WHEN we think about wealthy nations, we picture what wealth looks like: skyscrapers, motorways, factories. For most of history, what made nations wealthy was what they could own, grow, or extract — fertile land, mines, and oil.
But this picture is outdated. A World Bank report, Where Is the Wealth of Nations? (2006), treated wealth as a balance sheet. Beyond natural resources and produced capital, it highlighted a third component: “intangible capital” — the skills and health of people, and the institutions that turn effort into output.
Most modern wealth is intangible: roughly 80 per cent in high-income countries, and over half even in low-income ones. Countries grow rich mainly because of what their people can do — and how well their systems let them do it.
This reframes development strategy. Instead of hunting for a magic lever — exports, FDI, a new corridor — we must invest in our children. Here, I focus on education: it builds human capital, and it shapes the people — and the habits — that make institutions function.
Education builds human capital most efficiently when teaching happens in a language children already understand well. When children are expected to study mathematics, science, or history in a language they barely command, effort goes into decoding words instead of building concepts. This leads to loss of confidence, rote learning, and higher dropout rates.
International experience is instructive. Japan and South Korea modernised without making English the medium of mass schooling. They imported modern scientific and technical knowledge the practical way: by translating it. A clarifying example: if the Nobel Prize went to a Japanese or Turkish novel, millions would read it in translation; few would learn the language to read the original.
Mass learning requires a language the masses already understand.
Knowledge spreads by translation, not by turning whole populations into linguists. Deep learning grows from deep language mastery, and mass learning requires a language the masses already understand.
History makes the same point through one of the most powerful learning technologies ever devised: books. What is often called Europe’s ‘Dark Ages’ began to lift as texts and ideas — many preserved and advanced in the Muslim world — entered through Spain and Sicily and were translated into Latin. The printing press then turned elite knowledge into a mass phenomenon: books multiplied, literacy expanded, and ideas spread fast enough to reshape societies. Where printing and publishing were delayed or constrained, books stayed scarce and expensive, and knowledge remained concentrated.
Books, then, are infrastructure. A society that writes, translates, prints, and distributes books widely in the language of its people builds the foundations of mass literacy and mass capability. A society that confines serious knowledge to a foreign tongue builds walls around its own potential.
Pakistan’s education crisis has many causes, but one design feature is inherited: schooling as a ladder to a small number of government and elite jobs, not a mass project of learning. In that architecture, a colonial-era hierarchy of language and status still acts as a filter: the credential that matters is not what a child understands, but what signals they can display — degrees, exam results, and, above all, ease in English. Field research across low-income countries repeatedly finds that for many families a government job remains the clearest route to security; in such a world, it is rational for parents and schools to chase signals. The tragedy is that when education becomes a sorting machine, most children are asked to compete in a language they cannot yet read — and learning is sacrificed to selection.
Evidence synthesised by MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) points to a practical fix: stop selling schooling as a lottery ticket for a distant government job. Organise it to deliver visible learning at every stage — teach children at their current level, prioritise foundational reading and math, and track progress so gains are measurable and motivating.
Mass education — necessary for progress — therefore requires democratising knowledge in a practical sense: building serious translation and publishing pipelines in Urdu and Pakistan’s regional languages; producing high-quality textbooks and books children can actually understand; and shifting from prestige-oriented credentialism towards learning that delivers early, visible gains in comprehension, confidence, and capability. Teach English well — as a subject and a skill — but stop using it as the medium that blocks understanding, especially in the early grades. A nation cannot develop on a curriculum it cannot read.
The writer is a professor at Akhuwat Institute, Kasur.
Published in Dawn, January 5th, 2026