Prosperity
and the Power of Education: Pakistan’s
Missing Link
Poverty is out. Prosperity
is in. This message has gone around the
globe countless times. In today’s
world no nation has to be poor. All the
strategies for generating wealth are well
known, adopted and demonstrated right in
front of our eyes. The magical key that
alleviates poverty and creates prosperity
is education. Just within the past fifty
years a handful of countries have made schooling
the cornerstone of their national policies
and have produced wealth and prosperity
beyond imagination.
Well known among these are the Four Asian
Tigers (Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and
Singapore) and maybe even Chile. Several
others, which include China, Brazil and
possibly India, employing the same strategy
are forging ahead.
The desire to become prosperous is a collective
national choice made by the state through
adoption of policies designed to make people
more productive and to bring about their
empowerment in the marketplace. Of course,
the state also has to create a foundation
where the rule of law prevails, law and
order exists and openness in productive
machinery becomes a norm.
The most import element in this entire equation
is the education of the people. Through
schooling all types of skills can be learned,
imagination fired-up and innovative capability
cultivated. It is a combination of these
factors that enables people to produce more
and to put innovative ideas into practice
that brings about economic growth.
Unfortunately, the three levels of schooling
- primary, secondary and tertiary - in Pakistan
are woefully inadequate. In vast stretches
of the country schools simply do not exist
and those that do are antiquated beyond
imagination. Classes under the trees are
routine for many children. In some places
teaching is done by teachers who themselves
are deficient and who have difficulty in
reading and writing.
Neither the state nor the private sector
has made concerted effort in delivering
modern education in a systematic way. This
is an immense task crying out for direction.
Religious organizations could have made
this area their top priority. Jamaat-i-Islami
could have saturated the country with a
network of schools (K-12) and won followers
eternally grateful for the opportunity.
In the world of today knowledge is the basis
of advancement and for everything we do
on a daily basis. Those nations that command
the highest levels of knowledge are the
most productive, most wealthy, most prosperous
and most powerful. Those with the least
amount of knowledge occupy the bottom of
the ladder. The world has rapidly evolved
towards a knowledge-based economy.
Such an economy based on the use and application
of knowledge is still not a reality in Pakistan.
The central element in that type of an economy
is the use and application of information
on a large scale. In Pakistan the vast majority
of the people are simply not prepared to
tackle that kind of work owing to the lack
of necessary education. The process of applying
knowledge to productivity has been spreading
throughout the world like wild fire. In
a significant segment of the world the use
of knowledge is already the major instrument
of productivity. Each year more and more
nations are joining to become players in
the global marketplace.
One country where the saliency of education
for a knowledge-based economy has taken
hold is India, the neighbor next door. Almost
everyone is shooting to adopt a middle class
lifestyle. Indians are so obsessed with
learning that institutions of education
are expanding at a rapid rate. Last year
India counted 2.1 million graduates from
colleges and universities compared to 68,000
for Pakistan.
If a country wants to move ahead everyone’s
contribution is necessary in raising the
level of productivity. Higher production
means more income and better life. The gross
national product of a nation is determined
largely by the brainpower of that country.
Necessary information has to be kept flowing
for millions of productive decisions to
be made and up-to-date knowledge widely
shared.
That is unlikely to happen in Pakistan on
a large scale any time soon since people
are not sufficiently educated, and many
not educated at all, even to apply knowledge
generated elsewhere. They constitute an
obstacle in the knowledge-based economy.
Their contributions are miniscule and once
displaced by machines productivity shoots
up manifold.
Cultivating the brainpower of the nation
should have been the highest priority in
Pakistan. Everybody’s contributions
count, including those of women. “None
of us is as smart as all of us.”
Unfortunately, the country’s leadership
did not understand the significance of knowledge
and education until just a handful of years
ago. The two democratically elected prime
ministers of the country were disasters
in this regard. They pretended to be educated
but virtually with no understanding of the
world around them. Of course, no one was
able to make the connection that education
leads to productivity and therefore to prosperity.
The idea that education is the basis of
prosperity has been known for at least three
centuries. People are the wealth of nations,
said a British philosopher, and Britain
proved it before the end of the seventeenth
century by becoming the wealthiest and the
most powerful nation on the globe. It then
had a literacy rate of sixty percent, the
highest for that time in the world.
It behooves one to note that Pakistan even
at this point does not have the literacy
rate that Britain had two hundred years
ago. The nation’s literacy at 41 percent
is fully twenty points behind. Go figure,
as they say.
Today, a nation can choose to be prosperous.
It is a choice to be exercised. Harvard
professor Michael Porter has this to say:
“A nation’s wealth now is principally
of its own collective choosing. Location,
natural resources and even military might
are no longer decisive. Instead, how a nation
and its citizens choose to organize and
manage the economy, the institutions they
put in place and the types of investments
they individually and collectively choose
to make will determine national prosperity.”
For Pakistan the task ahead is a challenging
one. Its literacy rate at 41 percent is
one of the lowest. Fully 50 percent of the
children under the age of 18 are not enrolled
in schools. In the age category 18-24 the
statistics are even more shocking with only
5 percent attending institutions of higher
education. The comparable figure for many
countries is in the double digits with the
US at 60 percent.
About 1500 years ago Muslims were given
the command to “Read,” the only
religious community to be so blessed. Yet,
at this point, Muslims remain one of the
least literate, the least productive and
the most poverty stricken.
