Building Brainpower: An Urgent Need
By Dr Ghulam M. Haniff
St. Cloud, MN

Fully fifty years after a similar dramatic decision in the country next door Pakistan has finally decided to establish six universities of engineering and technology for producing a reservoir of brainpower. It is, of course, a case of too little too late, but without a pool of skilled manpower the country would likely hug the international rear-end until eternity. In many respects Pakistan is already several decades behind India, but when they started out their literacy rate was exactly the same, 12 percent each in 1948.
Not having sufficient talent at home to launch the project the nation is going to seek international guidance and involvement every step of the way. In this fashion highest standards would be followed to ensure the development of world-class institutions with state-of-the art teaching, learning, and research outcomes.
Half a century of neglect due to political ineptitude of the nation’s leaders is a heavy price to pay, mostly by the long suffering, innocent and deprived people of Pakistan. Even now the idea of an infrastructure for modern, scientific, professionally directed learning is not entirely welcome. Some in the National Assembly are less than enthusiastic but would go along with the innovative enterprise owing to external pressures, both at home and abroad.
The whole thrust for world-class institutions is orchestrated just by a handful of dedicated individuals. Among these the most prominent is Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, together with Shaukat Aziz and Pervez Musharraf and several others helping to push the idea through to fruition.
Early in the fifties Jawaharlal Nehru, then the Prime Minister, argued that India needed quality education for its advancement and that it had to be delivered through its own institutions. Thus began the genesis of the idea that led to the creation of the Indian Institutes of Technology. These citadels of learning, fifty years later, have become globally recognized as world class, comparable to the best in the United States, whose graduates are in demand the world over.
Nehru’s idea, because it was so radically visionary, failed to ring alarm bells in Pakistan. Apparently, no Pakistani leader of the time understood the notion that the pursuit of modernization and industrialization needed scientifically driven technical education. No one even pretended to echo Nehru in pushing for institutions of advanced learning. Higher education was the “terra incognita” of the Pakistani political discourse. No one saw any connection between knowledge and the development of skilled manpower, on the one hand, and the advancement of the nation though greater productivity, on the other.
Except for one individual, Fazlur Rahman, the Minister of Education, who had written a comprehensive plan for an educational system. His scheme was so far-reaching that no one took it seriously. It was politely shelved and ignored for years. Even if parts of his scheme were adopted Pakistan would be a different country today.
Since that time the building of brainpower in the country has become more urgent than ever. Pakistan remains at the bottom in almost every measure of socio-economic achievement. Its literacy rate at 41 percent is one of the lowest, fully 20 points behind India, placing it in the bottom ten percent of all the nations.
In the year 2004 of the 80 million children under 18 who should have been in schools only 40 million were in attendance. Fully one half of the children were not receiving any schooling, or learning useful skills. This does not bode well for the country. Besides grazing buffalos, tending sheep and weaving carpets several million children are said to be in bonded labor neither learning skills nor earning decent wages.
A comprehensive system of schooling, unlike in some Indian states, does not exist in Pakistan. To meet the deficit the private sector has recently stepped in with madressas, one of their more successful projects. Other private efforts are also underway though much of the attention is devoted to primary, rather than secondary, schools. Consequently, the pool of entrants to universities is quite limited. Hence higher education suffers from the lack of talented students. By improving its foundation at the K-12 level Pakistan can create a large base for training at tertiary institutions, including higher education.
The question of quality stands out as in need of serious attention. Much of the learning at the lower levels is based on rote memorization. Curriculum badly needs upgrading to bring them closer to international standards, with emphasis on modern pedagogical techniques. One of the biggest obstacles is the lack of suitably qualified teachers who must also be trained in the state-of-the-arts methods of delivering instruction.
Unfortunately, the objective of learning at all levels in Pakistan is to pass exams, not necessarily to develop capabilities in reading, writing, computing and analytical reasoning. Pakistani universities were established with the focus for giving exams and awarding degrees. That medieval mission, perfected by the colonial authorities, is still the norm.
The development of intellectual skills through reading, writing, research, and critical thinking is rarely emphasized. Papers are seldom written and oral presentation hardly ever demanded. The concept of a university as the marketplace of ideas, the foundational base of American universities, is totally absent. Institutions of higher education are not seen as the vehicles for intellectual competencies, or internalization of capabilities in entrepreneurship, initiative and enterprise, or development of well-rounded personalities, rather, simply as places for passing exams and awarding degrees.
Obviously, drastic changes are needed in the way in which universities are organized and courses taught. The entire system of higher education is badly in need of total overhaul. Universities have to become accessible to everyone. The focus ought to be to educate the entire succeeding generations to the highest possible levels of educational attainment. That is how the nation’s brainpower could be built for the country to move ahead.
Education must be made the number one priority for creating an expanding pool of human capital. Economic growth and rising levels of productivity are directly dependent on skilled brainpower.
The neighbor next door, India, has become a magnet for many companies around the world seeking investment precisely because it has created a knowledge-based economy with a brainpower workforce. Indeed, Bangalore is regarded as the second Silicon Valley, the most popular destination for outsourcing of American jobs. Last year Indian universities graduated 200,000 engineers, three times more than the American ones. In order to take advantage of the Indian talent many corporations, such as Microsoft, Intel and Motorola, are shifting their research facilities to India. It is doubtful if anyone would be interested in Pakistan given that last year it graduated only 9,000 engineers, less than five percent of the Indian total.
Moreover, Indian engineers have become successful entrepreneurs spawning companies in various areas of high technology and in the development of software. The entrepreneurial skills, necessary for innovation, hardly exist among Pakistani graduates and, such capabilities as enterprise, motivation and initiative are in short supply. One way in which these attributes could be cultivated would be through schooling but most of all through higher education at the university level. Unless an expanding brainpower workforce is developed economic progress will continue to evade Pakistan. Let us hope that the six universities on the drawing board are up and running in short order. Given how things work in Pakistan that probably will take about a decade. By that time, more than likely, astronauts from the neighboring country might be sitting on the moon.


 

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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