A Pakistani Technical University
Engineering is the most sought after career among the Indian middle class, replacing Civil Service in the British days. In addition to several elite schools like the IITs, India has several hundred Engineering colleges that churn out techies by the thousands. There is no shortage of talented and well-prepared students for these professional schools, despite the poor conditions in most of India’s high schools. The secret is that students, and parents, spend a fortune on private tuition. There is a whole cottage industry preparing students for the entrance exams.
There is a negative side to this. Sciences and humanities suffer as talent is sucked away into the professions. Still, overall, the system has benefitted society: the Indian economic boom is powered by the graduates of these many regional engineering colleges and to a lesser extent, the IITs.
Pakistan on the other hand has failed in its many attempts to revive its educational system. Not having outlets for their energies, young men-and some women- turn to militant religious organizations for inspiration and guidance. The havoc they cause is a problem for India and the rest of the world, but it is threatening the very existence of Pakistan.
It is not enough to crack down on the terrorists. They will pop up under different names, as long as there is no other outlet, an alternative value system and a route to success. Parents will continue to send their sons to terrorist training camps masquerading as schools. An international effort to provide education for the youth of Pakistan has to be an essential component of any effort to save Pakistan from the morass it is in now.
There have been such efforts before. Pervez Hoodbhoy writes of the latest farce in the Dawn. Military dictators anywhere-Pakistan or Turkey- will never understand that building Universities is not just about constructing buildings and importing expensive equipment. Good research cannot be created by offering a cash prize for each paper written.
It is a slow and painstaking process, which has to start at the elementary school level and work its way up to the University. But perhaps there is a way to jump start a stalled system?
There is no Pakistani equivalent to the IIT, nothing like the Joint Entrance Exam taken my hundreds of thousands of young people vying for a spot at one of the elite schools. Why not channel the energies of this third generation after independence into something positive? Even if only a few elite students benefit, the Indian experience had been that the work put into preparation for the JEE is not wasted: those who don’t make it into the IITs are still quite good and fill the many other professional schools.
Tariq Rahman concurs with Hoodbhoy that the Pakistani Government should concentrate on starting one good university instead of wasting resources on many grand projects. A focus on numbers and percentages is wrong: what is needed now is a single successful institute, to provide a nucleus for further development. A model could be the Bogazici University in Istanbul or the Middle Eastern Technical University in Ankara, if the Indian model is politically unacceptable.
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