If America can speculate on its future job growth, why can’t Pakistan think outside the box and help steer its young towards education and skill enhancement, and not heartaches and suicides?
DO you know owning a parrot in the state of New Jersey requires a license? Never mind if it turns out to be a dumbo; he’s still categorized as an “exotic bird” and should he kick the bucket, the law says you must notify the state once the funeral services are over. No kidding!
This is just a bird’s-eye view of how America regulates the existence of all creatures great and small. Licenses and certifications drive life here. Lay people are extinct species and therefore irrelevant. Should you call a plumber to unclog that nasty toilet or an electrician to fix the wires gone mysteriously haywire, first they have to flash their license, no matter how menial the job. Period.
Technicians cannot willy-nilly be Jack of all trades, but as masters of the mechanics, they vend. There’s a due process to their learning and passing the state exam. A beautician promising you a flawless face through dermabrasion just can’t sandblast your face without having studied the science and received certification in cosmetology; or a nurse’s aid is nobody to give you medical attention if (s)he is unqualified, just as your registered dietitian or a physical therapist (if you are in that annoying age bracket where something or the other keeps breaking down in your physiology).
The landscaper who leads you up the primrose path with promises of transforming your yard into a Garden of Eden must have done a course or a building contractor who you call in to fix the roof that just caved in on you has to showcase his license to practice.
Pray, why must I talk of plumbers, masons, electricians, beauticians, teachers and landscapers when the grand trajectory outlined by Professor Dr Atta-ur-Rahman and his Higher Education Commission (HEC) is what I set out to tread?
There is a link, a method to this madness (dare I say)? It’s called the ‘hierarchy of human talents’, i.e. people skills and emotional intelligence; imagination and creativity; analytic reasoning; formulaic intelligence; manual dexterity and muscle power — these attributes form the smorgasbord of higher education, craftsmanship and employment from garbage collection to brain surgery.
While the HEC, an autonomous body part of the ministry of education, meant to police institutions teaching graduate and post-graduate studies has recently turned into a comet (fired by chairman Rahman) zinging across the arc of academia, expected to sprout geeks and nerds and divine a path to enlightenment, wisdom and knowledge for development to arrive at the speed of light in Pakistan, let’s not leave the techies, however lowly, on the roadside.
We need this army of plumbers, janitors, nurses and hairstylists more than say fancy pants statisticians, environmentalists, economists, philosophers and many more esoteric experts that the HEC wants churned out annually.
Could it be that the talented Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, an alumnus of Kings College, Cambridge and a sound man, is erring on the other side of grandiosity by co-opting foreign faculty to educate Pakistani young, promising robust financial rewards? Will the thousands who get their Masters or PhDs under the tutelage of foreigners fare better in getting employment than their predecessors who never reaped the benefits of qualified foreign teachers?
And the short answer is no. It’s not rocket science to figure out what eventually becomes of these zoologists, futurologists, management experts, plant scientist, microbiologists and agronomists, who once armed with degrees enter the realm of the real world looking for jobs that commensurate with their educational qualifications? Who in the wasteland will absorb them? They will either fly away to foreign destinations willing to become illegal to pump gas or end up serving the tables at Islamabad’s five-star hotels with their MA degrees!
Granted that the 99 universities in Pakistan, according to the HEC, are in “desperate need of foreign faculty” and the “goal” is to hire 300 teachers each year for the next five years “who will bring tremendous wealth of knowledge and research experience ... expected to impart a modern and progressive outlook to research-based academic programmes in Pakistani universities,” to me, it still sounds like an oxymoron.
So before we get giddy with spending millions on teachers from abroad (it’s outsourcing education to foreigners but in the reverse), how about conducting a simple exercise on employment and higher education and whether the twain will ever meet.
In America — currently badgered by unemployment — there’s a shift in jobs already. In the last 10 years, the biggest employment gains came in occupations that relied on people skills and emotional intelligence — like nurses and lawyers, or among jobs that required imagination and creativity like designers, architects and photographers.
But the experts now declare — Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, are you on board? — “not all of the new jobs require advance degree or exceptional artistic talent,” while pointing out to “the rise of employment for hairstylists and cosmetologists!” I say let’s train people in skills and services that are relevant in day-to-day life. Forget the polytechnics of the Ayub Khan era! They are antiquated. Open up new academies all over Pakistan to give hands-on training, converting even the meanest of tasks into a labour of love and not a public stigma.
It would make entrepreneurship come alive. There was a time not long ago when top-tiered schools like Harvard and MIT trained its business graduates with an eye for the Fortune 500 companies. Not anymore.
Today, in America, there are over 1,500 universities and colleges that teach how to start a small business. Students at MIT are taught to handle the problems that entrepreneurs face, like what happens if your product is not doing well or your partner has quit on you? The schools try to imbue in their students entrepreneurial spirit, coupled with good small-business management. They spread out their students from beauty salons to computer high-end businesses where they are meant to help the proprietors with practical know-how.
There is much talent in Pakistan that never gets a chance to ventilate itself, only because the elites with connections in the right places or those born into wealth and privilege get to taste the fruits first; to take a stab at whatever catches their fancy. Then we have the monopolists like the Chinese hairdressers in Islamabad and all over Pakistan (God knows where they descended from) who have ruled supreme in the business of beauty for decades. Not only are these women greedy but very mediocre, and I bet these outlets cheat on taxes, too. Also, we have the well-heeled society dames running boutiques, eateries and jewellry design outlets, raking in huge rewards, without having to sweat too much, except for one or two, but I can’t name them.
If America can speculate on its future job growth, why can’t Pakistan think outside the box and help steer its young of all classes and social status towards education and skill enhancement that will at least ensure gainful employment, and not heartaches and suicides.
For example, secretaries, typists, telephone operators, health record technicians, bookkeepers, computer operators, butchers, typesetters are not needed anymore in the US, nor are garbage collectors; farm workers; timber cutters and fishing workers.
Would it not pay to be proactive to know where the jobs are in Pakistan?
And as for HEC importing teachers, let’s get the taxpayers’ vote.
If America can speculate on its future job growth, why can’t Pakistan think outside the box and help steer its young towards education and skill enhancement, and not heartaches and suicides? 
