Pakistan's reform experiment
Sarah Tomlin
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 18:30 UTC
After decades of neglect, in 2002 Pakistan set out to dramatically reform its higher education system. The reforms were designed to reverse years of chronic underfunding, to invest in the academic workforce and to inspire a new culture of research and learning.
Though it is too soon to judge the final outcome of the experiment, some of the early successes and failures were reviewed by five international authors in an Opinion article (password required) published in the September 3 issue of Nature (461, 38-39; 2009).
An Editorial in the same issue urged the elected government of President Asif Ali Zardari to provide continuing, but qualified, support for the education reforms — by starting with an independent review of the reform commission’s performance.
On October 15, Nature published three letters from Pakistan responding to the earlier articles. You can read the letters here (password required).
What do you think? If you are an academic working in Pakistan do you agree with the pace and style of the reforms so far? What would you like to see done differently in future? Have your say here.
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Replies
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Pervez Hoodbhoy’s correspondence piece (Nature 461, 874; 2009) on
Athar Osama and colleagues’ opinion article (Nature 461, 38-39; 2008) is
rather harsh and personal. Terming Pakistan’s reform experiment as
‘failed’ and a bad example for developing countries is a comment that
one should not expect from an academic of his stature. I myself have
been an undergraduate and graduate student during the time 2002-2007 and
a witness to the changes that were brought about in many Pakistani
universities during this period in terms of infrastructure development,
IT resources and academic environment in general. It was for the first
time that students felt that if they pursued higher studies, their
effort will be rewarded with better opportunities when it came to
employment. Before this teaching was considered a second rate profession
and for those who were unable to find any other job especially in
engineering, a sector which according to Athar Osama et al. has shown
remarkable improvement because of these reforms. During all this process
no doubt money had been the most important element because the main
reason for the prevailing conditions in almost all institutions of
higher learning in Pakistan was an acute lack of funding. I sincerely
believe that if this reform process had not been there, most of our
universities would still have been operating with no access to Internet,
no multi-media devices, obsolete and outdated laboratories and empty
libraries. I can assure you that today if you walk in to the campus of a
Pakistani university, you would find it buzzing with learning, teaching
and research activities and equal if not better than any university in
most of the developing world.Regards,
Engr. Saheeb Ahmed Kayani
Lecturer
National Uinversity of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad-44000,
Pakistan -
There are no easy answers, and all depends on the person we may ask. From the viewpoint of a university teacher, who is earning a lot more than she did in pre-reform era, situation is definitely very rosy.
In my opinion, blanket criticism leads us nowhere. There is a need to adopt more balanced approach: for both the Higher Education Commission (HEC) bureacracy and its critics.
To the credit of HEC, there is an ifrastructure in place now. Wether we believe in HEC officials or Prof. Hoodboy, there is no denying that there are certain basic research needs to be fulfilled either way. Access to research periodicals, financially satiated faculty, grants to buy equipment etc., checking plagiarism, some transparency regarding the quality of Ph.Ds churned out by national universities, are the things which can be assured by the new infra-structure. Certainly there is lot of room for improvement, but it would be much cheaper to learn from the mistakes of past few years than to move afresh with a false hope of a perfect start.The reforms has certainly given the HEC a central position to which universities may look up for guidance, but the big problem lies in the way universities are internally managed. No matter how big the chunks of money you throw toward universities, it is much easier for the present style of university managements to squander rather than make an efficient use of it. And unversity management is one thing which remained unchanged despite these reforms.
Other problems relate to largely neglected lower-tier school and college systems. It is important for higher educational level to recieve an input of quality students. It is important to have students with apt understanding of what SCIENCE IS, and what SCIENCE IS NOT. I see that majority of students pursuing Ph.D in Pakistan (and in some cases including their faculty advisers) have ideas of science and research very different from what is understood by their peers in rest of world. From my own experience, it is a nightmare to supervise an average master-level student during a small research project, designed to teach scientific solving of a problem.
Part of this later problem stems from failure to create a research environment examplified by a typical research group on a typical western campus. In such an environment, every new-comer naturally imbibes a culture and speedily learns how science IS DONE, and how it is NOT DONE. This kind of environment has to be craeted by FACULTY, and no amount of money or HEC patronage can help create it.
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