Daily Times

Growing up, the atmosphere in our home was atypical for both the place and the time. While General Ziaul Haq’s Saudi-inspired campaign of societal regression was underway in full force, my parents were spending much of their time and resources on furthering the cause of a broad-based, enlightened education for the underprivileged in the country. Thus, the conversations that accompanied our evening meals quite often turned to ‘the problem with education’. I was lucky enough to be educated at what is considered the premier private school in the country, and I certainly benefited greatly from many of my experiences. These benefits, however, were available only to a few thousand in a population of, at the time, one hundred and twenty million. And even at a school such as mine, there was too much focus on ‘skills’ required by the ‘elite’ hobnobbing, keeping track of other people’s portfolios and how to ask for and provide favours. Not exactly the types of skills needed to build a society. Fundamentally, I wondered, shouldn’t the goal of education anywhere be societal development, and broadly, human advancement? In retrospect, I find this focus lacking in no small measure in my own school and similar private schools across Pakistan.

The professional requirements of my adult life necessitate significant travel back and forth between the US and Pakistan. My children began their schooling in the US, were moved to the same school I attended in Lahore and were then relocated once more to their current school in Texas. Thus, we have had the rare experience of being both actively involved with our children’s education and being able to contrast the differences in the educational systems in our two countries. I should point out that I am not talking merely of the mechanics of the educational system, i.e. the specifics of syllabi or the tests used, but more importantly of what children are able to get out of their exposure to the entire educational ecosystem.

First off, any such comparison could be considered ridiculous merely due to the vast differences between the developmental conditions in Pakistan and the United States. Yes, there is a big difference in the per capita income and macroeconomic deltas loom as wide as an ocean. It would be ludicrous to compare a village public school in a rural community in Balochistan with a private institution in a rich suburb of the US. My intent is not to do that. Here, I am actually doing the opposite, which is to compare the educational experience available to the richest in Pakistan, people whose net worth and per capita income is, if anything, significantly higher than the average in the United States, to a middle-of-the-road public school in the US. Why is this a useful comparison worth delving into? To me, it is at the heart of determining what it takes to turn out result-oriented, productive citizens who can drive their society and humanity forward in meaningful ways. We understand that overall Pakistani educational standards cannot be at the level of a Tier-1 developed country until broad development indicators improve, but what about parts of the Pakistani population that already enjoy a level of development equivalent to or better than the west, at least in material terms? The validity of this segmented comparison is borne out by the work done by Professor Hans Rosling of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who has demonstrated with hard data that it is often meaningless to compare two large countries to each other. The disparities within each country are usually so vast that the comparison yields limited value. It is instead more interesting to look at smaller groups within a country and compare them to groups at a similar level in a different country. In our case, this factors out macroeconomic disparities and focuses the attention primarily on the differences in the educational experience available to rich Pakistanis and middle-class Americans, an economically similar group.

As is usually the case, comparisons of educational systems are often taken down to an easy to consume chart, or graph, something borderline inane, such as who scores the highest on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) tests. Yes, this may be interesting to some degree, but consider that students in Shanghai, China often rise to the top in these tests, yet those high math scores very seldom translate into leadership in innovation and developments that are new, unique and unparalleled elsewhere in the world. Do high STEM scores alone matter? Why is it that children in California, with lower STEM scores, end up fuelling the greatest innovation ecosystem in the world and routinely create the next billion-dollar tech giant?

Once considerations of exposure, disparity, accessibility and resources are removed from the discussion, what do you have left? Are elite private schools in Pakistan with resources and student bodies comprised of children from well-travelled, affluent families producing innovative leaders who go forth and change the world? I do not think so. And in the rare instance where this might happen, it usually has nothing to do with the school and mostly with what is going on at home.

(To be continued)

The writer is a technology entrepreneur involved with several businesses in the US and Pakistan