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Educate or Manipulate?


Contemplate a situation, where you as a guest speaker are in the middle of a lecture to a MBA cohort talking about the scarcity of resources that managers sometimes have to deal with...a hand shoots up and an eager young mind asks out...ma'am what's scarcity?...! your ears wait for snickers and mumbled giggles from the rest of the class...but to your utter horror the class remains silent holding the same blank look...anticipating some rocket science as an answer...

This encounter isn't fictional...it is sadly a story of universities today in Pakistan, I wonder if this is the education that we promise to deliver as educationists...we complain that employment rate in Pakistan is falling...more and more of our graduates sit home, jobless even though they posses degrees of the likes of MBA, Msc,Mphil and God knows a few others...but today I ponder on the fact that my father used to point out..that its the knowledge rather than the degree that counts...I now understand why when our doctors, engineers and teachers migrate abroad...their Pakistani credentials are thrown down the the trash and they are required to start all over again. Today, I consider this a valid practice....

We charge our students hefty amounts, we make them lurk around the university confines from the wee hours of the morning till late evening...we promise world class education..and offer nothing remotely close to it...and its not entirely the failure of our higher education institutes...one might argue that such basic issues are a responsibility of the schools and colleges to rectify...and I truly stand by it. These are grass root matters..if the bush gets pruned on time...it blossoms into a healthy shady tree...but if it stands unkempt...it grows into nothing but an unattractive,weedy sapling; Sadly enough, this is the state of Pakistani students today.


I believe that its our responsibility as teachers today to not pass the buck or put the blame on one another by saying that if students do not know basic English at university level its the job done poorly by their schools..there is never a time when you can't learn...life is a learning process...then why not start this process from today...lets not manipulate our students into believing that their hefty payments will help them make way in the corporate sectors and sound careers...lets educate them for once...enlighten them and make their payments worth it!

Comments

  1. Exactly, these were the main reasons most of our youth don't want to study anymore. All we study is the success stories of foreign brands and industries, but no book or teacher prepare students about the actual situation of our own country.

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