ISLAMABAD, Nov 10: Scholars and social scientists warned at a conference here on Thursday that globalization’s agenda was to reduce education to a market commodity in the Third World and called for a struggle against the trend.

Education at all levels is being changed to suit the demands of global economy to produce “obedient workers and consumers” for the multinational corporations, the conference on “State of Education under Globalization”, organized by the an non-government organization, Actionaid, was told.

Sabina Ahmad, who heads the education programme at ActionAid, said education was no more about serving its social purposes or creating thinking individuals “but aims at producing career- oriented, individualistic, apolitical youth who become obedient workers and consumers”.

Under the pressure of globalization, education, which was based on local needs and local realities, was replacing the teaching of liberal arts with market-oriented subjects such as management sciences and IT.

She said the divide in private and public education systems had reinforced class divides, digital divides and the differences between the rich and poor were creating a host of social problems and issues in the country.

Globalization not only aims at complete privatization but also at making it irreversible. WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) offers transnational corporations the opportunity to turn public services into private markets.

Education was being targeted by them as a two-trillion-dollar annual market, she informed the conference.

Pakistan’s decision to open its education sector to foreign investors could turn its universities into virtual universities.

Dr Azra Saeed Talat, an activist from Karachi, criticized the government for creating “space for sellers of education” and “feeding the market needs of neo-colonialists”.

She said globalization was “a new wave of capitalism in the post-Cold War period”.

She termed the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) “the worst-ever agreement in human history” as it makes even photocopying of published material a crime. It thus denies education to students who cannot afford costly books.

Eminent historian Mubarak Ali observed that dominant classes have always used education to control and subjugate the masses.

In mediaeval Europe the church controlled education. Liberal knowledge emerged only after a split in the clergy, he said.

In early Islamic society too individuals were the centres of knowledge. “As long as knowledge is controlled by ideology, you cannot train open minds,” he said.

ActionAid’s country director, Rubina Saigol, said “knowledge today has been made a commodity which can be bought and sold and possessed” and as such produced individualism and selfishness.

“Since knowledge affects the life of people, it is our moral responsibility as social scientists to see responsible knowledge is created,” she said, calling for challenging the agenda of globalization for education.

Dr Riaz Ahmad of Karachi University narrated how the resistance by university teachers to the Model University Ordinance (MUO) which robbed the autonomy of the faculty. The resistance forced the authorities to abandon their plan to impose the MUO on the 21 state-run universities.

It could implement the ordinance only in newly established universities like the Federal Urdu University which has seen its vice chancellor changed four times within a span of 30 months and five closures in the last eight months, he said.

However, he noted that the existing university structure is controlled by “local technocrats” and not by the globalization lobby.

Dr Tariq Rehman, professor of linguistics in Quaid-i-Azam University, said the so-called modernization of education under the pressure of globalization was “to the advantage, and in the interest, of the already privileged”. He called for producing “counter-knowledge” through institutions that are not controlled by the state.

Military regimes had robbed Pakistan of space to produce counter-knowledge, he added.

“Radicalism was possible in the state universities in the past but has become difficult even in private universities as teachers there are tightly controlled,” he added.