Teaching Science Badly – and Well

The ``illiterate`` doctor writes <<< The prosperity or poverty of nations, and of individuals, has become contingent upon their ability to understand and control science >>>

The poverty and prosperity of nations has more to do with their position in the global pecking order than any ``science``. Science has become one of several whores in the ``harem`` of the power elite. It is also amazing to note that the good ``illiterate`` doctor regards humanities as having nothing to do with science, as such he is quite oblivious of the method of science and quite dogmatic in what he considers science. Why science fails in Pakistan is because regardless of mastery it has failed to produce results in Pakistan and hense, as the SCIENCE of humanities would correctly predict, people lose interest and get discouraged when faced with multiple failure, no doubt it would get de-valued in a social structure that has been forced into dependant development and where science fails because the great powers see no benefit in lesser people developing that mindset or the resulting benefits......Doctor, get an education rather than trying to resurrect the ``science`` of the past without understanding the world of the present....

An excellent article Hoodhboy sahib. As a science teacher at a private school of the sort you be- moan (though not in pakistan) --obsessed with exam results--I agree with everything you say.

I was lucky to go to a school myself where we used to be expected to find out things ourselves via experiments. Feynman has some wonderful writing on what is good and bad science teaching.

Continued from post 65

For your benefit, read what Irfan Husain has to say about knowledge and reason in my post 60.
I pray, he happens to be one hundred percent Musalman. Otherwise...? Allah Malik! I am afraid he too is not BRAVE enough to endure your onslaught!

Samar

#63#Nutcasejob

About Nadir Shah : Before plundering Muslims of India, i.e. Mughals in their most wretched time, he had brought havoc to BRAVE Musalmans of Peshavar, BRAVE Musalmans of Ravalpindi, BRAVE Musalmans of Multan, BRAVE Musalmans of Lahore. I am really confused if these cities are in Pak or in India! Now I could really know the state of History books (and perhaps Geography books too) in Pak.

Now I could also guess what you think of and wish for Indian Muslims!!

I will go by what you say about Abdali having defeated Marathas but again you have just to replace Nadir Shah with Abdali to know the real history of Pak. You have confused me so much, I am still not sure about the Geography!!!

Samar

#62 my brave musalman zeemax, I see you are in agreement with the general thrust of the argument in #61!

Man, I am honored!

#62
my brave musalman zeemax, Abdali was that rare commodity, in that he was from the tr-country border area - persia, afhaghnistan and present day pakistan (musalmanstan). Hw owes his life to his father-like figure that great Musalman King from Persia Nadir Shah.

This test, is an answer to the dastardly indians who have been tickling the balls of the powerfull people of the world. These horrible hunoods have been presenting false witnesses against the brave musalmans of hindustan.

Yes, they are all going where ever they can and as you so delicately put it, there is something dribbling down the teflon trousers and they donot even have time to remove them. And their yellow Halwai Hawaii chappals can longer absorb the stuff (T)

#61

... err ... Ahmad Shah Abdali was an Afghan Pashtun (just like Taliban), and not a Persian ...

... but the connection is unmistakable because Abdali declared Jihad (just like Taliban) and crushed the Marathas in the third battle of Panipat ... LoL

... do I see something dribbling down those green teteron pants onto the yellow hawai chappals?

The professor like a true non-musalman is bent on making the musalman look incompetent and backward. HIs writings always reflect this point.

If pakistan and the brave musalmans were really that backward, how could they have got a brave persian and tested him as well.

Is the zorasthrian professor jealous that his fingers were not in the pie?








Pakistan test fires The ABDALI

Continued from my last post: See what Irfan Saheb has to say about outlook.

``Looking ahead, the only hopeful signs appear in those emerging economies that have adopted reason as the basis of education. China’s and India’s dramatic growth can be traced directly to their educated workforce. Neither has been reluctant to borrow from the West when it comes to setting up educational institutions. Both have jettisoned ideological baggage that might have handicapped their absorption of knowledge. Indeed, both have learned from their colonial past, and repudiated the complacency of their past rulers.

``This, then, is the lesson we must all learn: knowledge is universal and has no frontier. When elected members of the Pakistani parliament demand that students should not be taught the pre-Islamic past of their country, they are only exhibiting the kind of thinking that allowed foreigners to rule us so easily. Until we can shed this kind of mediaeval, irrational mindset, we are doomed to stand in queue outside the IMF and the World Bank.``- Irfan Husain in Dawn, 3/3/07

Good professor is trying to highlight the importance of scientific outlook which could and should be cultivated through objective learning of science and other subjects and not through Rattabaji. When all the Madarsas (and other schools too in Pak) give much, much more emphasis on just memorizing, naturally it kills the thirst for real knowledge.

If even science is not taught in a manner that would promote curiosity how the knowledge in other fields could ever question status quo? That is why even Musharraf is seen as someone enlightened, even if moderately and through newspaper Rattas people are given to believe that he is better than elected representatives . Presently even most progressive newspapers of Pak project him to be indispensable for the country. See, what the constant rattling of shrill voices has done to vanguards of the society. What a shame!

And, this is what we are witnessing in Chowkair.

I feel pity for the land of the pure. Real pity!

Samar

Pakiland`s whole education strategy can be summed up as ``paki see IIT, paki burn with envy, paki think he can do better overnight``..

and despite capt clueless` BS about being a phd and interviewing people, i hardly ever saw a paki prof at grad school...

VIEW: Bring HEC back to earth —Pervez Hoodbhoy

Every day brings new evidence that the planning of higher education in Pakistan has run out of control. It is now more about fantasy than fact. There seems no other way to explain the fact that while the country is becoming besieged by almost daily suicide bombings and religious fanatics can kill a woman minister for being un-Islamically dressed, the Higher Education Commission plans to spend $4.3 billion on building nine new engineering universities, staffed with European faculty and administrators.

It must have sounded like a wonderful idea. Pakistan would pay for France, Sweden, Italy, and some other European countries to help set up, manage, and provide professors for new universities in Pakistan. It would be expensive — Pakistan would have to pay the full development costs, recurrent expenses, and euro-level salaries (plus 40 percent markup) for all the foreign professors and vice-chancellors. But the large presence of European professors teaching in these Pakistan universities would ensure high standards of teaching, the degrees would be awarded by institutions in the respective European countries, and Pakistan would finally end the acute shortage of international quality engineers.

Work has already started. Off the nine universities, the most advanced in terms of construction and planning is the French engineering university with a completion cost of Rs26 billion. It has been named UESTP-France in Karachi, and has an ultimate faculty size of 450-600 with around 5000-7000 students. Its construction is underway and the official starting date is listed as October 2007.

On the ground, the situation looks dismal. The French seem completely absent from the French university. As of the beginning of March 2007, not a single faculty member from France — including the all-important head of the university — has joined. This was confirmed to me by French official sources, and has not been refuted by the HEC. Even the skeleton crew is not on board although decent academic planning for a university requires years of preparation for the curricula, courses, laboratories, and infrastructure.

According to the HEC “Initially, over 50 per cent of the faculty will be from partner countries but as foreign-trained Pakistani faculty become available over the next five to eight years, the foreign faculty component will be reduced to about 25 per cent”. This means that UESTP-France in Karachi needs to find — just as a startup — scores of French professors and still more Pakistani engineering professors for its faculty.

Should we blame the French for not turning up? And are hundreds of Swedes, and other Europeans any more likely to turn up to live and teach in Pakistan for several years at such a time? What is a European professor to make of the suicide bombings at the Islamabad international airport, the Islamabad Marriot Hotel, the Quetta High Court, and so many more in the past year, and that the international community grows more convinced everyday that Pakistan has become a new haven for Al Qaeda?

Even if the Europeans came, there would not be enough Pakistani faculty for all these universities. The sad fact is that currently there are no more than 2-3 dozen PhD engineering professors in all of Pakistan’s engineering universities who can teach modern engineering subjects at an international professional level. So, even if every one of these universities were sucked dry of all its best, this would be barely sufficient for meeting the needs of the first phase of the first Pak-European university. What will happen then to the Rs37 billion Pak-Swedish University, scheduled to start in 2008 and to be located in Sialkot, and which will need even more teachers?

The HEC says that in time there will be more Pakistani faculty as 500 Pakistani engineers have currently been sent for PhD degrees abroad. This simply cannot suffice for meeting the needs for nine universities, which will need in total thousands of teachers.

To be honest, the HEC should recognise even the 500 engineers it sent abroad may not be enough for even one university. Not all will succeed in getting a Ph.D. Past experience also shows that some of the really good students who get PhDs will stay on in the West, and some who do return to Pakistan will be too mediocre for university-level teaching. It is irresponsible to plan a series of universities with so much wishful thinking.

Far wiser would be to aim for, at the very most, two properly planned new engineering universities under the collective authority of the European Union, and to seek external help for adding engineering departments to existing universities, as well as to massively upgrade existing ones. But these relatively modest goals are unacceptable to a HEC leadership that believes, like the Musharraf regime as a whole, in grand plans rather than practical, feasible reforms.

Administrative incompetence and bungling has become the hallmark of HEC projects, whether large amounts of money are involved or not. Consider the ham-handed manner in which rules for students wishing to register for the PhD degree in Pakistani universities have been changed.

According to the new rules, published in national newspapers, it is now necessary for every student to ‘clear’ the subject GRE exam, administered by the Princeton-based Education Testing Service, before the student is granted admission to the PhD programme of any Pakistani university. Considered dauntingly tough by our students (most of their teachers would fare poorly as well) these exams do measure aptitude for higher studies fairly well. The logic — faultless in itself — is that Pakistani students must measure up to international standards.

But left dangling are the key questions: what marks or percentile rating does ‘clear’ mean and who will decide? Who will pay the $160 examination fee, a major consideration for our public-university students? How to acclimatise the student, who has operated hitherto in a familiar rote-learning mode, into an alien problem-solving mode?

The HEC is silent on these fundamental questions, but without addressing them a collapse of PhD programs will occur nationwide. This is just one more example of the scores of arbitrary schemes conceived by the HEC that have placed Pakistan’s higher education in serious danger.

Other projects launched by the HEC — such as incentivising the publication of research papers — have caused plagiarism to explode across the national scene. Hastily conceived and badly managed, they have channelled resources away from crucial areas into grandiose schemes. The HEC must be brought to task. There needs to be an independent investigation of its plans and financing, a review of its programmes, and a full audit of all the money that has been spent on and by HEC.

The author teaches physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad

“Science is taught in schools for a good enough reason – we owe the modern world to it. The prosperity or poverty of nations, and of individuals, has become contingent upon their ability to understand and control science. Take its products away, and we would be back in the dark days of our ancestors when a child at birth was more likely to die than live.”

Purpose of scientific education is to develop a scientific infrastructure which would enable a country to make products that it needs and solve its problems whether environmental, medical or whatever. Muslim nations realized over two centuries ago that the reason they were in decline and the West in its ascendancy had to with the latter’s ability to harness scientific knowledge. Realizing this every attempt was made to obtain this knowledge.

The best and the brightest of our youth were given scholarships; the wealthy and the powerful didn’t want to be left behind in this race and sent their kids to the best institutions in the West. Even today go to any good American University and attend a philosophy, history, political science, art or anthropology class and you will find that the class is full of Americans, but go to a calculus, physics, chemistry or natural sciences class and you will see them disproportionately filled with Muslims from Arab and non Arab countries. To date I have never met a Muslim student who came to America to study history, philosophy or political science. No self respecting parent would ever entertain the prospect of spending his money on such an economically worthless subject.

Arabs have a lot of money and pre 911 you could see American Universities flooded with their students and most of them graduated with science degrees and did return home to their respective countries. Mind you these young men were no dummies, those who stayed behind joined research institutions and academia here and made a name for themselves and did quite well. But what about the vast majority of the ones who returned? This should have fostered a climate of science and technology in all those nations, where such emphasis had been placed on a scientific education. But that is not the case at all, the Muslim world as a whole lags behind in scientific innovation, in creating new products or developing services indigenously.

My point is that whereas the Good Doctor is lamenting the fact that science is not well taught, the problem runs even deeper then that. Even when people from our backgrounds are given the opportunity and learn good science, they still are unable to think scientifically and obtain the results that they expected to achieve. Why is it so?

#53
Shah2
Yes, I agree with your POV.

#54 dullabhatti sahib

Please, re read my post # 52.

Look....
1:- I do not have any problem with learning sciences. I rather encourage learning more and more for the betterment of pakistan and for the betterment of the whole world.

2:- religious Dogmas do not prevent or stop us from learning sciences.

3:- Mullahs in Pakistan are in absolute minority........Majority Pakistanis are moderate and good Muslims , they sure are scientists, MDs, engineers, economists.......and theologists.....

4:- Scientists are not just physicists.

5:- Science is every other subject. studying geology, biology, theology, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, behavioural sciences, medicine, surgery, architect, engineers( in all their fields), agriculture, industry...............everything is science and every research done in these fields is science.............So, all those who study these subjects are technically
scientists.

My whole point is religious doctrines do not prohibit us from being scientists in any field.

I have seen even extremists mullahs as Phd physicists, MDs, engineers, soft wear engineers etc, etc, etc.......

I hope my point is clear.....

We need EDUCATED MINDS first to eradicate real ignorance in Pakistan. Degrees do not make us educated....And that`s the main solution to our problems.....Religious dogmas are not an issue...It`s the way Mullahs practice such dogmas in a totally convoluted ways...learning science can not stop from producing mullahs.....

Zeena, look, I am an Engineer and I work with scientists and some scientists turned engineers.. let me tell you there is a difference in a scientist and an engineer. There are some engineers who are good scientists and there are some scientists who are good engineers. but most engineers, doctors, MDs, are really technicians who use science to invent products and perform services. Majority of MDs die without putting forward a single scientific theory or making a scientifc discovery not known before.

#52
I am enlightened by your informatiion about status in Pak.
In my opinon any profressor in my life has been least instumental in giving me truely knowlege of life that came susequently mor benficial than practical on the field probl;em solving..

All theses profesors are full of Hot Air as Mao said in the eraly part of revolution
and look at chinese in Science one of he super powers way ahead of India