I disagree. It's like saying Nobel prizes have been devalued because one such prize was given undeservedly to Henry Kissinger.
Both the quality and quantity of higher education in Pakistan have been steadily improving since the HEC was heavily funded and reformed under Dr. Ataur Rahman's leadership in the last decade. However, the demand for higher education in Pakistan is rising faster than supply....hence the need for many to go overseas for advanced training.
Haq's Musings: Dr. Ata-ur-Rahman Defends Pakistan's Higher Education Reforms
Young people with advanced education and relevant skills have no trouble finding jobs anywhere.
The dark ages : Masood Hasan - Sunday, May 27, 2012
We all groan about the galloping illiteracy that has all but finished Pakistan. In thousands of schools and colleges across the country, millions are emerging with barely an education worth the name. These hordes, largely illiterate are then reduced to seeking any employment, howsoever menial it might be. Others resort to quicker means of making a living and crime follows soon after.
It is frightening to confront the overall dismal situation in Pakistan where vested interests have usurped whatever meagre resources we might have had, taking massive chunks of the budgets and reducing the education drive to a mere farce.
We spend just 1.5 percent of our GDP on education and we all know who takes the lions, tigers and leopards share. I think their medals cost more than what this nation spends on education but then who is going to ask the boys to give back the toys they have and who is going to tell them that there wont be any country left to defend if things carry on like they do. The answer to that too is well known but seldom voiced. Such lopsided thinking can only produce tragic and ugly results. With millions being added to our galloping population, Pakistan is now faced with such daunting and frightening problems that even Attila the Hun would think twice before venturing here.
The statistics make for horror reading and not the kind of thing that you want to wake up and read on a Sunday morning without any electricity but with mosquitoes galore. In this the new century a country which cannot get rid of mosquitoes does not deserve to exist. This is no citadel of Islam at best servant quarters. Where we are going can drive a chill up anyones spine but because the culture now is loot now, abscond later, no one truly cares what happens to Pakistan.
At school level, mechanically the system churns out robots ill-informed, ill-prepared and ill-equipped to join others already in the sewers. Those who are able to get a little further up, greasing their way forward or supported by the guess papers and tuition centres, take the illiteracy mega notches ahead.
These are men and women unable to put a sentence together. They have neither been taught anything nor have they absorbed anything of any value. They have never read a book and if they have, cannot recall what it was called. They live in homes where no newspapers ever arrive. If they do, no one reads them. When and if they can write, they approach the paper with fear and hesitation. They form words painfully, labouring over each letter. Their writing is clumsy and wriggly at best, like a shopkeeper will painfully put together an invoice. A word like one dozen will send them into a paroxysm of agony. Its a scenario that is simply the equivalent of doomsday yet the higher authorities are losing no sleep over it.
If what we are churning out is scary, look at what we are teaching the young ones. A posh school (as these are invariably called), ran a test for 7-year-olds to celebrate March 23. Among the brilliant questions that were put to them, were gems such as who designed the Pakistan flag? Quite fixated by this subject, the examiners wanted to know who wrote Pakistans national anthem? When was the national anthem approved?, who composed it? and what was its duration? (80 seconds in case you did not know) and so on. It also asked the 7-year-olds, the total area of Pakistan? (796,095 sq.km) and informed all that the biggest salt mine located in Pakistan was at Mingora (!!!!). It cites 1971s major event as Bangladeshs breaking away from Pakistan. Excuse me gents but was it not East Pakistan? Bangladesh came much later. For some odd reason it wished to know where the tomb of Emperor Jahan is located, but did not specify Shah Jahan or Noor Jahan. Oh well, same family really.
Much that goes into what is Pakistan History, Current Affairs or Social Studies is loaded with falsehood. Each regime has managed to alter the syllabi to its liking. I am not aware of what they are planting into young minds these days but do recall that at one stage Zulfikar Ali Bhutto got about two lines and at another time, simply did not exist. This was rectified when his party swept into the government and in turn reduced its enemies to a line or two.
My generation grew up on Messers Ghaznavi and Ghauri, lauded as some kind of Islamic visionaries, whereas in reality they were no more than marauding thieves who repeatedly attacked rich India and looted, enslaved and made off with all they could find. Razing Hindu temples glorified their looting.
It was years later, long after college, that one read the truth. But falsehood or not, what is scary is the quality of the instruction that is being poured into young and impressionable minds. The examination of the 7-year-olds is objectionable because if Pakistan History is largely a matter of anthem singing and whatnot, those who are supposedly responsible are guilty of misguiding their young students.
That is not simply unfortunate but downright criminal.
Those men and women for instance who develop material that then gets into textbooks cannot let prejudice, hatred, intolerance and warped thinking shape their views.. Neither can they be a party to what the government of the day wishes, but we all know that these are mere theoretical exercises. The truth is altogether different and whatever we inject into young minds shapes thinking for the rest of their days, few overcoming the lies they were fed when they were just children.
I dont know how the antecedents of the national anthem will help the 7-year-olds but it is sobering to consider what eighth graders were asked in 1895 in far away Salina, Kansas, USA. In Grammar: Give nine rules for the use of capital letters. Define verse, stanza and paragraph. In Arithmetic: Name and define the fundamental rules of Arithmetic, and Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days at 10 Percent. In Geography: What is climate? Upon what does it depend? Of what use are rivers and oceans? Describe the movements of the earth. And so on. I tried but couldnt answer more than a quarter of the questions.
We have an army excuse the pun of illiterates and they are growing. When the criterion of literacy is what we have fashioned here, it is not a surprise that the nation is blank. Our so called Matric is laughable as is our FA/FSc. Meaningless exams with nothing of consequence. Those who make it to the graduate or post graduate level cannot put two sentences together. Our country refuses to buy books or go to a library the few that we have.
Pretty soon we wont even know how and where to affix our thumbs but our arsenal will be awesome.
The writer is a Lahore-based columnist. Email:
masoodhasan66@gmail.com