various education systems. This difference in backgrounds and training systems results in class discrimination. Many political, social, religious and regional issues are actually inbuilt in the education system in Pakistan. The challenge today is to create a uniform, standardized and universal access value-based education system.

As for the technical aspect of education in Pakistan, at almost all levels of schools, even those claiming to be imparting international education, the applied side is missing. It is unfortunate that due to limitation of resources many professional and higher educational institutions have labs and materials only as a showcase and not in comfortable access of every student. Mostly, even technical degrees are lecture-based with little hands-on training of the youth. That is why when the transition from academic to professional life takes place, most students are confused and ill-settled.

Another issue is the model of academic to professional transition. In Pakistan, most students focus on degrees in the hope to finally land white-collared jobs. They are embarrassed to have their hands dirty. For example, a good engineer is the one who knows and has learned the work of technicians who work under him. This will make him a learned team leader. This is only possible if there is a compulsion of a certain level of experience at every stage of education. This will have two major benefits. First, every student who moves from undergraduate to graduate level will have hands-on experience and will be in a better position to grasp knowledge with more understanding of the worth and application of that knowledge.

Secondly, people will not be clueless when selecting their future careers and their studies will be requirement-based, helping them grow professionally. This will lead to industrial-academic liaisons which are now badly missing. Furthermore, this will help students to get better adjusted in international markets. Mismatching from the academic-professional transition model to international models leaves students jobless. They are either under-qualified or overqualified with little experience at all.

A research-based education system should be introduced at the university level where graduate students should be attached with faculty members who are developing and working in areas related to their professional requirements. In this way, they will be able to work and learn and, at the same time, innovate and research on local issues, coming up with solutions that are cost-effective and have a long-term value.

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