STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

Yaser Ajmal Sheikh is an Assistant Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Central Florida in 2006 and is a recipient of the Hillman award for excellence in computer science research.

STEP: Informed, perhaps, by your experiences as a student at MIT during the Vietnam War, you have spoken in favor of re-establishing student unions in Pakistani Universities. Could you briefly make the case for re-instituting student unions in Pakistan?

PH: Meaningful discussions on social, cultural, and political issues must be brought back to campuses. Young people are idealists; in fact, there is no other way for them unless they are brain dead. They naturally dream of what a good society is; a society that is way better than what they have inherited from their elders. So, it is perfectly healthy for students to have a self-image of being agents for positive change. Once aware, they soon realize that individuals count for little — only organized actions do. But organized actions require a culture of civilized debate. In my 36 years of teaching at Quaid-e-Azam University, I have never felt that rational, civilized debate with or between students is impossible. Of course, there have been exceptional situations, such as after the 1998 nuclear tests, but students will generally listen to the other side in a civilized way.
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Editor’s Note: Pervez Hoodbhoy is head of the Physics Department at Quaid-e-Azam University and a prominent social activist in Pakistan. We conducted this interview through email correspondence over a few weeks, to get his perspective on the state of higher education in Pakistan. This is the first in a two part series. The second part is shared here.

STEP: According to recent estimates, less than half of Pakistan’s population is literate, less than half have access to basic sanitation, and the economy is strangled by debt. In context of this, what is the social relevance and value of the modern university, with its emphasis on research and higher learning, in Pakistan today?

PH: Pakistan’s social indicators are indeed abysmal. But no country can wait for everything and everybody to get up to speed before making universities. Nor should it, because that would essentially mean waiting forever. But we should remember that there is a difference in the purposes that universities serve in countries like Pakistan, and in advanced countries like the US. The latter have knowledge-driven economies, and universities function as the engines of progress. They are the fountainheads of modern science, and of new technologies that have changed the world more in the past fifty years than the previous ten thousand years.
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At this year’s International Science Olympiads, Pakistan’s team racked up the awards with seven bronze medals and two honorable mentions. The teams, selected by the STEM Careers Programme (SCP), participated in the International Biology (IBO), Chemistry (IChO), Mathematics (IMO), and Physics (IPhO) Olympiads. Congratulations to the bronze medal winners: Mahym Mansoor and Tayyaba Maqbool Malik in Biology, Saman Zia and Nayha Enver in Chemistry, Waqar Ali Syed in Mathematics, and Zain Ul Abideen Ali Khas in Physics. It is note-worthy that four of the six winners were women — note-worthy because the pool from which the girls were selected was far smaller than the pool from which the boys were selected. In all, 56 countries participated in IBO, 64 countries participated in IChO, 104 countries in IMO, and 72 countries participated in IPhO.

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A new program funded by USAID, called Pre-STEP (Pre-Service Teachers Education Program), was launched on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009, to improve the quality of education in Punjab. The $75 million initiative involves Punjab’s Ministry of Education, the Higher Education Commission, and the Federal Ministry of Education. [Note: STEP is not affiliated with this program] Read the rest of this entry »

The Kerry-Lugar bill continues to advance through the legislative process. On Friday, the US House of Representatives authorized $1.519 billion in assistance to Pakistan and the Senate Appropriations Committee passed the bill the day before allocating $1.57 billion in aid to Pakistan. The difference between the House and Senate versions have to be resolved before the bill actually becomes law, and can materialize into actual aid.

Interestingly, in his companion report to the Senate bill, Senator John Kerry includes a vision of introducing “american-style” universities in Pakistan. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent paper by Prof. Najeeb Shafiq, from Indiana University, titled “Do Education and Income Affect Support for Democracy in Muslim Countries? Evidence from the Pew Global Attitudes Project” studies the influence of education and income on support for democracy in five Muslim countries including Pakistan. The paper draws several conclusions, both surprising and expected. The study is based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project data:

“The data for this study comes from the PGAP 2005, collected in the spring of 2005. PGAP 2005 contains data on approximately 1000 ordinary men and women (of age 18 or above) from Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey. Efforts were made to ensure nationally representative samples, but the sample from Pakistan is disproportionately urban.”

With the rural majority of Pakistanis living in feudal societies, it is unfortunate that “the sample from Pakistan is disproportionately urban.” It would be interesting to know what sort of increase in traction for democratic reform would result from increased education in rural Pakistan; is education really the silver bullet, or is economic reform a better route to social reform. Nonetheless, the study indicates that, in Pakistan, support for democracy is a social benefit of primary and secondary education; and further than the trends in Muslim countries do not differ from the trends in countries around the world. However, when compared to respondents in Turkey, Indonesia, Jordan, and Lebanon,

“…there is low support for democracy in Pakistan (27.4 percent), arguably because General Pervez Musharraf’s regime was perceived as successful at the time of the survey.”

The recent IRI survey confirms this observation.

I also found it intriguing that higher education did not change views in support of democracy, and further that:

“…there is almost no statistical relationship between belonging to the richest groups and having an attitude towards democracy; thus, this study cannot confirm or reject suspicions that the most educated and richest members of society oppose democracy.”

The heterogeneity of the five countries, in language, culture, level of industrialization, and history, raises questions on whether meaningful conclusions can be made broadly about five countries bound only by religion. However, research of this sort is indispensable in creating policy informed by empirical data and analysis, rather than by political expediency.

IEEE INMIC 2009 is being organized once again, this time by the folks at MAJU and UET, Taxila:

IEEE INMIC is held every year and INMIC 2009 will be the 13th in the series. INMIC has become Pakistan’s flagship technical conference with a broad scope, thereby inviting interest of a large audience. The conference targets research presentations by academic and professional researchers, and also includes a series of tutorials, enabling participants to learn about the latest trends in technology. Research contributions are expected from the participants, covering various disciplines under IEEE’s domain, including technical papers, panel discussions, tutorials and project exhibitions. For all submitted papers, the review criteria include significance of the problem, novelty, clarity, completeness, and accuracy.

As a venue for research, a multi-topic conference like this one is necessarily going to have substandard work: researchers with good work aren’t going to publish here because the audience will not be able to fully appreciate their contribution, and the related scientific sub-community (who would cite their work) aren’t going to be in attendance and therefore won’t be aware of the research. Read the rest of this entry »

This Frontline short documentary reported by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy examines the impact of the Taliban in Pakistan “out of the mouths of babes.” The narrative is highly engaging and is a searing indictment of the Taliban. The documentary makes an interesting statement on the battle against the Taliban: it is as much for the minds of the future citizenry of Pakistan as it is for square footage of land.

The swelling refugee camps of internally displaced people squeezed from their homes by US drone attacks, and faultlines between the Pakistan Army and the advancing Taliban are also examined. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre places the number of these refugees at upto 900,000 people, near half of whom may be children; out of their homes, and out of school.

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House Resolution 1886, known as the Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement PEACE act, introduced on April 2^nd, 2009 by Rep. Howard Berman authorizes President Obama to dramatically increase non-military assistance to Pakistan – $1.5 billion a year for five years. The scope of the act includes strengthening democratic, judicial, and government institutions, support for public education, the establishment of a human rights commission, healthcare development and cultural and educational programs. This is the House version of the Kerry-Lugar Bill, currently referred to committee; it still has to be voted in the House and in the Senate before reaching the President.

This bill constitutes the clearest articulation yet of the direction the United States wishes to see Pakistani civil society take. It reflects an understanding on the part of the US leadership that the military engagement of the Pakistan army is just one of many fronts that the battle against the Taliban is being waged. Education takes a central role in the bill, requiring the regulation of madrassas (enforcing existing Pakistani law) and advocating the development of a comprehensive national curriculum, framed on “modern” principles, particularly in FATA. The bill highlights a number of urgent national educational needs including women’s literacy (current adult literacy rate of females as a percentage of males is 59%, among the largest differentials in the world [3]), increasing teacher salaries and training, and linking education more closely with employment. In Section 102, the details of public education reform are outlined:

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