Moving Beyond Talk: A Roadmap for Quality Education

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Then there is this joker of a woman; Dr. Shireen Mazari``. Apparantly she heads some institute that looks after, and justifies the Pakistan Army/Rightwing agenda. She is shrill, vociferous, argumentative, and a liar; highly desirable traits, especially to prop up the present regime of Mr. Mush. She is expert in twisting the facts to please Musharraf (god knows where both of them would end-up after the Dems recover the Whitehouse?). In the article published in ``Nation``, she is lamenting the audacity of Nayyar report on the state of education (ha!) in Pakistan.
http://www.jang-group.com/thenews/mar2004-daily/10-03-2004/oped/o3.htm
It seems that Prof Nayyar has stepped on her tail. she has been coming out and swinging like a ``Cheap Ladakoo Bazari Laundiya``. I doubt whether she reads the garbage that is being spewed out by her. She is definitely in need of a thorough colonoscopy to check her brain functions.
I have ``googled`` her name and have come across the the lies she is spreading, her hatered for democratic values, compassion toward humanity in general; and poor Pakistanis in particular. She wants to keep the madrassah curriculum intact -may be she is on the take of petrodollars, may be she is in cahoots with Usama, Al Qayda, and Taleban. What ever it is, she is bad for Pakistan.
Dont you all agree?

Hey, Maasanamuthu:

It is really, really rich to see you giving advice about quality education. I mean, here you are with a degree obtained from some no-name third-rate college in India and that too by cheating deserving candidates out of their slot by producing a false caste certificate declaring you to be an OBC, repeatedly flunking any course that requires any analytical aptitude, passing by bribing the examiners, and getting a job during the boom years and kissing your manager`s arse to find your way to the US.

You wouldn`t know the meaning of quality education if it bit you on the ankle.

Do tell us the names of research publications to your credit.

At least, tell us what distinguished your alma mater, except for the fact that it offered courses in Dravidian Studies including the writings of The Great Intellectual.

Mr. Isphahani, I appreciate your comment. Achievements of UK and other developed world in education and enomic areas are great inspiration for people in the developing nations - they help demonstrate what can be achieved by righly focused human energy and efforts.

At the same time, their 100% literacy and tall building were not achieved in a single day and sometimes, we tend to ignore their journey which brought them to this point of inspiring success. And it is in the journey that lessons exisit for nations like ours (both india and pakistan). I am sure there was a time when nothing existed even in Uk and their conditions matched ours. What is important is to learn from how they achieved it.

Pakistani universities face a number of very fundamental management problems. They fail to deliver an environment where even half decent faculty would like to stay and teach. The problems are obvious and easy to solve. However, what is not understood is why there has been no cencern to solve them and no systematic effort to this end.

What we lack is not infrastructure. What we lack is also not very clear because we do not have any systematic management going on where we can make credible assessments of what is needed. Building are the last thing that I would recommend. What we have presently remains largely underutilised. Students flock to Uk or US universities for good reasons.

What I am recommending is that we optimize our systems so they are ready to absorb injections of further financial investments inthis sector. We need to start fixingour act. I am afraid that our current human resource which is available at these universities is mostly unsuited for the jobs. Why I say this is that the conditions are not conducive for self respecting people to work here - so anybody and everybody who could find a job in US or europe or canada has foundone. Others who could not leave for one reason or the other inspite of potential (and there are many) have lost hope and do not feel motivated. And no one cares. Performance is not even an issue here. The corporate culture at universities cannot handle and is ill prepared to accomodate highly talented people. So tangible and intangible attributes of our universities are unsuited for attraction, retention and development of world class faculty. hence developing internaitnally comparable university is nothing more than a dream - thats what we are chasing.

This is not the environment in which universities can improve and they will not improve regardless of how much money goes into them. We need to overhaul educaitnal management and organiatinal systems and culture. It will be difficult to do with the people who are a part of this system at this time and who have helped perpetuate it all.

What ever is flowing into higher education at this time is not delivering a proportionate value. We need to fix things. ANd the article above proposes a fraework to do that.

tayyab

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

From what I gather, A world class university - more than anything else - is the most compelling place to teach. A university which can be positioned as the most compelling place to teach will become the most compelling place to learn and to invest in. Hence world class students and lots and lots of funds will follow.

Teaching is the core business of a university. Universities exist to enable teaching, learning and thinking. All other functions and work processes, policies, procedures and everything else should be geared to the end of building an attractive destination for these activities.

How people do that is no secret. Why we are not trying to achieve this level of organizaitoonal efficiecny and effectiveness is a mystry.

Quality of educaiton does not lie in the curriculum design etc. What harvard teaches is available on the web. But surprisingly, there is only one harvard.

Our efforts t do quality higher educaiton are beating about the wrong bush.

This is what I gathered from my interactions with you who spared time to participate in this discussioon.

Thank you
tayyab rashid

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

soysauce, attracting worl class talent is the key to building world class univeristy. However, funds alone are not the determinant of where talent goes. Financial and general management systems in pakistani universities are not yet at a level where a credible statement can be made about the financial capacity of pakistani universities. And if education holds the key to a nations well being, i am pretty sure Pakistan has the resources to pay up and meet internatinal benchmarks on faculty salaries. The only obstacle is the will and guts to divert resources to where they matter most - educaiton.

At the same time, my concern is that since our universities are not well managed, they are not prepared to handle top brain (even if money can be arranged). To my mind, talent needs a certain environment to be productive. The entire HR of our universities needs serious retraining and retooling their skill sets to meet the requirements of the people we are vying for.

Thus a need to fix university work processes and upgrade people. I have a very strong feeling that if appropriate environment can be created, attracting top class teachers shuld not be a big deal.

Thats why the proposal presented in the above article presents a framework to overhaul our higher eduaitonal institutions and to build work processes which have build in mehcanism for continuous improvement and innovation. that will create an atmosphere conducive for excellence in hgiher educaiotn in Pakistan.

Right now, most of these places fail to deliver on basics. They cannot ensure clean washrooms. Higher educational quality is like foreign language to them. So there is no question of attracting top class faculty or students - no matter how much you pay them.

Dialogue,
If you look at the universities in the US, the top ones hire talent by offering huge incentives, monetary and non-monetary. Sometimes the 2nd level universities can beat the top ones by hiring away talented faculty by offering huge sums of money. These sorts of games cannot be played by universities in poor countries where money doesn`t ``grow on trees``. Therefore comparisons to western universities is not very productive. If you look at what NUS, singapore has done, is to attract talent from wherever, again by offering good facilities and globally competitive salaries. They have improved their quality (as measured by placement of their graduates, research output, ranking by 3rd party, etc) drastically in the span of 2 decades. But that`s singapore, an affluent state, concentrating its resources mainly on a single institution. I`m not sure that`s a good model either.
You have your own Aga Khan university that has quite a name recognition, from what I understand. There`s also an informal measurement system by which a certain prestige gets attached to a university or college. This measure is based on the accomplishment of the graduates, where the smart students like to go, reputation of the teachers, etc. For semiquantitative measure that may or may not be reliable, but one which attracts a lot of attention, check out the US News & World Report`s ranking of universities & colleges in the US. Their methodology is controversial (which isn`t?) but their rankings are religiously trumpted by the top-ranked colleges themselves.

#30 by soysauce : What I understand from your post is that quality of education of a university is a reflection of the success it achieved in attracting top of the line people to teach and learn at its campus. Can we say then that ``Attraction, development and retention of talent and ofcourse funds`` form the foundation for the performance of a university?

This makes sense in that the core business of a university is teaching and learning. And graduates who pass out is a reflection of the quality of this process.

The next logical question is what is the look and feel of the university that can attract talent. There is a cultural aspect to it, an aesthetic apect, and work process efficiency and infrstructural aspects.

If teaching and leanring are core processes at a university, then every other work process shoul dbe geared to the task of facilitating the core activities. This is what should direct action at all support functions and their performance shoul dbe measured on this.

Pakistani universities can fix their act and improve tremendously. Are there any people who can comment on what they think are the nuisances which are keeping the brightest of this nation away from the campuses - why don`t more people come back from USA or europe or elsewhere and rally to teach at Pakistani universities?


Mr. Isphahani, what do you think...

#30 by soysauce ``I am not sure these are good examples for poor countries. ``

I would differ with this because University Leaders in Pakistan and about everybody else has used this as an excuse to perform. Let me just say that Pakistan is not exactly a poor country. It is a mismanaged country with plenty of inefficient and ineffective institutions and plenty of people (about 150 million) who continue to tolerate.

Rs 5,229.670 million rupees were allocated for all federally funded universities in 2003-2004. If you compare this with some other budgetary heads, this is peanuts. But If you compare the allocation with results delivered, the performance of our universities is dismal to put it lightly.

Also, universities can attract funds from alumni and corporate sector if they are percieved as adding value and I am sure money is available for the asking. But it is only the state funds and tuition fees from poor students (in pakistan parents pay tuitions), that can be swindled and no performance or quality is necessary. universities are not prepared to bringin the corporate sector because that will openthem up and make these places more transparent - something that the exisiting people at these universities will not like.

I will straight away agree with your ``You could say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and measure the quality of higher education by what the graduates of an institution end up doing.`` But who is measuring in Pakistan. Although this is one of the ultimate measures of effectiveness of a university, you will be surprised to hear that very very few universities might have a mechanism for collecting/reporting this data. Not that it is difficult to measure. not much is getting measured here.

How do they get away without any objective measures of their performance is a mystery.

Performance measurement parameters can and will always be contested. But it does not mean we should not be measuring.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

#31
Sorry I have trouble parsing much of what you have written. Are you saying Harvard is a bad school because of Benazir?
It`s not a question what some individuals do. Dialogue brought up MIT as an example of excellence in technical education. MIT alumni are professors at engineering departments all over the US. Similarly, Stanford engineering graduates go on to become great enterpreneurs and professors and what not. Were it not for this fact, Stanford would be another runofthemill university.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Dialogue,
You could say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and measure the quality of higher education by what the graduates of an institution end up doing. This too is somewhat misleading because once an institution achieves a certain level of ``quality`` it will attract better students who are more likely to succeed even if the quality of education is not up to par. The process becomes autocatalytic with more students succeeding which in turns leads to better funding, etc. Perhaps the goal should be to get the standard up to that level where things could run automatically. A world class university attracts the brightest students and faculty and lots & lots of money. But there also are many very fine liberal arts colleges in the US which are expensive, have rich alumni and huge endowments and impart excellent education. But without large amounts money they also would starve to death. I am not sure these are good examples for poor countries.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

How would you define quality education because unless you do that, all efforts to do improve will remain misguided like a jounrney without well defined destination.

Eduational quality is a difficult concept. The goal is to produce world class graduates. Universities have to be geared up to do that. It takes a wrld class university to produce a world class graduate. Creation is a reflection of the creator - graduates are created by universities.

What makes MIT better at technical education? To my mind, education is the core business business of a university. Universities and their quality is based on the quality f teachers and students they can attract and retain. All else is just frivolous detail. MIT is better because it can attract, retain and develop the best brains for teaching and learning.

A university would do well to gear its processes to this end then - all support processes. Teaching and learning are highly creative processes and cannot be standardised beyond a certain limit.

Delima that our universities face today is that they are not ddesigned to handle world class brains. These people, although belonging to one class, are highly individualised. No institution which cannt handle diversity of an intense kind and which does nt allw freedoms will be able to have these people.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

#24 by M.B.Z.Isphahani and #23 by mumbaikar : I appreciate your taking the time. At the same time, i am sorry that I totally failed to comprehend what you were trying to get across.

How would you define quality education because unless you do that, all efforts to do improve will remain misguided like a jounrney without well defined destination.

Eduational quality is a difficult concept. The goal is to produce world class graduates. Universities have to be geared up to do that. It takes a wrld class university to produce a world class graduate. Creation is a reflection of the creator - graduates are created by universities.

What makes MIT better at technical education? To my mind, education is the core business business of a university. Universities and their quality is based on the quality f teachers and students they can attract and retain. All else is just frivolous detail. MIT is better because it can attract, retain and develop the best brains for teaching and learning.

A university would do well to gear its processes to this end then - all support processes. Teaching and learning are highly creative processes and cannot be standardised beyond a certain limit.

Delima that our universities face today is that they are not ddesigned to handle world class brains. These people, although belonging to one class, are highly individualised. No institution which cannt handle diversity of an intense kind and which does nt allw freedoms will be able to have these people.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

FerozK, putting more money into education is something we need to do on priority. However, my feeling is that Pakistani university management systems and culture are not in a position to absorb investments - it takes capacity. The inefficient systems will be rewarded if money is pumped in without quality system reforms at these places.

On the same note, the ther measures you have recomended is a useful list. However, universities and institutions do not have the organizational framework which can deliver on the objectives/directions you have outlined for education in pakistan.

The measures aare also deficient because they are detached from and do not flow from a widely accepted definition of academic quality. When the purpose is not defined, what you have suggested ends up in a file as a wish list although a noble one.

What you have suggested is nice. Why do you think universities have failed to undertake these? They fail to attract, retain and develop world class faculty. The reasons are many including totally unhygenic washrooms. No matter how much money you can pay to your professors, and this is something you cannt win at....so people can make good money and pee in clean washrooms ...so why g to pakistan...

have you been to a paki university lately...?

tayyab rashid

Dear Dialogue, IMHO education (by which I mean knowledge) has no geo political or religious boundraies. One can begin that process -almost any where. Teaching dogma, applying religious labels, and painting the curricula with self serving propaganda will be unable to bring peace and prosperity. At thge same time -taking short cuts, may bring you to your deatination, at the cost of ``achieving the goal``. It is the ``journey`` -STUPID and the destination. Maybe u can guess why I call myself ``Xerox Khan``. I sympathize with his efforts, at the same time I doubt whether - force feeding grass to the Pakistani awam, was really worth it, especially today when the Jewels are out in the open, ready to be castrated.
AS long as Pakistan promotes an ideology based on religion (blind faith and beliefs), I see very little hope for educational institutions to thrive. Pakistan has already wasted 3 generations (post independence) to promote hatred and bigotry, I think this could be the begining of a long and lonely period of Darkness.

re: Tayyab Rashid

First of all, it would help if Pakistan starts investing in its human resources; teachers are paid more money and teachers are hired based on their qualifications and the research conducted by them in their fields of speciality.

Secondly; the profession of teaching is held to a code of conduct, both as far as the performance of the teacher is concerned and teacher has to perform according to a certain expectation.

Third; the course material being taught needs to be vetted and made coherent; free from political, religious or ideological or other issues and teachers instructed to teach the said material and not vent their personal believes as a subsitute for imparting instructions.

Fourth; Students need to be taught the value of understanding the course and engaging in critical thinking, which lessens the role of rote learning. The emphasis on examination as the sole criteria for measuring student performance needs to be replaced by series of subjective and objective standarized tests, phased over a proportional time of student`s progression from primary to secondary grades, which tests the overall comprehension of the student`s ability to think logically and critically.

Fifth; Instructions in post-secondary institutions need to encourage academic skeptism in students, which probes the outer limits of accepted wisdom and challenges the teacher`s perception and interpretation of a topic.

Sixth; freedom of speech should be made the sine qua non of academic discussions and the Socratic Method adopted instead of the traditional lecture methodology of instruction in post-secondary institutes.

Seven; education should be made free and public education should be made the norm in Pakistan made available nationally, but the management of such an education should be removed from the affairs of the government and handed to professional educationists.

Eight; There should be an independent verfication and accountibility conducted of the teachers by a third party organization, not affliated with the government.

Nine; The government should frame the education policy in a coherent manner; give the said education policy to the provinces for implementation and base the education budget on the projected future costs and not based on past financial cost estimates.

Ten; The education budget, nationally, should be constitutionally given a budget increase of 30 percent (not amendable) for the next 30 years and private educational institutions should be officially certified and should not be taxed but should reinvest 25 percent of their total annual revenues, as an incentive not to be taxed, in their teachers pay scales and to improve their overal educational methodologies and to provide better learning aids/facilities. This policy should apply nationally without any exceptions.

Eleven; Education should be privatized.

Twelve; Parents who send their children to schools, specially primary and secondary schools, should be given tax break of upto 40 percent of their annual taxes.

Thirteen; Students, who attend higher education/post-secondary institutions and are not able to pay for their tution, should be provided with work scholarships on the conditionality that after graduation, they would work as teachers in the rural districts of Pakistan for a period of 5 years.

Fourteen; Employment opportunities have to be created to ensure that graduating students have a job.

Fifteen; A certain percentage of the sales tax collected should be annually allocated towards funding education and paying for teachers` salaries in additional to annual federal bugdetary allocations.

Sixteen; Teachers should be made to take ``refresher`` courses periodically as a requirement for maintaing their tenured status.

Ciao

JANG#13: Thanks for posting the link to http://www.neu.edu/aap.doc . knowledge of similiar initiatives being undertaken elsewhere provides the much needed motivation to go ahead with the effort on hand.

Pakistani university however is at a very different stage of evolution from its counterparts in developed world. I do not know if you have visited one in Pakistan lately. while the problems we face are very basic in nature, they can be improved pretty quickly with little effort and the opporunity is huge. This is a classic case of plenty of low hanging fruit all over the place. If you visit a pak uni these days, you will bump into problem/opportunity after opportunity wondering why no one is paying attention. People have become complacent and they include people with PHDs as well.

One of the important purposes that benchmarking data (as suggested in the proposal above) can serve is to provide a solid credible foundation of rating universities. Once we have credible ratings in place, their is no way that university managers can continue to hide behind ambiguous loud claims since their will be comparative data ot defy their claims and counter claims. That is a basic requirement to create the environment where quality inititives will find buy in. Best practices research can help demonstrate how the better universities organize their work to achieve the levels of excellence they have achieved.

There is a severe possibility that such efforts will fall in wrond hands. last night, somebody showed me a draft proposal for setting up a body to undertake quality in Pakistan endoresed by minister of S&T research and others - costing 10.7 billion rupees. Somethign which if approved will be very harmful for the quality movement and its credibility in pakistan.

The proposal above provides a framework within which, quality can be done in higher educaiotn using the currently exisiting mechanism. Pakistan is a grave yard of buildings, ministries and departments and committess and last thing we need is more of one of these.

We know what is wrong with pakistan and pakistani universities and there is plenty. What we are asking here is not ``WHAT IS WORNG? or ``WHY DOES IT ALWAYS HAPPEN TO US?`` BUT ``HOW CAN WE IMPROVE?``. This is the a more useful question to ask.

Some of the interacts, like Jay etc have been pointing out what is wrong which has value but I guess we have had enough of that. Jay, can you read the above item and provide feedbacks. may be you can share lessons from India in this regards!! that . Let me remind you that this proposal does not aim to compare pakistani vs indian higher education but seeks to develop a mechanism within which academic quality can be achieved.
tHIS GOES FOR PARDAISI AS WELL.

tayyab rashid

What gets measured gets improved. We have to be very careful about what we measure. Leaving measures exclusively to policy makers might not be a good suggeetion as recomended by free thinker #14. It should be withinpots form educational community.

``I hope the situation has changed now. freethinker#14`` - let me say that unless we create a widely accepted structured framework within which credible calls can be made about improvements, all we will have is claims and counterclaims. Measuring university performance against carefully chosen parameters and collecting such data across a broad cross section of universities (also known as benchmarking) will give us useful comparative insights into university performance or lack of it. Unless that happens, we will continue ot have opinions and claims and counterclaims.

Dr. Atts Ur Rehman (Chairman Higher Education Commission) was quoted in ``The News`` saying there is not a single world class university in Pakistan. This is an opinion one feels like beliveing but then again, this is just an opinion and opnions have very little weight.

It is absence of benchmarking data which is hindering meaningful dialogue on improving quality of our universities. University leaders are least pushed and facts and figures used in comparative context is what is needed to provide this push. Policy makers are also not prepared to handle this task alone. Hence the above framework is recomended which can deliver wihtout creating new departments/divisions and if you read throught he above article, the proposal builds on the structures available.

#7 Jay,

It must hurt that no one wants to interact with you, fianlly frequent chowkies have learned not to listen to your barking.

Good Job Chowkies!

The subject of educational reform is very important particularly for the Muslim society because our initiation begins on the wrong foot. Our education begins at home by ``rote``. The elements of religion are bequeathed to us for believing without question. It`s also inculcated at early age that whatever your elders tell you, believe it without questioning because questioning your elders is disrespectful. ``Do you know more than they do?`` This tradition is extended into schools. Whatever the teacher says is good; accept it without question. Whatever you do not understand, cram it. The spirit of inquisitiveness is thus dulled. It should be one of the objectives of good education to spark the spirit of inquisitiveness, not to kill it.

During my tenure of education upto B.Sc., Civil Engineering, nobody taught us any elementary course on logic with the result that I with other classmates didn`t learn to think analytically. Whatever logical thinking we developed was from learning mathematics in which one is to deduce results from the given premises. Some self-motivated students learned how to evaluate if a given method of solution was fruitful; the majority however took the `sheepish` route. I remember a friend of mine at Engineering College (1953-56) who used to cram even the mathematics course work. He was not an ordinary student, he was above average. The normal method of instruction used by majority of the professors was to copy their notes on the blackboard which the students would faithfully transfer to their notebooks. The examination papers used to be set from the teachers` notes. So, the key to score high in the examination was to be able to reproduce the solutions of the examination questions. The course work, in mathematics, for example, consisted of not more than a hundred questions. So if you did not understand all of them, the temptation for cramming was always there.

The purpose of schooling in my days was to get a degree for lucrative employment; the acquisition of knowledge was only secondary. There were no seminars, period. Critical thinking which is so important for research was not part of our curriculum. There was a total disconnect between the students and the teachers.

I hope the situation has changed now. Most of the teachers have Ph.D`s these days so they must be doing a much better job of teaching. There ought to be some checks on the quality of teaching. What these checks should be, need to be determined and developed by the policy makers.

Private and public universities in the US are constantly competing and reinventing themselves. It may be instructive to see the following link to see a set of quality improvment objectives etc of one such univ .. it is very candid and focused (i.e. to be in top 100 of US Univs as ranked by a news magazine)

http://www.neu.edu/aap.doc

XeroxKhan (nice nic btw) #2 & 11 : you have painted a pretty gloomy picture of Pakistan. However, let me also say that seeds of our nations fate were sown in our classrooms. Things can change and they always do if oyu look at the bigger picture. There is plenty of hope. The problems inPakistan are so evident. What we sometimes fail to see is that BEHIND EVERY PROBLEM IS AN OPPORTUNITY.

Pakistan has a rapidly growing higher educaitonal sector. And there is a great opportunity in ensuring it grows to deliver world class quality and positive forward looking individuals who can create hope. This is what the above articel seeks to do.

Quality and excellence is no secret. University leaders in Pakistan (like everybody else here) need to be provided a solid reason to perk things up, and resources and recognitoin for performance.

one of the things is to fix these places so they can attract back educated pakistanis who left for greener pastures for teaching and research in Pakistani universities. Wouldnt that be lovely.


tayyab rashid

Educated Pakistani is EXTINCT in Pakistan (should I say -PALIDISTAN).
S/He has moved away to greener pastures of Europe and America.
At last Pakistan has become a failed state. A haven for the Khakis, Mullahs and other sundry criminals to practice their brand of relegion (which is NOT Islam). Palidistan is the only place in the world where retired proffessors commit suicide due to `hunger`. The ghost schools, madrassahs, and government sponsored schools (dispensing lies and rhetoric in the name of education) has killed the spirit of institutional learning.
In Palidistan ......
If you are a woman : You have no chance.
If you are a minority: You have no chance
If you are a law abiding citizen: You have no chance
If you are a reformer: You have no chance
If you have a bright idea : You have no chance
If you are not Parvez Musharraf : You have no chance!

#5 by soysauce on February 17, 2004 7:52pm PT
I`m afraid your answer - that quality is results, visible & measurable, also does not mean much. How do you measure, what do you measure?

I appreciate your inputs. yes, I would agree there is a need to describe some of the ``jargon`` used here which I will do. Here, i will try to respond to your above concern.

University managers in Pakistan have used this argument to not measure - thus there is no accountability. While the entire nation feels higher education sector is not delivering, it is not possible to make verifiable calls about what is wrong. Dr. Atta Ur Rehman was quoted in ``The News`` as saying Pakistan does not have a single world class university - an opinion one feels like believing. But it is just an opinion and hence fails to provide university leadership in Pakistan with reason to improve. It is a scene full of unsubstantiated claims and counter claims about absence or presence of quality of educaiton while the nation suffers.

While measurement parameters (i.e., what is measured) can and should be improved, it has to be recognized that measurement of performance by an educational institution is, and will always be, contested and contestable. there are no simple, or uncontroversial answers or someone would have thought of them by now. The real power of quality measurements comes not from providing the right answers but by helping to frame a set of questions and a structured dialogue abut how we can improve.

tayyab rashid

Seminars on education and more plans created by high powered committees is not the solution.

Education in Pakistan needs a ``change of mind`` and that is only possible if the people of Pakistan change their mindsets and move away from the orthrodoxies of intolerance, only then will educational reform work in this nation. Pakistani educational system is geared towards performance on examinations and is not tuned towards producing thinking students. The entire educational system creates a nation that exists within a coma and is incapable of ``thinking outside the box``

Ciao

Quality of anything is a social construct, what people are willing to accept. In the case of education, there has to be a social value in the sense that people value education, especially of the modern variety. No one dares to say what islam talks about the kafir education. Many rich ones like saudi and kuwait do not value education.
A country that bans kflying as kafirian will not and cannot support education which is the central theme of brahmin hindu system

Have more madrassas and the jihadis can be gainfully employed as crash dummies for cars as long as the concrete blockja are in the shape of somnath tem[ple and allahu akbar is blared tokthe ears of the human dummies. Appropriate jibs for paki educated is the need. There are so many educated in pakistan.

first thing first...I will read the subject later but I got you MAN!
Food Park!!!:P
Hows your GRE efforts going?
oh me? thats very simple, Kami`s friend!
Hope to see you soon in Islamabad with a purpose.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

I`m afraid your answer - that quality is results, visible & measurable, also does not mean much. How do you measure, what do you measure? There`s a great debate going on at the elementary, secondary & high school levels in the US as to how to measure quality. Bush has decreed that quality means good performance in tests. But then education becomes geared towards doing well in tests. Most people will agree that doing well is a necessary but not sufficient condition for measuring educational quality.
I found it difficult to plod through your essay because it is so jargon-laden. Hopefully you`re a better teacher than you`re a writer.

MNIphirasay:
Thine wish will be granted. I am watching the tide and the weather. I have not read this article as yet . I intend to read it when I am in the `mode`.

The honours you have bestowed upon me seem a tad undeserved , seems like overkill, but then from Your Eminence , a leftie in stupor , this is merely a left-hands play for you.[;>)

I am waiting for Hazrat Allama Maulana Mufti Echoboom sahib Torontvi to weigh in on this. :))

Let us teach our children (boys only!):
1) To HATE thy naighbour.
2) Hog-Wash in the name of History.
3) Mechanisms of Jihad (straping and arming of explosives, detonation devices)
4) Different ways to rape (and gang rape) women.
5) Perpetuate the culture of ignorance through intimidation and violance.
6) Ban Books, Ban Knowledge, Ban Individuality.
7) Ban Free Press, Ban Internet, Ban contact with outside world (except when destroying it).
Finally, 8) They should be able to recite the holy book, and be able to quote from it -in defence of their curriculum (from the above 1 through 7).

Palidistan Paindabad

In the name of education Zia and his cronies had been chanelling millions of dollars into the madrassah system.

``Pakistani Bhayon, Behnon! give your hard earned money so we can make another Mujahid! which we intend to grab by kidnapping children or by telling their parents how the west is going to corrupt your babies ... no girls allowed but when we go to the suicide bomber phase and are running out of money from Saddam we will talk to your girls, in the meanwhile make sure your girls don`t wear jeans or we will shoot them in the legs! Long live Kashmir! Long live Chechnya! Long live Palestine! Long live everyplace but Pakistan which will soon become a province of Saudi Arabia! Where is your patriotism brothers and sisters? We are sending around this Maulvi who will open up his Paggar so you may deposit money into it for the next mosque! and madrassah! ``