Education is not a Solution

[cocomo]

mass education followed development

You need money to invest in R&D.

 

[Dubious]

An educated population fosters growth itself. You mean to tell me I have at my disposal an army of talented engineers and well trained technicians with all the skills in the world but they all will just sit at home twiddling their thumbs because there aren't any jobs? .

Actually that is what is happening currently in Pakistan!

Engineers arent exactly developing anything! Doctors are reluctant to use lab to test for discoveries and additional reported diseases! PhDs are unemployed and literally twiddling their thumbs!

 

[padamchen]

That is a economic problem. Requiring economic solutions and nothing to do with Kashmir.

Hi,

What you are missing is---we don't care about india becoming our " blood enemy"---.

What you should worry about is that we may not become your "blood enemy"---. That should be your biggest worry---.

Was simply responding to a fallacy I saw in Mangus's post.

You make India a blood enemy, you say goodbye to growth.

At the very least.

Right now the elephant sleeps. Best you don't finger his nethers.

Cheers, Doc

 

[Crusher]

You need money to invest in R&D.

You need money to pay the teachers and tuition fees for education too, nothing is done without money any way whether education or research and development. You need "capital" for everything, the question is how you get it, do you produce it yourself or you borrow it from others who are willing to give it to you under certain conditions.

 

[Indus Pakistan]

You make India a blood enemy, you say goodbye to growth.

I don't think India can be made more of a enemy then it is. We now have 70 years of bitter history.

 

[padamchen]

I don't think India can be made more of a enemy then it is. We now have 70 years of bitter history.

Think what happened to your psyche after being robbed of Bangladesh.

Then think of your size and capacity to hurt us.

Now replace Bangladesh with Kashmir.

And Pakistan with India.

Cheers, Doc

 

[Syed1.]

Can trust an Indian to come in and ruin any thread by bringing in India where there is no need. Threads like these should only have Pakistani access.

 

[padamchen]

Can trust an Indian to come in and ruin any thread by bringing in India where there is no need. Threads like these should only have Pakistani access.

It was my learned Pakistani friend who pulled India into the discussion first.

Let the record be straight.

Cheers, Doc

 

[waz]

Education is not a solution

Anjum Altaf
July 25, 2019


PEOPLE often insist that Pakistan’s lack of development requires investing in education. They should reconsider this relationship.

Consider the following arguments:

In countries we consider developed today, mass education followed development, not the other way around. Countries did not wait till they were fully educated before they began to develop. Rather, they began to develop which created the need for the spread of education. Great Britain became a global empire when there was relatively little mass education. Today, with universal education, it is a minor player in the global system. There is no linear relationship between education and development and certainly the former does not cause the latter.


Apply this framework to British India. There was little mass education when the British took over but because there were so few they needed local intermediaries to help administer the colony in ways familiar to them. That was the genesis of the limited number of BA and MA programmes set up to produce the babus they needed. Pakistan has continued to produce many more babus than it needs. By any measure, there is much more education today than there was in 1947 without commensurate gains in development. By comparison, many countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia with similar education levels at the outset have greatly outpaced Pakistan.


There is yet another problem in attributing the lack of development in Pakistan to a lack of mass education because the key economic and political decisions have been made by well-educated people. Why have they been making very poor decisions despite their excellent educations? It is a travesty to blame uneducated people for the sins of the educated rulers.

Pakistan’s development problems are not going to be resolved even if every citizen acquires a postgraduate education.


These arguments should suggest that the emphasis on mass education in the context of development is misplaced. Policy choices, which are made by the educated, matter much more and if the policies are flawed no amount of mass education can undo the damage. Climate change is a good example — the existence of universal education in the US is of little avail if the Trump administration opts to disregard the evidence on global warming.

All this is not to argue that education is without value — it is obviously better to be educated than not to be educated. But to appreciate this point we need clarity on what is meant by education and also differentiate between its two quite different functions.


At the level of individuals, education confers the ability to realise their full potential. Just as the lack of adequate diet results in physical stunting, the lack of adequate education results in intellectual stunting — both are handicaps that hinder the realisation of human potential. But this education provides very different kinds of tools — the ability to think, to learn, to reason, to evaluate evidence, to argue logically, to differentiate truth from falsehood. In short, this education provides the foundation for leading a life based on reason


On the contrary, what we commonly understand as education is much better described as training in particular skills like medicine, engineering and accounting. We mistakenly believe that the earlier we start students on acquiring such skills the better off they would be — thus the existence of pre-professional streams in high school. This insistence on acquisition of skills comes at the expense of the general education that ought to be the mandate of schools. It is no surprise that we have many highly skilled technicians who appear intellectually stunted.


This second type of education, the acquisition of skills, is what people need to earn their livelihoods. Here we are guilty of a major fallacy because the demand for skills does not exist independently of the state of the economy and society. To take an obvious example, if an economy is not generating any jobs, training a whole lot of professionals is not going to lead to development. We should be familiar with this phenomenon having seen huge numbers of Pakistani professionals emigrating in search of jobs. They are moving to developing economies requiring specific types of skills.


This reiterates the claim that development comes first and signals the kinds of skills required. In economic terminology, the demand for skills is a derived demand. It derives from the state of the economy, its needs, and the nature of its growth. For example, unilaterally overproducing highly specialised doctors in a low-income country with no environmental sanitation makes little sense — most would seek to emigrate while the majority of the population would be unable to afford the ones that remain and be forced to resort to quacks who respond to the effective demand.


These arguments should make clear that Pakistan’s development problems are not going to be resolved even if every citizen acquires a postgraduate education. All that would happen would be a worsening of the existing crisis. Today, an advertisement for the job of a naib qasid draws thousands of applicants including many with postgraduate degrees and professional qualifications. Many lawyers can be found driving Uber cabs.


Yet another societal malady militates against the acquisition of even those skills that are needed by the economy. One often wonders why in a country of over 200 million, with serious underemployment, it is difficult to find a competent electrician or plumber. Is it because employment and advancement are not based on competence but other factors? If most jobs are doled out on patronage or exchanged for bribes, it is smarter to invest in connections or acquiring funds to buy jobs than to acquire additional skills.


Given the above, why do poor people in Pakistan acquire any education at all? Simply because the oversupply of labour relative to economic development has made degrees a filter for recruitment for even the most mundane jobs. This has transformed education into credentialing. People need credentials and many institutions have responded by becoming diploma mills, either churning out worthless degrees or selling them outright.

Regretfully, more education is not going to provide an easy solution to Pakistan’s development problems. A good schooling would provide a platform while sensible economic and social policies would be needed to spur growth leading to appropriate skill acquisition.

The writer was dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lums.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1496099/education-is-not-a-solution

His point regarding streaming early on and niche fields is more or less correct, what you do here is create swaths of graduates without the associated industries go into.

However it's also the very same folks who lead the way in terms of growth and enterpernship i.e. the development he writes about. It's not a coincidence that the likes of Bezoz(Princeton/Amazon) , Gates (Harvard/Microsoft), Zukerberg (Harvard/Facebook) Sergey Brin (Maryland and Stanford/Google), Larry Page ( Michigan and Stanford/Google) , Elon Musk ( Pennsylvania/Tesla), Brian Chesky (Rhode Island design school/Airbnb) etc have all had a strong higher education. The folks who've had a rudimentary education will not produce the start-ups the EX Dean writes about, the correlation is as clear as day.

Building a holistic education and having the set streams for speciality subjects are mutually inclusive, you need both.

 

[Indus Pakistan]

Pakistan should have had universal education enrollment by 1970. By 1980 Pakistan should have churned out enough scientists, mathematicians, metallurgists, aviation experts, electronic experts, civil engineering experts, auto engineering experts that we should have by 2000s making our own cars, tanks, trains, helicopters, rockets to space, computers, mobiles etc.

Instead to dump some soil, flatten some hardcore [Romans did it 2000 years ago], tarmac it and call it motorway we need.

We have a population of 200 million. We have mass unemployment so somebody explain to me what is so special about this Chinese athiest? It certainly is not his penis size or his Islamic credentials or piety or he pretty looks. So what has he got that required him to come 2000 miles from China to Pakistan to build motorway? Answer below

@PAKISTANFOREVER



education

 

[Indus Pakistan]

An educated population fosters growth itself. You mean to tell me I have at my disposal an army of talented engineers and well trained technicians with all the skills in the world but they all will just sit at home twiddling their thumbs because there aren't any jobs? No, these folks will go out and make jobs for themselves and others.



Pehlay sahi taaleem deh kar tou dekho.

If you had 5,000 guys with all the education, skills that built F-22 Raptor in Islamabad are people telling me they would get jobs as rickshaw drivers or would they end up at PAF Kamra making 5th gen stealth for Pakistan?

when everyone is BA/MA pass (real or fake degree) babu

If they did it in science subjects they would be used to build eveything from jets to roads.

 

[denel]

Education is not a solution

Anjum Altaf
July 25, 2019


PEOPLE often insist that Pakistan’s lack of development requires investing in education. They should reconsider this relationship.

Consider the following arguments:

In countries we consider developed today, mass education followed development, not the other way around. Countries did not wait till they were fully educated before they began to develop. Rather, they began to develop which created the need for the spread of education. Great Britain became a global empire when there was relatively little mass education. Today, with universal education, it is a minor player in the global system. There is no linear relationship between education and development and certainly the former does not cause the latter.


Apply this framework to British India. There was little mass education when the British took over but because there were so few they needed local intermediaries to help administer the colony in ways familiar to them. That was the genesis of the limited number of BA and MA programmes set up to produce the babus they needed. Pakistan has continued to produce many more babus than it needs. By any measure, there is much more education today than there was in 1947 without commensurate gains in development. By comparison, many countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia with similar education levels at the outset have greatly outpaced Pakistan.


There is yet another problem in attributing the lack of development in Pakistan to a lack of mass education because the key economic and political decisions have been made by well-educated people. Why have they been making very poor decisions despite their excellent educations? It is a travesty to blame uneducated people for the sins of the educated rulers.

Pakistan’s development problems are not going to be resolved even if every citizen acquires a postgraduate education.


These arguments should suggest that the emphasis on mass education in the context of development is misplaced. Policy choices, which are made by the educated, matter much more and if the policies are flawed no amount of mass education can undo the damage. Climate change is a good example — the existence of universal education in the US is of little avail if the Trump administration opts to disregard the evidence on global warming.

All this is not to argue that education is without value — it is obviously better to be educated than not to be educated. But to appreciate this point we need clarity on what is meant by education and also differentiate between its two quite different functions.


At the level of individuals, education confers the ability to realise their full potential. Just as the lack of adequate diet results in physical stunting, the lack of adequate education results in intellectual stunting — both are handicaps that hinder the realisation of human potential. But this education provides very different kinds of tools — the ability to think, to learn, to reason, to evaluate evidence, to argue logically, to differentiate truth from falsehood. In short, this education provides the foundation for leading a life based on reason


On the contrary, what we commonly understand as education is much better described as training in particular skills like medicine, engineering and accounting. We mistakenly believe that the earlier we start students on acquiring such skills the better off they would be — thus the existence of pre-professional streams in high school. This insistence on acquisition of skills comes at the expense of the general education that ought to be the mandate of schools. It is no surprise that we have many highly skilled technicians who appear intellectually stunted.


This second type of education, the acquisition of skills, is what people need to earn their livelihoods. Here we are guilty of a major fallacy because the demand for skills does not exist independently of the state of the economy and society. To take an obvious example, if an economy is not generating any jobs, training a whole lot of professionals is not going to lead to development. We should be familiar with this phenomenon having seen huge numbers of Pakistani professionals emigrating in search of jobs. They are moving to developing economies requiring specific types of skills.


This reiterates the claim that development comes first and signals the kinds of skills required. In economic terminology, the demand for skills is a derived demand. It derives from the state of the economy, its needs, and the nature of its growth. For example, unilaterally overproducing highly specialised doctors in a low-income country with no environmental sanitation makes little sense — most would seek to emigrate while the majority of the population would be unable to afford the ones that remain and be forced to resort to quacks who respond to the effective demand.


These arguments should make clear that Pakistan’s development problems are not going to be resolved even if every citizen acquires a postgraduate education. All that would happen would be a worsening of the existing crisis. Today, an advertisement for the job of a naib qasid draws thousands of applicants including many with postgraduate degrees and professional qualifications. Many lawyers can be found driving Uber cabs.


Yet another societal malady militates against the acquisition of even those skills that are needed by the economy. One often wonders why in a country of over 200 million, with serious underemployment, it is difficult to find a competent electrician or plumber. Is it because employment and advancement are not based on competence but other factors? If most jobs are doled out on patronage or exchanged for bribes, it is smarter to invest in connections or acquiring funds to buy jobs than to acquire additional skills.


Given the above, why do poor people in Pakistan acquire any education at all? Simply because the oversupply of labour relative to economic development has made degrees a filter for recruitment for even the most mundane jobs. This has transformed education into credentialing. People need credentials and many institutions have responded by becoming diploma mills, either churning out worthless degrees or selling them outright.

Regretfully, more education is not going to provide an easy solution to Pakistan’s development problems. A good schooling would provide a platform while sensible economic and social policies would be needed to spur growth leading to appropriate skill acquisition.

The writer was dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lums.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1496099/education-is-not-a-solution

Complete BS and coming from a Dean; he needs to be re-educated.

We have here entire seperate post schooling paths. Techikons - trades professions; Universities + Nursing Colleges. They all work in tandem fullfilling various requirements.

He is failing to recognise the need for Technikons which offer 3 year programs which btw includes specialisations e.g electrical/electricians/waterworks/drafting/surveying/mining etc including for various services as well e.g. naval maintenance etc.

 

[PAKISTANFOREVER]

Pakistan should have had universal education enrollment by 1970. By 1980 Pakistan should have churned out enough scientists, mathematicians, metallurgists, aviation experts, electronic experts, civil engineering experts, auto engineering experts that we should have by 2000s making our own cars, tanks, trains, helicopters, rockets to space, computers, mobiles etc.

Instead to dump some soil, flatten some hardcore [Romans did it 2000 years ago], tarmac it and call it motorway we need.

We have a population of 200 million. We have mass unemployment so somebody explain to me what is so special about this Chinese athiest? It certainly is not his penis size or his Islamic credentials or piety or he pretty looks. So what has he got that required him to come 2000 miles from China to Pakistan to build motorway? Answer below

@PAKISTANFOREVER



education

Who needs education when you have low IQ turds blowing themselves up for the "Ummah", for people who consider Pakistanis as a "lesser people".........that is for more productive..........

PS With the types of Muslims Pakistan is producing nowadays, even the most ardent of Athiests and Satanic Devil Worshippers are more "Islamic" than most Pakistanis. Sad but true..........


The ONLY solution left for Pakistan is high calibre nationalism and education. Nothing else can help us. That is the reality........

 

[VCheng]

There is no linear relationship between education and development and certainly the former does not cause the latter.

This is not a cause and effect relationship. Both go together, progress in one feeding progress in the other, as a virtuous circle. That is how the Industrial Revolution was started.

Even more important is how does a new entrant get into this virtuous circle in a global economy? If a country wants to produce value-added products that others want to buy, how does one get the process started?

 

[Nike]

education is a starter for all economy progress, England at the start of industrial revolution is indeed only the elites got education and enjoy even the luxury of university like Cambridge and Oxford but he is failed to mention the rest of the world doesnt have comparable educated elites with systematic education system capable to nurture batch after batches educated elites without pause. Thats why most important invention at the era only come from Anglo Saxon sphere, Germany, and French in which got almost the same education system. Realized the important of educated bunch of people their government starting to implement universal education system in which made their progress being leap and bound from the rest of the world. Educated people is important to running more complexes economy activities far cry from being a simple farmer with only a cow and hoe at their backyard. Educated farmer capable to running their farms more efficient with mechanized farming tools at their disposal and doing accounting books to made notes for their revenue and expenses and trying to get more capital from banks and so on.