Problems with Universities in Pakistan

This was an excellent article and the writer`s views are quite realistic. I would want to read more from the author on this topic, something more constructive as to what a modern, liberal, responsible university in Pakistan should be like.
Both my parents are educationists and we will be greatly helped by reading more about this.

The public sector universities still reign supreme over the private sector ones. Regardless of the fact that they are affordable to all, the standard maintained by some of them should make the private sector jealous. A multitude of graduates come out of private universities yet they are the ones responsible for the jobless group in our society. Because the employers just refuse to recognise their degrees from those ``universities`` open at every nook & corner. The private sector generally is in such a depleted state that I could open a ``university`` in my own backyard. The thing that worries me is what is to become of all the students if and when the `universities ordinance` comes into effect. It will disable all the talented students with limited finances. That will be a great injustice to say the least.

We need to differentiate between primary education and higher learning.

As far as primary education is concerned, the bulk of it is provided by public schools. Education provided in these schools is nothing but a farce. There is usually no furniture, no books and in many cases no teachers. Who is the culprit here? Nothing other than corruption. If teachers ae hired without any qualificatoins and schools are built in areas with no students, then it cannot be anything else.

As far as the universitites are concerned, there are a number of different issues. The first one is the motivation of the students. Most students are in colleges and universities simply to get a degree that would in turn enable them to get a job. There is no desire to learn. This issue may be solved by increasing the tuition in institutes of higher learning, while at the same time providing scholarships to needy students. Once a student knows that he is paying for a service, he will try and make sure that he gets his money`s worth.

The other issue is that the role of the teacher is more like that of a person giving a lecture rather than a facilitator of learning. Students are not encouraged to ask questions and are ridiculed by many senior teacers for doing so. The methods of teachers` selection need to be modified so that persons with a passion for teaching are recruited and not just left over bullies who aspired to join the police or district management end up becoming teachers.

Another factor which would impact the quality of education is the method of recruitment of civil service officers. The simple requirement of a BA degree coupled with the CSS exam needs to be done away with and greater focus on professional skills is required.

EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN,

Today marks six years since Abdus salam passed away. No university, no government, no pakistani dares to honour this man, highest scientific achievent for any pakistani. Universities are the centers of learning, and no university dares to mention this name. It is the supremacy of religious bigotry that is ruining the pak universities. A place where learing should be supreme, the children of TNT cannot accept the achievemnets of abdus salam because he was a dispised ahmedia.

Education can never prosper in pakistan because the minds are poisoned with hatred, a socity that approves and supports the individuals to kill of the non-innocent kafirs can have only jihadic education at the madirasis.

ANOTHER EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN,

The fundamental education process in pakistan and the value of pak society is symbolised in the hero worship of gaznavi. Emerging from this social value is the notion that the wealth can be obtained only by plundering the kafirs. Pakistan a relatively low tech country has a very sofisticated military infrastructure, the country is ruled my the men in khaki, and the people support it largely because at the back of their mind is the hope that they will be the modern gaznais, to bring back the loot.

Even the jihadic education, and the extremists that flood to india take back the loot. From TOI of today, from the report on attack in kashmir on CRP men.


T``he LeT spokesman claimed that two other attackers returned alongwith two looted weapons from the CRPF camp. ``

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M. Yousaf,

Stay put in Mexico and enjoy the hot jalapenos ;-) We don`t want the standard of education in Pakistan to go down any further if you decide to return, God forbid.

Good article:

http://www.dawn.com/weekly/education/education.htm#1

Debunking the conservative view of education

By Dr Shahid Siddiqui

The government claims that our literacy rate has now reached 49 per cent. This, on the one hand, is an encouraging sign and, on the other, invites us to critically think as to why this growth in literacy is not reflected in our social and economic development. To understand the co-relation between education and social and economic development, one can turn to some concrete examples cited in the report on UN Report on Human Development in South Asia (HDC 1998).

Let me refer here to two examples taken from the subcontinent, one from India and the other from Nepal which demonstrate a strong link between education and socio-economic development. According to the HDC report, in India increasing average primary schooling of the work force by one year ``increased output by 23 per cent``. Similarly in Nepal, increasing the average education of a farmer by one year expanded agricultural output from 5.2 to 5.9 per cent``.

Why then is it that in Pakistan the consequences of this so-called increase in literacy are not reflected in socio-economic development. One way of looking at the issue is to challenge the validity of literacy figures, questioning the official definition of literacy, the questionnaire used in the survey undertaken to determine the literacy level, the qualifications of the people who collected the data, the data collection procedure and the interpretation of data.

There are problems in all these facets of measuring literacy in Pakistan. In this article, however, I will focus on another aspect of the issue which is equally responsible for the gap between literacy and socio-economic development. This aspect is the very orthodox view of education we have.

We have a very conservative view of the nature, purpose, and the dynamics of education. The planning built on and around this conservative view of education is unlikely to bring a meaningful change in and our society, especially in the domain of socio-economic development.

In most of our schools, the function of education is equated with ``knowledge transfer``. So the primary purpose of education, in the Pakistani context, appears to be transmission of knowledge, skills, and values. This view of education is conservative in essence as it highlights the significance of conserving knowledge. Consequently, the whole emphasis in education is laid on the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another.

This perspective of education views knowledge as static and as something that can be learned through a behaviouristic model of learning, i.e. by imitation and repetition. As this view of knowledge acquisition requires a lot of memorization and cramming on the part of students, there is hardly any room left for reflection and critical thinking in our classrooms.

The conservative notion of education promotes a conventional view of learners and the learning process. The general concept of a student, in the mainstream schools of Pakistan, is that he or she is an empty vessel who knows nothing and whose sole responsibility is to absorb the `knowledge` delivered by the teachers. A metaphor that describes this kind of students is that of a sponge.

A good student or learner in this paradigm is the one who sits in the classroom quietly, behaves nicely, never disagrees with the teacher, absorbs the given information, hardly asks any question and has a sharp memory to repeat what the teacher has taught. A ``good student`` would never ask a question, give his own viewpoint, or disagree with what the teacher has said. The ``goodness`` of a student in this paradigm emanates from passive obedience, blindly following instructions and doing the needful. Innovation, creativity, or personal opinion is not encouraged and never pays off in most classrooms.

Having seen a glimpse of an ideal student in most of the Pakistani mainstream schools let us now look at the notion of a good teacher in this paradigm. A teacher, in the conservative paradigm of education, can be viewed as a transmitter of knowledge, skills, and values.

The primary aim of the teacher in this paradigm is to prepare the students for examination and present himself to the students as a perfect model who knows the answer to any question under the sun.

To build and maintain this image a teacher may use any measure from persuasion to restraint to coercion and physical punishment. A `good teacher`, in this paradigm, tries to fill the empty vessels (the students) and expects from them to conserve this knowledge and reproduce it when required. There is hardly any room for disagreement on the part of the students. The whole emphasis is laid on the product (getting good grades) and the process is totally neglected. The outcome of this approach is that teachers and head teachers use every possible means to show ``good results``.

This view of students and teachers leads us to our current system of assessment which in turn is a very important influence on the various components of education. Our prevailing assessment system is geared towards testing the ability of students to conserve and store ``knowledge``. If we look at the examination papers of different education boards of Pakistan we realize that there has been little attempt to tap the higher order thinking skills of students. Most of the questions are of the `what is/are....` variety and require students to reproduce information. As a result, the student who is good at memorizing and who has effective recall skills is bound to get better grades. Ironically, in most cases, the students who get good grades have a very shallow understanding of the material for which they got these grades. A simple analysis of the examination papers would show us that questions which ask students to say `how` or `why` something happens are very rare.

So far, I have tried to unpack some aspects of conservative concepts of education such as conservation and transmission of knowledge. The conservative notion of knowledge - i.e. it is a fixed set of information - relates to the role of teachers (as transmitters of knowledge) and which in turn views students as passive recipients (empty vessels). And this all creates a system of assessment and examination that tests the ability of students to conserve and reproduce information. This vicious circle goes on and on. In this paradigm, where education is transmission of a set of information, no matter how high the literacy rate is, there won`t be any significant impact on socio-economic development.

What is required then is a rethinking of some basic educational notions. Teacher education programmes in Pakistan can play a vital part in helping teachers to re-conceptulaize these notions. Ironically, a large number of teacher education programmes focus only on pedagogical skills, with little attention and effort put on the changes at the conceptual and attitudinal levels. My experience as a teacher educator tells me that no matter how many new techniques and methods are given to the teachers, if their fixed educational beliefs are not `unfrozen` and if they are not facilitated to re-coceptualize the fundamental educational notions change at the classroom, school, and societal level is very difficult.

Let us now try to rethink the nature, purpose and dynamics of education. For that we need to go beyond the narrow and conservative and misleading view of education that is concerned with conservation and transmission of knowledge, skills, and values. We need to look at education as a more dynamic tool that helps learners to acquire, interpret, construct and create knowledge and develop appropriate skills and attitudes. For that education should not hinge too much on the aspect of its transmission but should rather be used for the transformation of recipients` lives and of the society in which they live. The purpose of education, thus, should not be a social contract but intellectual emancipation.

This vibrant notion of education does not view students as a clean slate or empty vessels. It rather looks at them from a humanistic angle which believes that learners have their own unique and peculiar experiences and ideas. According to this perspective, each learner has tremendous ability for self-actualization. So in this paradigm there is a respect for students` views and opinions and they are welcome to present their own perspective on certain issues.

They are encouraged to think critically and benefit from creative controversies. The students are not led to passive obedience but are encouraged to reflect and to come up with creative alternatives to resolve conflict.

In the transformation paradigm of education, knowledge is not considered as something fixed and static which is transmitted from one generation to another. Rather it is something fluid which can be discovered, interpreted, constructed and created in the classroom. Reality in this paradigm has multiple versions and diversity is encouraged to have a more comprehensive view.

This view of knowledge legitimizes the role of learners or students as constructors of knowledge. In fact, even teachers are seen as potential learners because they could learn from their students. The teacher in this paradigm is not just transmitter of knowledge, but he/she acts a facilitator who focuses on the transformation of students` lives.

The system of assessment plays a very important role in determining the style of teaching and determining the real function of education. There needs to be a balanced emphasis on the `what`, `how` and `why` type of questions. An effective assessment system should encourage critical thinking skills among students by requiring less memory driven answers and more thinking and use of analytical skills.

In this article I tried to unpack the conservative notion of education which is prevalent in Pakistan. This paradigm of education cannot ensure any correlation with economic and social development. To make our education an effective tool for social and economic development we need to re-conceptualize the notion of education by moving from the transmission to the transformation paradigm. This can be done through teacher education programmes that can bring a change for them at the conceptual level.

Mohammed,

This article and you summarise the problems, not only of the universities, but the pak society. You consider yourself pretty smart, you were an educator, and going by the quality of the article, the very logical structure of it, there is no way that any student could have benefitted from your days at the uni. The most important part is you have no idea what so ever what the world outside of pakistan think your education system. The best resources are with the military, they are employed for fighting india, or surrendering to the indians. The best minds of your country have got themselves into this mess of surrendering the last institution in pakistan to the americans.

Not all is lost in the corridors of education in Pakistan.
The best and the brightest always shine and the
BS artists just have to work very hard later in life.

You have not seen some of our American grads.....

Ras

[ ... However, this situation is changing with the out flux of teachers to private sector universities and to the Arab countries where they get a better salary. Thus there also we are having problems of imbalance. ...]

Dear Prof. (at the Institute of Technology, Mexico), your knowledge about the culprits of education in Pakistan is amazing. Personal experience, perhaps? ... by the way, how big was your salary raise when you moved to Mexico?

[... It is time that we put our differences apart, since these will always be there. We should start working for the ultimate good that such centers may produce. ...]

I`m assuming that you`re currently in the process of packing your bags and moving back to Pakistan so the country can drink from your fountain of wisdom. Unless, by ``we`` you mean everyone but you.

Adios!

``````I didn’t hire him but hired another applicant who appeared better than the first one. After a few months of work I found him to be unsuitable for sales work and asked him to move to the finance department (remember he was an MBA Finance)???. ``````

zamana baRe ghaur se sunn rahata tha
hameeN so gaye daastaaN kuhte kuhte

more like aungh gaye....

``Who is the real culprit, the educated class or the mullah? ``

after reading this piece, i think some english grammer teachers are the real criminals.

today is one of those days!...the sun is out...don`t feel like working...or exercising the mind...so....will someone please explain this paragaraph?

...hint: i infered after reading this paragraph that the problem was supervisory and management related not the employee`s per se!

This is exactly what has already started happening and will happen with more severity in the coming years. One graduate (an MBA in Finance, to be exact) of such a University came to my office some time back looking for a job. I told him that the only open position is that for a junior clerk with a salary of Pak. Rs. 4,500. To my surprise, he accepted the offer. I didn’t hire him but hired another applicant who appeared better than the first one. After a few months of work I found him to be unsuitable for sales work and asked him to move to the finance department (remember he was an MBA Finance)???. In the coming months my Income tax advisor called me and asked what is happening in my office. He told me that according to the documents prepared by this MBA my company is making millions, its cash reserves are showing a negative amount and the balance sheets are not even balanced! That day everybody in the office was told he will not be reimbursed if he gets a degree or certificate from any such university, though that was the custom in the company before that.

where is pervez hoodbhoy?

...t