Education — the values gap

Education, in our day-to-day vocabulary, has become a catch-all phrase. Perhaps, a better description would be a scapegoat or a punching bag. Anytime, anything goes wrong, we blame it on lack of education. Whether it is rampant poverty or rampant corruption, inexcusable negligence or poor sanitation, the typical one line (or one word) reason is education. Friends in a particular political party blame education for their less-than-stellar performance in national, provincial and local elections. A friend recently remarked that even the poor performance of our cricket team is tied to lack of education! I am sure some would connect the energy crisis with education as well. Lately, I am not even sure what people mean by education anymore.

Indeed, lack of education continues to be a major challenge, and the problems that we face may have something to do with that, but the reality is a bit more nuanced and subtle than that. If we analyse the current problems, especially the ones that we preoccupy ourselves with these days, education does not seem to be the root cause. Panama papers and uncontrollable corruption are driven by not the illiterate, but those who by all standards are ‘educated’ — some even went to institutions of the highest repute globally. I am reminded of Habib Jalib, who famously said in a poem that “Reh-zanon nay to reh-zani ki thi, Rehbaron nay bhi kiya kami ki thi?” (loosely translated as “The bandits did what they were doing all along, but the leaders didn’t fare much better either”).

The reason that our streets are not clean, that health is not a priority, that innocent children die in Thar every year and that we sell substandard products and deceive others cannot simply be blamed on illiteracy or lack of education. Areas outside of health tell a similar tale. It is not to say, by any means, that education is not important, or should not be a priority, but instead I would like to argue that there is a serious disconnect between education and the values we want the educated ones to espouse.

There are plenty of problems with our texts, that promote misogyny, intolerance and a worldview that is isolationist and toxic, but the tolerance in the text is only part of the problem. Equally troubling are problems with teachers who use archaic and sometimes draconian tools to educate, and stifle thought and creativity. Even when our students read the same text (such as in the sciences and engineering), we do not necessarily embrace innovation, utilise rigorous tools or develop the same problem-solving skills as others may do in other countries. More importantly, our education system, as a whole, fails to focus on ethical decision-making and moral leadership and does not deal well with social, societal, cultural, ethical and aesthetic complexity.

While it is exciting to hear that everyone is thinking about education, it is equally troubling that the debate on details and values is missing. There is a lot of emphasis (and rightfully so) on the input, in increasing access and creating institutions, but not nearly enough on the output and the product. We need to realise that the issue is not just of education, but that of quality education. What is desperately needed is not for education to be a punching bag for all to hit, but a more nuanced discussion that includes ideas about incentivising good teaching and mentorship, both in terms of strong financial rewards and in terms of promotion on media for inspiration to others. The reward system and promotion of best practices have to be implemented at the institutional level, but also at the regional and national levels. Incentives for improving the system have to be tied with stronger disincentives for lack of responsibility by teachers and administrators. We also need to create improved means of self-regulation of curricula and institutions, and develop structured and unstructured mechanisms of deeper reflection on whether our output is what we desire and aspire. The real value of education is not in the statistics of brick-and-mortar buildings but in the values that education creates in society.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 24^th, 2016.

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