Imagining higher education

School mostly relates to recounting, retaining existing knowledge; university focuses on ‘creating’ knowledge.

Over the last few months, Professors Pervez Hoodbhoy, Attaur Rahman and others have reflected on the state of higher education in Pakistan. Since over half of the population is under 30, the provision of good university education is critical for the future development of the country. However, even with the pumping in of millions of dollars in higher education in the last decade or so, only quantitative, not qualitative, change has been discerned. Why? The reasons are self-evident, but, as with most things in Pakistan, not understood.

First, our attitude towards higher education has always been ambivalent. As a television channel has shown recently, when Europe was busy establishing educational institutions in the Middle Ages, people in South Asia were primarily making tombs. While the tombs were not a bad project per se, their long-term utility was limited to being buildings of great art and architecture — not even an art school was ever associated with them. In contrast, most colleges in Oxford and Cambridge were founded in memory of people who had died. So, their tombs might not have been that grand, but the legacy of several great English statesmen lives on through these colleges. Just imagine, if the numerous Mughal era tombs, which litter old Lahore, had been replaced by colleges, what would the history of South Asia have been then? Certainly, much different and better. We have never taken higher education seriously. (Also, a side note to all those who still dream that there were lots of universities and colleges in South Asia under the Mughals, please first find some evidence for this claim. We can still see tombs of Mughal cooks in Lahore, yet no remains of Mughal colleges).

Secondly, no great thought has ever gone into distinguishing school and university education. While school education is mostly related to recounting and retaining existing knowledge, university education is primarily focused on ‘creating’ knowledge. If Urdu had adopted the more apt Persian word of university, ‘daanishgah’, rather than the bland Arabic one, ‘jamia’, perhaps, this distinction might have been clearer. The university is where knowledge, ‘daanish’, is nurtured and, therefore, differs substantially from the ‘madrassa’, which has always been used to transmit basic knowledge. This understanding of a difference between the place and role of a school and university is yet to take root in Pakistan. In my time in Pakistan, I have met several university professors who, when asked, cannot explain the difference between a schoolteacher and a university professor. One university professor even suggested to me recently that universities should have parent-teacher meetings — just like schools!

Thirdly, there will be no higher education revolution in Pakistan by simply throwing in money. Let us look at the experience of the UK in this regard. The UK, too, hoping to revolutionise higher education, converted lots of its polytechnics into universities, upgraded several others and established a number of new universities beginning in the 1960s. The experience of the UK in the last 40 years has shown that while the number of ‘graduates’ has increased, the quality of education has certainly not. Outside the dozen or so good universities, the majority of UK universities offer bizarre courses and pass even the most mediocre of students. That said, the UK has long been a knowledge-based society and with its small crop of world-class universities can still sustain itself educationally. Pakistan, on the other hand, has yet to have one world-class university. The horror stories of professors plagiarising, getting illegal promotions and perks and of students simply copying their ‘esteemed’ professors is just a symptom of the lack of understanding of what higher education is and this will continue until a radical rethink is done.

Pakistan needs a deep and dispassionate reworking of how it even imagines higher education. We cannot solve problems piecemeal when the complete imagination of what higher education is and should be is flawed.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 8^th, 2013.