Daily Times

We have all heard advocacies for a system of education that abolishes or diminishes the distance between the elite and the masses and thus makes for an egalitarian society. It is a known fact that public education is in a bad state. Its instructional resources and standards of attainment are inadequate and its product is at best mediocre. Even parents belonging to the lower middle class prefer to send their children to private schools, which they think are better situated than schools that are funded and managed by a government agency. There may be an institution here and there in the public domain that has become famous for the excellence of its offerings, but it is more an exception than the rule. The aforementioned advocates argue that if all private schools are abolished, those who manage society and make public policy would have no option but to send their children to public schools. That will motivate them to improve public education. High-class education and egalitarianism will both materialise.

I do not accept this reasoning. In my reckoning, this is not a project for improving the existing ground realities but a prescription for building a utopia. A university is a community of scholars who transmit and create knowledge. Their areas of interest and inquiry gradually extend beyond their original design. The universities at Rome, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge started out hundreds of years ago as theological seminaries but in time, their concerns included physical, biological and social sciences plus the humanities. Some of them turned out to be more creative and productive than others. Nothing would be gained and much might be lost if great universities in the US and Great Britain were closed down merely because they were private.

Not all universities, public or private, are equally good. Each one of them has to invest money, time, and energy in making its way to excellence and some of them may not even have the ambition to reach a higher status. The marketplace will rate them by the value it places on their graduates. In Pakistan, the University of the Punjab is considered to be the best in terms of the totality of its offerings and attainments. Then there are schools that concentrate on a particular field of knowledge such as engineering, medicine, law and business management among others. Three of the private business schools — Institute of Business Administration (IBA) in Karachi, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and the Lahore School of Economics (LSE), in that order, are placed at the top. Their graduates are well received in the job market. Merit gets recognised and rewarded, which is the way it should be.

A society where all working people receive the same remuneration — a barber as much as a surgeon — is not likely to materialise. That also holds for a community where all schools provide the same quality of education. Nor does equality of opportunity in education denote this kind of uniformity. Education at the better-known schools can be expensive. It may cost anywhere between $ 50,000 and 100,000 a year for a young man to go to Harvard. Not all of those who can come up with that kind of money may be accepted at this school. A right combination of money and merit may be needed. Those who have the money will compete with one another on the basis of relative merit. Some of those with requisite merit but not the money may get scholarships or another kind of financial assistance from one of the universities they may wish to enter or from the foundations that support education. It may be said of the United States and the United Kingdom that hardly anyone who is capable of profiting from higher education will be left out because he cannot pay for it. There is equality of opportunity for those who deserve to be in the race.

Equality of opportunity cannot mean that high-class schools should be pulled down to the level of the mediocre or the poor. The rational course of action would be to pull the latter up. Upgrading of public schools that are currently in a bad state is not easy. There are first the problems of mechanics. Reportedly, there are thousands of school buildings but no teachers and students to occupy them in Sindh. To a lesser extent, the same is the case in the other provinces. The reverse is also true. Teachers and students sit under trees because school buildings are in a state of disrepair and are unusable. There is another much more anguishing problem. While teachers in private schools are obligated to earn their keep, those in public schools do not perform the job for which they are paid. Strangely enough, they are able to get away with it. They put in an appearance at their places of work for a fraction of their working day and then go away to manage businesses that they are carrying on at the same time. What do we make of this reprehensible practice? This is unfortunately the case to some degree in all of the public services. It may be no exaggeration to say that most government servants go to work late, take long breaks for lunch and noontime prayers, entertain friends in their offices, and go home sooner than the appointed closing time.

If I may be allowed a slight digression, I should like to report an interesting conversation between two of my friends here in the US. Peter asked Paul how he was occupying himself. Paul said he was learning the art of making money without having to work for it. Peter advised him to go to Pakistan where folks had developed this art to perfection. The work ethic is admittedly weak in Pakistan. Left to themselves, most people would like to be freeloaders. This was not always the case. I remember that during British rule, teachers, students, administrators and others worked hard even beyond the call of duty. Dedication to one’s responsibility goes from top down and not from bottom up. If the rulers and managers of society are seen to be industrious in advancing the national interest, those in the lower echelons will probably be motivated to do the same.

The writer is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and can be reached at anwarsyed@cox.net