One might ask, why is it that when these Pakistani students go to study to Europe and the US, they do amazingly well, graduate with top honours and almost always land lucrative jobs, or go on to achieve professional success. If elite Pakistani schools are not good, why does Pakistan hold the world record for the most As in the London/Cambridge O and A Level exams? Why do Pakistani students from elite institutions excel in higher studies in science, math, medicine and engineering all over the world? The reason for this is simple. Pakistani schools do a good job at handling the mechanical aspects of a formal education: the facts, formulae, processes for computing results, tricks for retention, becoming expert test takers and so on. These are skills that translate well for a BS, MS or even most PhD programmes. They are also useful qualities for highly efficient, hard working, task-oriented worker bees.
Would Goldman Sachs hire a financial analyst that graduated in the top one percent of his or her class from a top 10 US school? Sure. Often enough, that financial analyst is a Pakistani math whiz who was educated through high school at Aitchison College, Karachi Grammar School or another elite institution. But where are the Goldman Sachs of Pakistan founded by these locally schooled graduates? Or, where indeed are the UBSs of Europe, founded by expatriate Pakistanis? Or the Googles, Microsofts and Oracles for that matter. We have a few examples of brilliantly successful Pakistan-educated business people and technologists who are tremendous leaders and actually demonstrated the ability to create value and not merely serve as cogs in the wheel of a well-oiled machine. However, people like Safi Qureshey, the founder of AST, Attiq Raza, the former president of AMD and founder of Raza Microelectronics, Fred Hassan, the former CEO of Schering-Plough and Shahid Khan, the billionaire owner of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars and CEO of Bump-N-Gate, make for a woefully small list. Too few from a country of nearly 200 million, and close to seven million expatriates living all over the globe.
From what I have been able to tell so far, the reason behind why even elite Pakistani schools cannot produce people who go forth and change the world has little to do with what is taught formally, and far more with the attitudes and environment in which the learning happens. A strong sense of self-confidence and examples to demonstrate that tremendous achievements are within the realm of the possible are key ingredients in the upbringing of a future leader who ventures forth and applies his knowledge and skills to do something ground breaking. It is far easier for a child to learn this when he has been raised in a neighbourhood where half the garages have been converted into machine shops. Where, when they walk or bike by their friends’ house they see their friend’s father working on the family car, greasy hands and all. From the very first day, children are exposed to an environment that says loudly, “If it’s broke, you can fix it. If you need it, you can build it.” This is a quality that pervades the US, and is palpable if you drive through the suburbs of any American city. It is incredibly common for children in school to know someone, a friend of their parents perhaps, who is working on building an ultra-light aircraft at home. In my years of living in the US, I have come across numerous people who have done exactly that. They are not fabulously wealthy. They scrounge up the excess funds from their modest salaries and slave away in their garages assembling their planes over a period of years. They do this because it never strikes them as odd or impossible. If in the process, they figure out a better way of doing something — which they often do — you might have the next startup being born right there!
The reason I provide this specific example is to contrast it with my own experience. While in school, I developed an intense interest in aviation. At the age of 10 or 11, after having read enough aviation magazines, I convinced myself that I could build planes too! I shared my plans with my father, who was incredibly supportive to say the least. Flush with zeal, over-confidence and a sense that I was imminently going to become the next Burt Rutan, I made the mistake of confiding in some friends at school that by the time I was 15, I would build a jet plane of my own. The reaction I got was not, “Oh, cool!”, or “Yeah, my uncle built a plane last year.” It was one of intense incredulity, which turned rapidly into ragging. Interestingly, this persisted for several years and I was mockingly asked many times by children in school, “So are you flying your jet plane yet?” It was not their fault, in retrospect. What I was thinking about was completely alien to them. They came from families where drivers drove you to school; if something was wrong with your car it was probably time to buy another one, and if a light bulb went out it was time to ring the bell for a butler or maid to change it. Honestly. What sort of reaction could I expect? We had just had a clash of aspirations.
I do not think things today are very different. Luckily, with the Internet and phenomena such as TED, children all over the world can at least be exposed to big ideas, an expansive worldview and a desire to be great. But until attitudes toward education progress beyond the myopic considerations of test scores, until the elite in Pakistan start talking about what they have done, what they have built, what ideas they have come up with and what they have invented rather than who bought the latest Birkin bag and drove off in a new BMW to the latest designer exhibition, expecting the next Larry Page to be an Aitchisonian or Grammarian will remain a distant dream. Until, like Americans, Pakistanis too see more of a role model in an unkempt inventor, covered in grease, or locked away in a basement dungeon pouring over code, yet armed with the next great idea than in a party-going, Armani-wearing clod with nothing purposeful to say, we will not turn things around.
(Concluded)
The writer is a technology entrepreneur involved with several businesses in the US and Pakistan