Daily Times

If you ask a ten-years old, “who invented the incandescent light bulb?” “Edison,” he will respond. But, a question about the scientist’s other achievements, some of whom may hold equal importance, will put the child at a loss. With 1093 patents collected in his lifetime, we must recognize Thomas Alva Edison not only as a great inventor but also as a great entrepreneur, who established Edison General Electric Company in 1890 which after merger with Thompson-Houston Company in 1892metamorphosed into General Electric Company (GE), an organization that spearheaded the field of innovation in electronics for decades to come. The same GE, more than 125 years after its inception, thrives in 2018 with a market capitalization of$66 Billion (approximately). It makes aircraft engines to home appliances to light bulbs while also owning NBC and producing Seinfeld and Saturday Night Live.

Again, if you inquire, “who invented the telephone?””Graham Bell,” he will rejoin. However, if you delve in to the association of American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) with Graham Bell, he will be baffled. History tells us that the eminent innovator launched Bell Telephone Company in 1880 which after many mergers and acquisitions became AT&T, the largest telecommunications corporation in the world whose net worth runs north of $200 Billion.

Likewise, if youask about radio’s invention, Guglielmo Marconiwill spring to mind, but the childmay not have heard of Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company or the Marconi Company, the organization founded by the Italian engineer himself that survived more than a century in one form or another till 2006 when it was acquired by the Swedish telecommunication giant, Ericsson.

I allude to a ten-year-old to avoid embarrassment for adults, by the way, realizing fully well the parents of the child may also stand as ‘naïve.’ Also remember, my question is not about the history of GE, AT&T or the Marconi Company, since that information can be retrieved from the internet anytime. My realconcern is why the education system in Pakistan teaches us about one aspect of the legacy of a person while ignoring the other; and why it stresses on the scientific achievements of Graham Bell orThomas Edison, but spurnstheir business acumen.

Can we get out of our longstanding quagmire? We can, we just will have to provide our kids unadulterated and unabridged information, the complete truth and nothing but the truth, advocating for new ideas even when they make us uncomfortable and driving in skepticism into them to find unique solutions toour problems that have snowballed over decades

Put another way, our curriculum encourages us to become doctors (clinicians), engineers (technicians) andbureaucrats (clerks)-people who can memorize the facts and followthe guidelines-it, however,does notenliven a free entrepreneurial spiritin us, the spirit that allows to think out of the box, to create something from nothing, to ignore the current rules and establish the new ones. For example, the established rule advises against borrowing heavily. Agreed, yet, are we taught also that without debt growth is almost impossible, and without growth any enterprise would sink?

Let us dig a little deeper and ask why our mode of instructionis so determinedto produce servicemen and skilled laborers instead of innovators, freelancers and entrepreneurs. Why do parents and teachers stress on memorizing the books instead of cultivating creativity, the ability to write those books? The answer to these questions is not too complicated: our soulsremain incarcerated. In 1947,the partition granted us external freedom, sure, we, nonetheless, stayedenslaved internally, chained to our traditions, our culture, the rules, the norms, the guidelines, the policies and procedures. We feared that if we promoted an unencumbered thought process orpermittedskepticism about issues that we deemed acrosanct we would lose our identity; that it would lead to chaos and anarchy in the society, that our children would not identify themselves with us anymore; that they would insist on forming their own rules, creating their own protocols and hence would not match up to our standard of being a Pakistani or a Muslim.

This fear compelled us to share partial information with them, to edit parts of national archives, to censor ignoble facts, to bring up a generation based on the history what we think ought to have happened in the past instead of what actually happened, a sanitized version of events. The result? We continue to produce doctors, engineers and business students from our graduate schools but have failed to set up a single reliable, research university in 70 years. The so-called cream-of-the-nation thushas been primed not to ask questions, questions about our identity, about our religion bout our national policies. If they are indoctrinated that the country suffers because of financial corruption and not because of political instability or misdirected strategy, no one doubts that assertion irrespective of how far it lays from the facts.

Can we get out of our longstanding quagmire? We can, we just will have to provide our kids unadulterated and unabridged information, the complete truth and nothing but the truth, advocating for new ideas even when they make us uncomfortable and driving in skepticism into them to find unique solutions to our problems that have snowballed over decades.

The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com

Published in Daily Times, December 17^th 2018.