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The whole world — the world that matters, that is — wanted to block our path to nuclear technology and yet we had it in the course of time. The whole world — again, the world that matters — has been facilitating our progress towards better education and yet we have failed to make meaningful strides. The conundrum is as interesting as it is depressing.
The latest input came from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that has started to invest in teacher training programmes in Pakistan to make things move at a better pace. The plan involves scholarships to those planning to pursue a career in education.
It is understandable that the US is trying to be seen as contributing to the social sector in Pakistan to soften its public image that is more akin to some monster out to devour all that comes its way. But what stops us from streamlining our education sector, especially the teaching part of it?
Apart from the missing accountability factor and the general indifference that has come to characterise our national life — every bit of it included — there is one obvious reason behind the decline of the standard of teaching. The mere fact that teaching is not a profession of choice explains to a large extent why things are the way they are. By and large, teachers have failed to be the role models for their students. No one, as such, aspires to be part of the academia.
The low wage structure, especially at the school level, only adds to the problem. Lack of opportunities in other, more lucrative areas push individuals into the black hole of teaching and once they are there, they tend to spend more time grumbling over one thing or the other than actually picking up and honing teaching skills. For the better part of their lives, if not the whole life, they remain on auto mode; moving and grumbling.
Just for the record, the problem is not specific to Pakistan or even the Third World. It is more universal than it appears. In the United States, for instance, a large number of teachers leave the profession after just one, two, or three years of teaching. Almost one out of every two new teachers leaves the classroom by the end of five years.
The vital difference between this universal pattern and the problem in countries like Pakistan is that in the advanced world, the teachers for whom it is not a profession of choice use it as a transit phase and move on to other areas when an opportunity comes their way. In contrast, people who take up teaching here stick to it because they are generally not good enough for other, more competitive areas. This basically means that such individuals — and there are hundreds of thousands of them across the land — spread their ignorance, incompetence, lassitude and prejudices in society for the rest of their lives.
The state-run schools have mechanics and dynamics of their own and need to put aside in this discussion. The private-sector entities that charge a fee that is good enough for the owners to pay proper wages to the teaching staff and yet earn them a fantastic profit, fail to deliver because of the voracious fiscal appetite of the investors who are always busy finding a location for their next campus rather than in improving standards at the existing ones.
At the intermediate level, the scene shifts to the tuition centres. The same bunch of sleepy teachers with a couldn’t-care-less attitude wake up in the evenings and become good enough for the students to at least depend on them.
The fun doesn’t stop once you enter the world of higher education. Teaching at the university level in Pakistan is nothing more than a pastime for most of the faculty members. Exceptions, rare as they are, aside, the junior ones do not have enough in them to be effective. The senior ones carrying the doctorate chip on their shoulders spend much of their time conducting workshops, addressing seminars, attending to their administrative assignments and so on. The more dynamic of the seniors become members of the various government committees on education reforms and spend time visiting foreign shores for lectures and fellowships. But classroom teaching? That features at the bottom rung of their priority ladder, if at all.
As far as natural sciences go, things are believed to be slightly better because teaching entails theories, formulas and equations that teachers talk about. When it comes to social sciences and liberal arts, things tend to take a turn for the worse. The reason is simple: these are disciplines that have human beings lying at the heart. Howsoever hard one may try to focus on the theories, the complexity of the human mind is too enormous to be covered by them. It is only by encouraging the students to think that one can hope to have an aware citizenry at some point in time. But classroom teaching at the university level is often not geared to serve that purpose.
The crux of the argument is that regardless of the tier of education and without any consideration to the constraints of the system, individuals can do better if they so wish. If you are doing a job, you might as well do it properly; at least to the best of your capacity.
We adopted that approach for the nuclear arsenal and got it despite the odds that were stacked against us. We have not adopted that approach in any other segment of our national existence and we have failed in those areas despite the funds and facilitation that we have received from the others all these years. We, as a nation, are proud of our nuclear achievement, but we do not feel ashamed of ourselves for failing to do much else. Why?
