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| October 27, 2008 | Monday | Shawwal 27, 1429 |
Opec’s move to cut output
No wall, thankfully
Education in futility
Home is not a commodity
OTHER VOICES - North American Press
THERE has been a sizeable quantitative expansion in higher education institutions in Pakistan. According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan (2006-07) we now have 49 universities. Besides universities, there are a number of colleges that offer postgraduate programmes in different disciplines.
INCREASED reliance on private banks to provide housing will cause more homelessness in cities across the world, according to a UN expert.
ASMA Jahangir, special UN rapporteur on freedom of religion and belief, paints a grim picture of minorities all over the world. In an interview with the UN News Centre, she said some minorities were living in perpetual threat and they continued to be discriminated against in the most advanced and secular of countries. She linked persecution on the basis of belief to despots, she talked of states’ contribution to making life difficult for minorities and lamented that visible diversity in itself was not a panacea for a majority obsessed with oppressing the smaller groups. Running through the content of her interview, it unfortunately becomes clear that the land Ms Jahangir belongs to happens to combine all that is bad in this world with relation to minorities in one state. She was talking about the globe as if she was talking about Pakistan.
Pakistan’s religious minorities are so tiny that they hardly pose a social, economic, political or cultural threat to the overwhelming Muslim population. One consequence of the Pakistani belief equation is sectarianism that has been eating away at our foundations. This is diversity that divides, just as pluralism is sacrificed at the altar of religious biases in places like India. Along with other factors, this division has weakened the Pakistani state to a stage where it can do little more than pander to the larger groups. The media and political parties, driven by a system that is based in notching up as high a number of adherents as possible, are often guilty of playing the role of facilitator in this degeneration of society. Our history is full of instances where the two have joined hands to the disadvantage of a section greatly outnumbered.
The latest example is that of a television anchor who some weeks ago issued a death edict in his talk show and of politicians who, bar a few exceptions such as MQM chief Altaf Hussain, chose to remain silent on the issue. Even the leadership of the lawyers, very much a political entity fighting for judicial supremacy, did not for once tell us that no one could have dared express such grisly wishes in public if the courts were being run by independent judges. This is not to say that what Justice Rana Bhagwandas chose to highlight in his address at a seminar in Lahore last week — shortage of gas, electricity and wheat flour, rising fuel prices, etc — are non-issues. The point is about our total submission to populism, about how some basic issues and fears occupy us and prevent us from putting pressure on the state to attend to other pressing matters.
THE Opec decision to cut oil output by 1.5 million barrels a day to support “fast collapsing” global oil prices has come at a time when fears of a comprehensive world economic slowdown are mounting, and developing economies like Pakistan are facing serious balance of payment crises. The cartel of the world’s 11 large oil-producing countries controlling 40 per cent of the global oil trade said it was slashing output to avert a glut in the market and stop a dramatic — “unprecedented in speed and magnitude” — fall in oil prices. Global oil prices have slumped 56 per cent to just under $65 per barrel in New York from an all-time high of $147 on July 3, triggering fears in many oil-revenue dependent countries that the receding markets could threaten their budgets and public development programmes as well as hamper existing and future oil projects that could result in supply shortages in the medium term. These countries cannot be faulted for the decision made to protect their economic interests.
The oil markets didn’t rebound on the Opec announcement immediately, and prices slid by another five per cent shortly after the decision was made. But the question remains: how are the oil-importing countries going to cope with yet another possible spurt in prices? Different economies have different thresholds of pain. While the developed but recession-threatened economies like the United States and the United Kingdom have unleashed a verbal criticism of what they call the cartel’s anti-market decision, they are more likely to absorb the impact of the increased prices in spite of the financial crisis facing them. But poorer nations like Pakistan, whose present economic woes stem as much from high oil prices as from defective policies and which are now finding it extremely hard to avert a possible default on their foreign debt obligations, are left wondering how they will raise enough foreign exchange to buy oil if global prices actually start rising again and protect consumers already reeling under high food and energy prices. The government has already hinted at not restricting its foreign exchange borrowing to the country’s immediate needs. Even if it succeeds in raking up the funds required to avert a default and fend off the impact of the new oil price hike, the escalation in global oil markets could scotch Pakistans hopes of an early economic recovery.
MANY citizens of Islamabad are relieved that the city’s police chief has reportedly denied that there was ever a proposal to build a wall to cordon off major government offices and the adjacent diplomatic enclave as a protection measure to fend off suicide bombers. Reports about the wall proposal had surfaced after the recent bombings at Police Lines and the Marriott hotel. Those who had conceived, planned and built Islamabad as the new seat of government at the turn of the 1960s could never have imagined such a dissection of the capital city with a structure a la the Berlin Wall. The city of peace, as Islamabad came to be known, has already undergone much defacement lately in the name of security measures. The diplomatic enclave was the first to be made a no-go area for the general public after the 2002 bombing of a church located within it. More recently, Islamabad turned into a city of barricades. Political agitation relating to the lawyers’ movement and the Lal Masjid affair, and increased insecurity after the bomb attacks on the Luna Caprese restaurant and the Danish embassy, resulted in a gradual expansion of the no-go areas. A wall straddling several kilometres in the heart of Islamabad, however, would have irreparably defaced the look and image of the city.
Despite being a common protection measure in historical cities like Lahore, Multan and Peshawar, the security effectiveness of building a walled city within modern-day Islamabad to fend off suicide bombers is questionable. Short of building a wall round the whole of Islamabad, which is impractical, a wall that cordons off only a limited section of the city will not solve the security problems of a host of other government and private offices and schools across the capital that have received bomb threats recently. Besides, such a wall would represent a distinct separation of the government and the people, a separation that is not in tune with democracy. The solution lies not in raising walls but in beefing up our security system and urban counter-terrorism ability in terms of manpower, training, equipment and professionalism. In this respect, apart from the installation of CCTV surveillance cameras at vulnerable locations and explosives detectors and scanners at all approaches to Islamabad, a new department devoted to domestic security might be necessary.
In the wake of the commercialisation of education, a number of educational institutions engaged themselves in offering postgraduate programmes. With generous funding from the Higher Education Commission for PhD programmes, certain educational institutions found it an opportune time to enrol a large number of students in their ill-prepared and hastily offered programmes. Missing were sufficient resources in terms of qualified regular faculty, a good contemporary library and facilities for scholars like space and Internet connectivity.
The result is that a large number of PhD scholars are not given proper research guidance and are left in the wilderness after finishing their course work. It is understandable to desire the production of hundreds of PhDs but the realities on the ground are just the opposite. There are two obvious outcomes: first, a large number of scholars are stuck in the research phase because of the lack of guidance; and, second, in some cases, substandard PhDs are granted without any rigorous process. These PhD holders are unable to justify their degrees.
Besides PhDs, a similar casual process is being adopted for master’s programmes. In the arts, an MA in English has relatively better job prospects. This has prompted a number of educational institutions to offer an MA in English Literature and/or an MA in English Language Teaching (ELT). With the exception of some established institutions, the rest have opened the floodgates and enrolled substandard graduates. Again this is done without qualified faculty and in the absence of a rigorous entrance test and challenging academic process.
As a result of this ‘free for all’ policy a large number of students are thrown in the market with an MA in English Literature or an MA in ELT. Majority of them get their degrees in the absence of a rigorous academic system, and are generally not familiar with the basics of the subject.
Recently I was asked to be a part of a panel of experts to interview some potential lecturers with MA English and MA ELT degrees. Trained as a teacher educator I was particularly interested in assessing the content knowledge of the candidates in the relevant disciplines. I have a firm belief that a teacher occupies a central position in the dynamics of a curriculum as it is the teacher who interacts with the students and constructs the curriculum with his actions.
For a successful teacher it is important to be well versed with the three layers of professional development, i.e. content, skills and attitude. Some of the recent research studies on teacher education have suggested that subject-content knowledge plays a crucial part in the success of a teacher. These findings are significant in the context that most of our teacher education programmes are laying extra emphasis on methods, techniques and strategies, assuming that candidates posses the subject knowledge.
My experience of interviewing the potential English language/literature lecturers confirmed the findings of these research studies and shocked me as an educationist about the existing quality of education at the master’s level and the kind of graduates certain educational institutions are sending to the market. Let me share with you some of the answers of the candidates that would reveal the gravity of the problem. Almost all the candidates very frankly admitted that they didn’t read books. This was also evident from their answers.
Most of the candidates couldn’t name five novels they had read in their lives and didn’t know the title of any novel other than those prescribed in their syllabus. Most of the candidates seemed to have passed the examination by just memorising the notes from the help books, without even reading the actual novels. According to one candidate the heroine of Pride and Prejudice was Charlotte Bronte. When asked, “Who was ‘Darcy’ in Pride and Prejudice?” the candidate replied, “Darcy was the heroine of the novel”. A candidate with an MA in ELT, including the sociolinguistics course, had no idea about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
A candidate whose thesis was in the area of assessment had no clue about ‘higher-order thinking skills’. Another candidate who evaluated a textbook with reference to the Bloom’s taxonomy could not tell the difference between the terms ‘syllabus’ and ‘curriculum’. Another candidate, with an MA ELT degree had never heard the name of Hymes, a sociolinguist who is known for his work on communicative competence.
A couple of candidates came with theses that had similar titles. They told the interview panel that their group worked on the same topic and the only difference was the evaluation of books from different grades. This meant that each member of the group had the same literature review, research methodology, references, and, to some extent, discussion.
The experience of interviewing candidates for lectureships gave me some useful insights into the prevailing academic practices in some educational institutions and their product, i.e. graduates: (i) I could imagine that there are no stringent entry tests organised to grant admission to these programmes; (ii) there are insufficient teaching and library resources; (iii) there is a lack of rigorous academic systems and it is relatively easy to get degrees; and (iv) there is insufficient research exposure and thesis writing is just a formality.
Who is responsible for this substandard education? Some may consider the HEC responsible for not monitoring the quality. I, however, believe that lack of a quality assurance mechanism in the concerned educational institution is to be blamed. Why should educational institutions with insufficient resources admit students and then throw them into the market with half-baked degrees? Churning out ill-prepared graduates is not a service to this nation.
The writer is director, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences at Lahore School of Economics, and author of Rethinking Education in Pakistan.
shahidksiddiqui@yahoo.com
“The belief that markets will provide adequate housing for all has failed,” said Raquel Rolnik, the U.N. special rapporteur on adequate housing. “A home is not a commodity. It is a place to live in security, peace and dignity.”
Rolnik, an architect and expert on urban planning, wants policymakers to create a better system that provides more housing options and avoids relying on a single solution. “Excessive focus on homeownership as the one and single solution is part of the problem,” she added. “Homelessness does not affect only the poor. It also threatens those who work but cannot afford market prices.”
While most analysts see home foreclosures in the United States as the result of liquidity or lack of regulation or a combination of both, Polnik offers a completely different viewpoint. “The sub-prime mortgage crisis reflects fundamental flaws in our approach to housing and the inability of market mechanisms to provide adequate and affordable housing for all,” she said.
Rolnik predicts that there is likely to be sharp increase in the number of homeless people in the United States as homeowners and renters are being increasing affected by foreclosures. “With the continuing “housing and financial crisis spreading to many countries,” she said, “things are only going to get worse. Millions more may face eviction because they cannot pay their mortgages.”
Rolnik’s mandate involves reporting annually to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council on the right to adequate housing throughout the world, and identifying practical solutions towards this end. Her criticism of pro-market housing policies came the same day Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of UN-Habitat, released a new comprehensive report, entitled “On the State of the World’s Cities.”
The 264-page report points out that about 33 per cent people in the cities of the developing world live in slums, many of them without adequate access to sanitation facilities and clean water.
The report shows that inequality in housing is also on the rise in many countries in the developed world. According to the report, US cities are “as unequal” as cities in Africa and Latin America. Major cities, such as Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and New York, have the highest level of inequality in the country, similar to those of Abidjan, Nairobi, Buenos Aires, and Santiago, the report’s authors said. n — IPS News
Porous defences
The New York Times
CONGRESSIONAL investigators have found alarming weaknesses in security procedures at two top laboratories that work with the world’s most dangerous biological agents and diseases. As the country races to open more labs to develop vaccines and treatments for exotic diseases and potential biological weapons, the government clearly has a lot more work to do to ensure that dangerous materials cannot fall into terrorists’ hands.
The Government Accountability Office evaluated perimeter security at all five of the country’s so-called Biosafety Level 4 facilities. These are the only labs allowed to work with pathogens for which there is no cure or treatment, such as the Ebola virus and smallpox.
Neither lab had a command and control centre to monitor alarms and cameras and coordinate a response if security is breached. Also missing were barriers to keep vehicles from approaching, buffer zones, camera coverage of exterior entrances, intrusion detectors, closed-circuit television monitors and magnetometers and X-ray machines to screen visitors and packages.
This also makes us wonder how well the laboratories are carrying out internal security measures.
Leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce are pressing the CDC to identify all security shortcomings at the Level 4 laboratories.
There is certainly no time to waste. Seven years after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, we find such lax security impossible to justify and deeply disturbing. — (Oct 23)
