The new education minister, Mr. Ahsan Iqbal, has invited public comments on the national education policy. The draft of the policy document can be found here.
It is hoped that we will have a fruitful discussion on this issue and ideas for improvement in the national education policy here at Pakistaniat, possibly leading some of the participants to even give some valuable suggestions to the education ministry.
I hope to read the document in the coming days, but in the mean time, here are some general thoughts on how we should approach such issues.
We would love to have instant reform, which unfortunately is not possible. Our suggestions and criticism should be made while keeping this basic reality in mind. We can however break down reforms into short and long-term ones and see what can realistically be achieved over what time frame.
Secondly, there is absolutely no denying that funding is important, but the utilization of existing funds is also equally important. We have a tendency to overemphasize the shortage of money and use it as a convenient excuse for a lack of serious effort for institution building and the failure to make proper use of available resources. As a general rule, we should always be weary of overly steep increases in funding. Too much money going in too fast, though good for making impressive news headlines for the concerned ministry, can often lead to more corruption and institutional decay instead of bringing about a genuine improvement.
So while the education budget certainly needs to be increased to at least 4% of GDP as soon as possible, it must not be forgotten that such an increase by itself will not lead to much improvement if there is no prior ground work for ensuring that the extra money will not just be wasted away through corruption and inefficiency. And such ground work will inevitably require a bit of slowing down and setting achievable targets instead of unrealistic ones.
A somewhat related concern relates to how we see ‘big picture’ ideas as opposed to apparently smaller and basic things that are not even very hard to implement, but can make a significant impact. Both are very important, but we sometimes grossly underestimate and dismiss the simpler, but less grand ideas by saying that they do not ‘address the big picture’ or some other such ridiculous criticism. In the end, the ‘fundamental paradigm shift’ or ‘revolution’ does not materialize, but we also forego the smaller and incremental but more achievable improvements that can accumulate into something substantial over time.
Lastly, a good education policy should produce socially aware individuals and not just money making robots. We need people who can have the sense to start thinking ahead before an economic bubble bursts, before the severity of an energy crisis hits them right in the face and before a food shortage leads to a famine or violent riots and are willing to make compromises to their personal lifestyles and start agitating for badly needed policy reforms for their own selves if not out of any concern for the society.
References:
1. Ministry of Education, Pakistan
2. Photos for this post are from flickr.com
The quoted figure of 80 to 90,000 Indians flocking to US for IT jobs is grossly exaggerated.
This far exceeds the annual number of H1B visas that the US issues each year to ALL the countries combined and certainly India’s is not the only one.There is an annual cap on H-1B admissions of 65,000 workers per fiscal year.
Whatever the number,those Indians rushing to US for tech jobs,not all of them are sticking in there.Hundreds of thousands of H1B workers are languishing for years waiting to become permanent residents but the US is presumably not planning to give them green cards.As a result hundreds of them are returning back to India disappointed each year.
Many of those Indians waiting for 10 years or more recently organized a kind of ‘bhook-hartal’ or an Indian style dharna outside the White House recently.
I also think its good move by minister to ask for comments. I agree we shoudl stick to basics and if basic education is good everything else will be good.
@Rohit
It is astonishing the lack of knowledge about Pakistan prevalent in India.Abdul Sattar did not invent anything.He runs the largest private ambulance service in the world.One can be an ‘IT expert ‘but can still be dumb on other fronts.
Pakistan does lack the infrastructure to spearhead an IT boom but there is little doubt about the immense talent among the youth.
If given a fare and even chance and an environment to grow this country can surprise the world.
As I said,we need not look at Silicon Valley as a model,we don’t need to.We must focus inwards and concentrate on building up and sustain an environment and infrastructure for tech growth.
Rohit, thanks for your exclamation-mark-peppered post. It seems like you’re taking credit for the whole IIT success story.
It’ll suffice to reply to this part of your rant:
“i dont know about pakistan ,but in a closed society like pak ,its really difficult to implement !”
Yes, you’re right; you really _don’t_ know a flying freak about Pakistan.
Also, to others, I never meant that higher education should come at the expense of basic education. I’m in the research arena myself, and I’m convinced that you cannot do research without having a solid undergraduate education system….research takes a lot of money and it would be very very hard to compete right away. Instead, the focus should be on developing core strengths so that Pakistan becomes attractive to companies who want to do solid, but not necessarily novel, work like software development, etc.
Also, to the person who said Pakistan doesn’t need a lot of Ph.D. holders: sorry, I don’t agree. Perhaps you meant to say that it’s useless to spend millions to fund students attending mediocre institutions, in which case I would agree.
@Ahmad
IIT produces a decent 5000 engineers yearly ,1% of total engineers of india
Every country needs few PHDs and a large no of Engineers !!
for a country of size of pakistan,
there must be 60000 engineers passing out yearly!!!
(but pak doesnt have so many industries ,who can hire so many)
btw Excellent engineers are good managers!!
And anyone can do a MBA ,but only people with technical brains can run industries/innovate a product !!
btw pakistan is not switzerland !
even switzerland has some world class industries!!
but pak has missed the industrial revolution!!
so it lacks multinational companies!!
and in todays recession,software is also down!!
so developing country like pakistan need to innovate
,produce world class scientists!!
what if ,u all come up with another Abdus sattar!!
1 invention can contribute 100 billlion $ !
We should make our priorities right. During the last eight years, people were made to believe that the pursuit of PhD was the reason that God created man. Thus every Dick, Harry and Tom went to do a PhD. That is huge burden on the economy and should be removed. We don’t need a large number of PhDs at this level of technological development. What our economy mostly needs are the school and college educated people who can work in the factories, do plumbing and stuff. We do need engineers, but not a large number of them. Also we might need a few PhDs but very few. The money should go where the need is the biggest and not the other way around. For that to happen Dr. Rehman should be sacked and some sensible person be posted who is more interested in some real work rather than self-glorification.
Apart from school and college education, we do need strong vocational education system. We need to train out craftsmen and teach them about the market demand for their products and any export markets, if any.
We don’t need IITs, which only cater to a small minority of “excellent” students, basically the ones who were lucky enough to have good schooling. What we need are the large number of not brilliant but people with market oriented skills, which they can cash in the local and foreign markets.
a)uniform salybus for all schools.
b)after class 8 students should be able to choos either bio,computer,arts or religion.
This notion that we have to follow the IIT model and as if education is about creating technicians and technocrats is totally misplaced. Educational policy should be about education. I agree with others that if you get the basics write in elementary school that is all you need. If basic education is good people will excel in whatever they do (look at Bill gates who is a college dropout). If basic education is not good then all the best universities will make no difference beyond serving the needs of the very few. All attention should be ONLY on primary education and for now forget about all other pipe dreams.