Education In Pakistan Part 3

Educated persons no matter what degrees they claim to have. But high technology based industrialisation cannot come into existence without the prior availability of a pool of scientifically trained ‘manpower (both men and women). No one is likely to invest in high technology industries in a country where there is not already an abundance of well qualified, scientifically trained personnel. As we stand today Pakistan does not offer an attractive base for such high technology operations. The only way to breakthrough this barrier to a prosperous future for all, would be for the state to invest in an ambitious programme of scientific and technological education.

We are falling behind in today’s world with alarming rapidity. If we wish to go forward in the modern world we cannot avoid heavy investment in science and technology based education at various levels. This is an expensive option. Schools as well as colleges and universities will need well equipped laboratories and workshops. This will also call for investment in scientifically trained teaching staff. If on the basis of what we manage to attract investment is science and technology based industries, there will be much Iess incentive for our highly educated and well trained people who want to go abroad. We can see this from the experience of Southeast Asian and Pacific Rim countries which are forging ahead in the field of high technology industries. There are few lessons that we can learn from them.

India too has done well in this respect by restricting its military expenditure in the critical early years after independence (until 1960) an concentrating its available resources instead on an ambitious programme of development of an industrial base by building heaving, industries, a programme that we initiated, by its Second Five Year Plan, That policy is now paying them dividends. It is quite remarkable how some of the best brains from India, who have an international standing, prefer to serve in their own country. That is not only because they are more patriotic. They also get more back-up than academics in Pakistan do and they are better valued and get a lot more respect than we do in our society of bureaucratic and feud values. They are proud and happy to serve their country. Why can we not also provide sufficient incentives to keep our best brains home? Educational development therefore should not mean for us a simple multiplication of schools, colleges and universities on the, present lines. Merely replicating such educational institutions will fair to solve anything. Providing more of the same will actually be counter-productive. That will merely pour out even larger numbers of badly educated and unemployable graduates for whom the country has little use and for whom there can be no jobs. That can only result in large scale educated unemployment which in turn will result in greater frustration and even more violent ethnic strife.

If we forego the option of heavy investment in science and technology based education, we will not safe resources. Money that is not spent on that will, inevitably, be swallowed up by larger expenditures on police and military operations that will, be needed t contain civic strife. Equally we must take account, in that equation the loss of the benefits that will accrue from the training of a large body of scientifically and technologically trained ‘man-power’ (men and women) that can attract and support investment in high technology based education in Pakistan, for it is such education that holds out a promise of future prosperity of our nation.

Virtually the same arguments apply in rural education. Traditionally the kind of education that has been on offer has provided young people in rural areas with the means to get out of the village to take up an urban job. In central and southern Punjab and in Sindh there was hostility towards such education because of the fear that educated sons would be lost to the family. Of course one must add to this the role of big feudal lords in backward areas and their hostility towards education of peasants. But that was not the sole cause of low levels of education in those regions.

The picture has been very different in the pother area. there the vast majority of farm holdings are too small to provide a livelihood for the family. Therefore, traditionally: there has been an incentive to educate children. Education has been ‘functional for the family economy by facilitating migration of sons and daughters to outside jobs. They are then able to send some money home to subsidies the bankrupt farm economy. Past census figures have shown a higher level of education in the poor and technologically backward region of the Pother than in the far richer central and southern Punjab, where agriculture is technologically far more advanced since the “Green Revolution” that got underway in the sixties and the seventies.

A change in attitudes towards education was already noticeable in central and southern Punjab. The education that is provided by schools and colleges, which is designed to produce more members of the salariat was of no use to them and they said so. They did not want to lose sons who would migrate to towns. But there was another kind of education which they were then just beginning to ask for. The Green Revolution and farm mechanisation had just got underway. They wanted knowIedge would tell them how to cope with the new technology. They wanted to know how to maintain and repair their new farm machinery including tractors. The ordinary kind of education, even an ordinary science degree, was quite useless for that. They needed something different. They wanted technological education that would help them cope with the new scientific inputs in agriculture. So in the rural areas too there is a case for révolutionising education and to move towards science and technology based training.

Science based education should help us, to prepare the ground to build a new industrial base. It should also help our people to snap out of their primitive superstitious beliefs and supernaturalism that are so characteristic of our ideological make up. We might learn to look at the world with scientific and rational minds, in new and more meaningful ways. Standing as we are on the 15th century Catholic Fundamentalism and the Spanish Inquisition that persecuted Muslims and Jews and rational scientific minds. Our Own zealots the mullahs are not far. behind their record. The Spanish inquisition south to stamp out the new learning that was brought to Europe by Muslims and Jewish scholars by way of Andalusia. These scholars we the main targets of the bigots who feared the light of reason. But even the extreme brutality of the Spanish Inquisition could not stop the new learning from spreading across Europe, ending. It ‘Dark Ages’ and giving birth to the Europe ‘Renaissance and the centuries of progress that followed that. We too need renaissance to liberate ourselves from our Own home grown bar Of bigotry, and Our own brand of Inquisition One would hope that the expansion of science and technology based education would contribute to the inaugurfj0 of such a new era of for us.