Moving Beyond Talk: A Roadmap for Quality Education

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! ``

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

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

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`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.

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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.

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.

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

#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

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!

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

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

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.

#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!

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.