Educating people without ensuring that they get jobs after higher education is the worst kind of tragedy
SIALKOT: Education has become an imperial instrument to exploit the abundant human resources of the Third World countries through the kind of schooling provided to children. It has become a huge industry as everyone wants to educate his/her children, but the real beneficiaries of this trend are the capitalists who are running private educational institutions, as well as multinational and national corporations which could exploit the educated youth. In Third World countries like Pakistan, jobs are scarce as the economy is semi-industrial, so educating people without ensuring that they get jobs after higher education is the worst kind of tragedy. When people come into the job market, they have to compete for a few jobs. Consequently, the best one or two per cent brains are hired by the government and other corporations while leaving the rest at the mercy of fate.
In this situation, capitalists have a golden opportunity to exploit these people by offering them minimum pay because the latter cannot bargain due to the large supply and low demand in the market. This is exactly why the majority of graduates and Master’s degree holders from state institutions are serving in banks, corporations and in other institutions for meagre salaries — if they are lucky enough to get jobs at all. Moreover, many students have to serve without remunerations during their internship periods as there is no implementation of labour and minimum wage laws in this country.
The most ironic thing is that most educated people belong to the middle and lower middle classes whose parents mostly run small businesses or depend upon agriculture. When these educated people fail to get a job in the government or the private sector, they don’t adopt their ancestral occupation due to the threat of social ridicule because they are expected to do white-collar jobs after being educated. Running a shop or working agricultural land is deemed to be the task of the uneducated.
In this way, the Western education model is creating social and economic problems for the people of Third World countries. This education system is only for the highly industrialised societies where there is space enough to accommodate almost all kinds of workers. The implementation of that system in Pakistan is resulting in unemployment and mass exodus of talented people to other countries. My contention is that the government should quit its evangelical mission of ensuring 100 per cent ‘literacy’. It should spend more money on basic education while opportunities for standard higher education should be given to those who really qualify for it, rather than distributing degrees and creating unemployment. Unfortunately, successive governments in Pakistan have ignored basic education while focusing on higher education without any research. Consequently, there are so many university graduates who do not have any command over their subjects and are hence vulnerable to exploitation. The opportunities for higher learning should be compatible with market needs and the standard of higher education should be improved by focusing on quality rather than quantity.
Tayyab Butt
Published in The Express Tribune, May 5th, 2015.
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