WHAT is common between Daewoo running three types of buses on some routes and Beacon House opening three types of schools? Why do some vendors of lawn sell their product as a package of shirt, shalwar and dupatta? Why do some schools want their children to buy textbooks, notebooks even uniforms from them? Why are drivers paid more than teachers working in low-fee private schools?

The above are examples of common business practices: price discrimination, bundling, tying and fragmented labour markets respectively. These concepts are taught in any first undergraduate course in economics. Yet — and this comes from years of teaching experience — I find that most economics, business and/or social science undergraduates and graduates that I interact with in Pakistan are not able to connect these examples to the concepts in their conceptual toolkit to make sense of these phenomena.

Generally, students are just not able to go beyond the definitions of what they have learnt, usually without much understanding, and are not able to think how what they have learnt can be used to make sense of the world they live in. What is the point of an education if it does not allow you to play with what you have learnt and to apply your conceptual framework to understand new phenomena and to make sense of your world?

Students are just not able to go beyond the definitions of what they have learnt.

This was brought home most forcefully when I was interviewing candidates for a senior research/teaching position. We met about 20-25 candidates, most of them with a Master’s degree or a doctorate in the social sciences, and we could not find a single candidate who was even remotely interesting. This sounds awful, but it is the truth.

I have been giving lectures in a number of institutions of higher learning. The question-answer sessions that follow these lectures have given further evidence of the problem. Students, who have already had years of training in their chosen field, ask questions that should have been addressed long ago, or they give answers that betray the fact that their learning was mostly rote-based and they have understood little or nothing of what their subject is all about.

The problem is not specific to the social sciences. My colleagues who teach mathematics and physics also talk of some of the same problems. At a recent conference on the teaching of physics, the main issues that were discussed were exactly these: people graduate without having understood the basics of their subject, the same graduates then become teachers and as teachers they teach exactly the way they had been taught.

Many researchers/teachers and even scholars feel that despite all the rhetoric about expansion in educational opportunities in the country, the quality of education that is being imparted to most children in Pakistan has fallen over time. Some hold that this is true even for some of the ‘elite’ (high tuition fee) schools of the country.

My teaching experience at a university that gets many of its students from these elite schools does, in general, corroborate the story of declining quality standards: students have become good at getting As, but their understanding of the subject seems to be poorer. Teachers and schools have cracked examination systems like matriculation, FSc, ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels, but they have lost focus on the quality issue.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, in his article titled ‘Enough PhD’s, thank you’, published on these pages on Nov 21, pointed out some of the consequences that recent Higher Education Commission (HEC) policies incentivising the production of PhD’s and research in the higher education sector have had. But he talked more of issues of fake, poor and useless research, plagiarism and problems with publishing in unknown or fake journals. The criticism is clearly valid.

But, here, I am focusing on a different aspect of the same problem. The issue is not just of HEC policies, it is of the quality of people we are producing through the education that we are giving at the school and college level. By the time these students come to graduate programmes or take up teaching/research jobs, their work habits, ways of learning and understanding things, of engaging with learning, and utilising their knowledge are already entrenched. HEC incentives just reinforce the poor pathways that have been created. But, the actual creation of the pathways happens long before.

A younger colleague, whom I had met for the first time, was telling me what her doctoral thesis was all about. I could not understand most of what she said. Admittedly, she was working in a different area of economics than I do, but I could not get even the basics of what her thesis was about. Her heavy use of specialised language from economics was part of the problem. I asked her to explain to me, in simple English, what problem she had investigated, how she had done it and what her results were. She could not do it. I left with the strong feeling that she herself did not understand what she had done.

Physicist Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate, was once asked by a colleague to explain something. Feynman said that he would prepare a lecture for undergraduates on the subject. A few days later, he admitted he could not prepare such a lecture. His conclusion, from his inability, was that clearly he did not understand the phenomenon well himself if he could not explain it to an undergraduate.

Are we producing a lot of learned and literate illiterates? It seems to be the case. Poor quality of teaching and learning seems to be pervasive and, over time, it seems to be getting worse. In our quest for quantity, we have neglected quality issues for too long. But, where diagnosis is easier, it is not clear what remedy can be implemented, especially given the scale of the problem.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

Published in Dawn, December 4th, 2015