“Heinz [College at the CMU campus in] Australia began to notice a growing population of Pakistani students in its Master’s programs and that they were some of the best and brightest of their overall class.  This was supported by anecdotal evidence both in Pittsburgh and Doha and we decided to, as we say in the states, ‘check this out’,” said Bryan Tamburro, Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives at CMU, who visited Pakistan last month with Prof. Chuck Thorpe, the outgoing Dean of CMU Qatar. “I believe this growing population of top talent from Pakistan is a direct result of HEC’s efforts to increase Pakistan’s capacity to deliver world class quality higher education to its college age population (17-25).”

Bryan and Chuck visited the campuses of NUST, COMSATS, GIKI, NDU and met with the rector of IBA Karachi in Islamabad. They were impressed by the state of affairs of higher education in Pakistan, particularly in contrast to other countries in South Asia. During the trip, Bryan and Chuck also met Dr. Ata-ur-Rehman, former Chairman of the HEC, Dr. Khurram Afridi, Project Director of the LUMS SSE, and with Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC.

Bryan said that, given his experiences throughout South Asia over the past twelve years, he had tempered expectations for what they would experience in Pakistan. But, he was pleasantly surprised by what they found after their visit. “I was wrong! I believe that the HEC, through nationalizing the accreditation process of Higher Education for Pakistan, has made significant progress in addressing the nation’s capacity issue, while strengthening facilities and with an incredible focus on faculty development, is succeeding where many other ‘developing nations’ are failing.”

He went on to say, “[s]imply put, you can erect a building on campus but the building doesn’t educate the student the faculty member does and that, for some reason, is the one thing strangely missing in many nations efforts to build quality higher education. This is the significant accomplishment of the HEC that helps separate Pakistan from other nations.”

Currently, administrators at CMU are considering avenues of sustainable collaboration with various Pakistani Institutions. Carnegie Mellon currently has presence in a number of countries, including Qatar, Portugal, Japan, Australia, and Cyprus, offering graduate and undergraduate courses.

Editor’s note: We previously reported that the visitors met with Prime Minister Gillani. While they were scheduled to meet, the meeting was canceled due to the Prime Minister’s scheduling conflicts.

“We argue instead that educational attainment and higher income increase political dissatisfaction, such as dissatisfaction with one’s government or foreign policy, when holding all other factors constant. We also argue that politically dissatisfied men and women are more sympathetic to suicide bombings.”

Their study is based on data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project. The following question from the survey was used:

Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets [in our country] are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?

Slightly over half of the Pakistani (50.4%) respondents to the survey never consider suicide bombings of civilians justified, and, somewhat surprisingly, 60.4% think that  suicide bombings of Westerners in Iraq are never justified. When broken down according to educational attainment, the percentage of Pakistanis who believe suicide bombings are never justified against civilians are: 43.7% of Pakistanis with below primary education, 54.4% of Pakistanis with primary education, 56.6% of Pakistanis with secondary education, and 63.4% of Pakistanis with higher education. A similar negative correlation is seen between wealth and support of suicide bombing.

With respect to Pakistan, the authors conclude:

“The basic and extended models … offer no statistical evidence that educational attainment matters. The extended model provides some evidence that compared to the poorest respondents, upper-middle income respondents in Pakistan are less likely to support suicide bombing against Westerns in Iraq.”

and that,

“Respondents in Pakistan with primary education are more likely to be politically dissatisfied than those without primary education.”

Despite the lack of consistent indicators that span the Muslim public, the study concludes with two broad policy recommendations.

1. The first recommendation is to continue the expansion of ‘peace’ education. They note: “The purpose of such education would not be to reduce political grievances that can be very real but to suggest other ways to bring about change that cause less suffering and damage to society… This, however, may be too much to ask from some of the more oppressive regimes and the narrow elites that lead them.”
2. The second recommendation is somewhat less well defined: “The present dissatisfaction … can be reduced if governments of Muslim countries, U.S., and other Western states adopt policies that respect the dignity, welfare, interests, and lives of Muslims everywhere”. They recommend taking steps to reduce political dissatisfaction, such as supporting trade, economic integration, and cooperative international security.

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.

We must have faith in the young, educated people of our society. This is why I strongly feel that student unions must be restored, and student representatives be elected by popular vote. How else can Pakistan generate its next generation of political leaders? Are we forever doomed to being ruled by military usurpers and dynastic rulers? No, we must believe in ourselves.

I’m not asking for something far out, something that has never existed. Even under the British Raj, there were student unions. So, why not now? In the early 1970’s, which is when I had just begun teaching, all Pakistani universities had student unions. On the one hand there was the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba and other far right-wing organizations. They were pitted against an assorted range of left and liberal organizations: the National Students Federation, Democratic Students Federation, Peoples Students Federation, etc. Sure, there were occasional physical clashes, but it was still healthy in the sense that battles were fought primarily in the realm of ideas. This kind of fighting was infinitely better than fighting the senseless ethnic and religious wars of today.

I know that some people feel that our students are fundamentally incapable of responsible behavior. In my opinion, this amounts to a condemnation of Pakistan itself. If students in India can successfully study and become world-renowned professionals, as well as unionize and fully engage in national and international political issues, then surely Pakistani students can do this just as well. Else, let’s be prepared to declare Pakistan a grand failure, a bad idea to begin with, and our people stupid and irrational. I do not accept this terrible conclusion.

STEP: What realistic measures could be taken to prevent student unions from devolving once again into quasi-militant organizations responsible for violence and intimidation instead of political debate and activism?

PH: I would begin cautiously lest the whole idea of restoration flops. Although all unions remain banned, religious extremists still rule many Pakistani campuses. They will surely try to take advantage of the new opportunities offered if the ban is lifted, and will want to impose their extreme views upon the rest of the student body. Also, let’s not forget that political parties like the PPP were less than responsible in the 1970’s. They also violated laws and ethical responsibilities to gain power just as much as the Islamists. So, there must be a clear code of ethics that specifically abjures physical violence, and specifies immediate penalties, including immediate expulsion of students if these are violated by whoever is responsible, irrespective of political orientation. I know it is difficult, but the reinstatement of unions, subject to their elected leaders making a solemn pledge to uphold specified rules is the only way forward towards creating a culture of debate and tolerance on campus. Ultimately, the voices of reason will become loud enough to be heard. Before a full restoration, the government should allow and encourage limited activities such as disaster relief activities, community work, science popularization by students, etc. But this first step must not be the last one, and we must move as rapidly as circumstances allow.

STEP: As a result, perhaps, of stifling university campuses, creativity and innovation are not valued personal traits in Pakistani society, even in urban centers. Do you believe there is a case for creating an ‘HEC for the Arts’, that cultivates and funds literature and the arts in Pakistan? What measures can be taken to change attitudes towards creative individuals and their ideas?

PH: Literature, art, music, and sculpture are forms of creative expression. If you want them then you must first fight the battle for political, cultural, and personal freedom. Without this freedom, all the money in the world and the finest building for a “HEC for the Arts”, will achieve exactly nothing. The starting point is to acknowledge that we actually want the Arts.

Presently, it is not clear that anything beyond narrowly technical education is desirable or socially sanctioned. Unlike during the earlier years of Pakistan, today we see that film, drama, dance, and music are frowned upon within the campuses of most public universities. Joyous or artistic expressions are sometimes attacked by student vigilantes who say these violate religious norms. At Punjab University, the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba staged violent protests against the establishment of a department of musicology. Even when something low-key was finally established, it had to be located away from the main campus.

Burqa and hijab are ubiquitous, cafeterias are segregated, males and females are not allowed to walk together, and Islamic morality squads enforce these restrictions with due fervor. I cannot see the faces of most of my female students today.

There is no strong Jamiat in my university, but the Saudiized culture is not too different from Punjab University. Indeed, I would contend that we are witnessing a broad social phenomenon that is no longer linked to specific political initiatives as they were in the past. An example: in the physics department of Quaid-e-Azam University we started a film club some time ago. The first movie was A Beautiful Mind, a PG-13 rated story of Princeton mathematician John Nash. It’s a marvelous story of this psychologically disturbed genius. But half-way through, some fanatical students disrupted it and turned off the electricity. The following day there were posters up across the university accusing me, as the physics department chairman, of screening pornographic movies and importing western culture! It was ordinary middle-class students doing it without the Jamiat behind them.

In a landscape that is generally pretty dank and dark, there are a few bright spots. The times that I have been to the National College of Arts in Lahore, and the Indus Valley School of Arts and Architecture in Karachi, I was impressed by the vitality of students and the open atmosphere. Their work looked rather good to my untutored eye. The ambiance there reminded me of my visit to Indian universities a few years ago. Perhaps openness is the key to their success. More generally, ambiance really does matter in determining the quality of a college or university, even if it does not specifically relate to the liberal arts because learning has to be taken in a broader sense than mere book-learning. Personal freedom is crucial to creating a well-rounded individual. It is particularly important to learn to deal with colleagues of the opposite sex in a mature way. This is a necessary part of the maturation process for homosapiens.

STEP: In the past, you have written about the tension between Islam and Science, particularly the lack of scientific maturity among university students. As a university professor, you are guaranteed a captive audience of young impressionable people, mature enough to understand the implications of the scientific method. Rather than blame ideologues for succeeding to capture an intellectual vacuum, would you concede instead that the scientific intelligentsia, including university academics, are simply failing to articulate the “idea-system” of science to university students?

PH: Yes, university academics in Pakistan have failed to create a scientific culture and mindset. They, like most school and college teachers, are indeed guilty. Except for the honorable few, most consider scientific thinking an alien, imported, western concept. Sadly, those who are paid to teach science know next to nothing about the scientific method, the premises which underlie science, or its history. This also holds for the majority of teachers who hold PhDs from our universities. In fact many — whether actively or implicitly — work against the idea system of science.

In my opinion, the scientific mind is nothing but the questioning mind. It starts to develop naturally when students encounter questions that engage the brain’s reasoning and logical capabilities rather than memory capacity. To nurture it, teachers need to raise such questions as: How do we know? What is important to measure? How do we check the correctness of measurements? What is the evidence? How do you make sense out of your results? Is there a counter explanation, or perhaps a simpler one? The aim should be to get students into the habit of posing such questions and framing answers.

The barrenness of academia is painfully apparent. Anyone who has studied or taught in the Pakistani system (O-A levels and elite private universities excluded) knows that our teachers are guaranteed a captive audience of students who hang on to every scribble made upon the blackboard, or every sentence read out from the teacher’s notes. Students who ask questions are frowned upon and risk being branded as trouble makers. To get good grades, examinees need only reproduce this undigested, or partially digested, information. No surprise: this is exactly the way the teachers were educated themselves and what formed their worldview.

The impact of rigid obedience on science education is fatal. I have often seen science being taught in schools as though it was Islamiat – as something that exists in its final, complete, and ultimate form. Rote memorization dominates even in my university, which is supposed to be Pakistan’s best public university. Science teaching is reduced to an absurdity and is nothing but a waste of time because the essence is lost.

A sorry anecdote: as departmental chairman, I decided to monitor the teaching practices of an assistant professor in my department about whom students had frequently complained to me in private. So I sat in one of his classes and found that he jumped from formula to formula with no connection between them. Later, I summoned him to my office and demanded an explanation for the intermediate steps. His answer: this formula and that formula are in the prescribed M.Sc-level plasma physics textbook on page so-and-so.  He could not even understand why I was horrified. I tried to tell him that physics depends on a chain of logical connections, not the authority of the textbook. Step 1 leads to step 2, and so forth. Sadly, I did not see my horror reflected in my colleagues. So my efforts to remove this teacher have failed thus far. He has been receiving a full salary for the last two and a half years although I do not allow him to teach a course in my department.

Why is the system increasingly totally rote-oriented and anti-questioning? There may be deeper reasons, but one obvious reason is lack of subject competence: teachers can only dare to invite questions from students if they know all the answers, or at least most of them. This requires having a solid understanding of the material you are teaching. If you have insufficient mastery over a subject, then obviously you don’t want your ignorance exposed. So, even if teachers agree in principle that students should ask questions, the mixture of intellectual laziness and incompetence is usually too heavy to cast off. Nevertheless, while the competence deficit is a difficult problem to fix, it is solvable. Better books, examinations, and evaluation criteria can produce more competent teachers who would then emphasize internalization of knowledge over rote learning. For this there has to be a strong will.

STEP: Rote memorization is a ubiquitous feature in the education systems of most developing countries, like China, North Korea, India, and Singapore; none of these are Muslim-majority countries. Why do you feel the problem of rote learning is more closely correlated with religion than economic development in Pakistan?

PH: Traditional, culturally-driven, societies rely upon inherited knowledge and think of it as a fixed corpus of facts. Teachers are supposed to transmit the “truth” as determined by some unapproachable authority. To that extent, science and traditional learning do not get along well. Joseph Needham’s marvelous treatise on Chinese science exposes this point in great detail. But the countries you named – with North Korea probably excluded – have been undergoing a massive cultural and social transformation over the decades. They are rapidly modernizing their values and ways of behavior. Not all the changes are good, of course, but the fact is that they are moving towards a way of thinking that is eminently suited for good, science-based education. Hence their excellent technical universities and high educational standards.

It’s a different matter in strongly religiously-driven societies such as ours. Fixity and rigidity are much more ingrained, the resistance to modernity much fiercer. This directly impacts pedagogy. The teaching of religion is necessarily authoritarian because religious knowledge is final, total, and unalterable — it all comes from God up above. If this attitude remained confined to Islamiat, it wouldn’t be a problem. But one inevitable by-product is that the reverential concept of knowledge filters all the way down into science subjects and their teaching. The notion of “up above” becomes fluid and extends into textbooks and teachers, which lie almost beyond challenge.

I think that obedience to “the hand above” is paralyzing because science simply does not accept anything that lies outside of logic, mathematics, and observation. In fact, intellectual timidity critically underlies the failure of science in Islam for the last 700-800 years. This young man in my department who I referred to above is just one of the millions from General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamized generation. They are steeped in the notion of textual authority — the Book is always right even if it is a textbook!

The scientific mindset and orthodox belief (as we have it today in Pakistan) are mutually exclusive. Take your pick, you just can’t have both. Please note that I am not extending this to science and faith in general; compromises have been worked out in different places at different times. Muslims and science got along famously for a good 400-500 years. But I am fairly certain that with present attitudes to life and knowledge, all the world’s laboratory equipment, computers, fast internet connections, and books won’t move us an inch towards genuine science. Like the Saudis, we are doomed to be mere consumers of knowledge and its myriad products. I don’t see this changing any time soon.

STEP: With the extreme scarcity of “scientifically-literate” teachers, the hiring of sub-standard faculty, like the one you mention, seems necessary and inevitable. In the present climate, how can the hiring processes at universities be reformed to prevent incompetent faculty from joining?

PH: Before hiring faculty in any university, a test to check subject basics is absolutely essential even if the applicant has a PhD. It should be a national policy that applicants at the lecturer and assistant professor level should obtain more than a prescribed number of marks in a centrally set and administered subject test of high reliability. This test should be used only in a pass/fail mode — the final selection should take into account the usual criteria (publications, performance in a trial public lecture, etc). But subject literacy should absolutely be the first criterion, not publication quantity. At the associate or full professorship, a public lecture must be made compulsory.

I am aware that implementing this is not easy. First, very few science departments have faculty who can make good tests and grade them. This means that one should rely on GRE exams, which lie beyond petty corruption but have some known disadvantages as well. Second, there will be stiff resistance from applicants to pass any kind of test. They will argue that a PhD is more than enough to qualify. They frequently invoke the “ghairat” argument, and accuse proponents of testing as “foreign agents”. However their ignorance rapidly emerges once they are challenged to answer any question outside some very narrow domain.

STEP: In the final mix, is it better to have poor faculty or no faculty at all?

PH: That’s a really tough question! A miniscule proportion of the eligible population has access to higher education, about 4%. One wants greater enrollment but clearly somewhere one has to put a lower bound on quality. So, for example, there’s no point in having a department of English if the head of department can’t speak or write a straight sentence of English. In some colleges that’s actually the case. Ditto for literacy in the sciences.

Maybe it would be helpful to have different grades of universities and colleges. So grade-I would do both teaching and research, grade-II would do only teaching. Finer differentiation could also be done. But at some point one has to simply say: no, this is worthless! Let’s not pretend that we’re offering “higher education”.

STEP: Finally, are there any trends you see in Pakistan today that offer the promise of a better tomorrow for science and education?

PH: If one looks hard, it is possible to point to some good things that are happening. First, there is increasing realization that local testing and examination standards have collapsed to the point that they have lost meaning. This is forcing us to confront reality – which is absolutely vital for reform.

An example: the HEC has made GRE subject tests mandatory for the award of a PhD degree from every public university. Of course, the passing mark is ludicrously low (40 percentile) and most students can’t make even the low grade. But their performance is steadily improving. About 15 students from my department have cleared this hurdle, and the best has scored 80 percentile. Much more importantly, our students are being confronted head-on with a hard fact: science is about problem solving and they will have to shape up if they want to play ball. The fact that they can’t cheat or cram is doing a huge amount of good.

Another positive development: there are universities that are seriously developing science faculties of high quality. The LUMS School of Science and Engineering has already taken off. Given how much effort it has put into faculty recruitment, this must be considered a flagship effort. If it succeeds — and the odds are that it will — we shall actually have a model for other efforts.

But let’s not fool ourselves. Pakistani higher education will turn around when Pakistan turns around. This can’t happen while our cities, towns, army, and police are attacked by maniacal terrorists day after day. Expatriate Pakistanis, as well as others of high academic accomplishment, are vital to the uplift of our universities and colleges. In these circumstances they do not feel safe enough to work in Pakistan.  Without winning peace, the country will just continue to stagger along.

Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy is head of the Physics Department at Quaid-e-Azam University and a prominent social activist in Pakistan.

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.

In Pakistan, our universities do not produce much new technology or ideas.  Nevertheless their graduates are necessary to keep the country going. Else the country would not have engineers, technicians, doctors, and administrators needed to run institutions, factories, businesses, and government.

There is another reason for a country to have universities – and this is quite independent of whether they produce state-of-the art research or not.  Universities are needed to create a modern citizenry capable of responsible and reasoned decision making. Their graduates should be able to think independently and scientifically, have an understanding of history and culture, create discourses on social and political issues, and be capable of coherent expression in speech and writing.

The fact that our universities do not measure well on this score is deeply regrettable. Yet, this suggests that we should strive to improve them, not eliminate them. At the same time, although buildings can rather easily constructed, Pakistan’s very limited intellectual resources put strong constraints on the number of actual higher education institutions that it can have.

STEP: Beyond their role as educational institutions, what is the value of emphasizing research, specifically theoretical and technical research, at universities in Pakistan?

PH: Research on the theoretical aspects of a subject is important for two reasons. First, genuine research, even if it is not cutting edge, makes the individual teacher much more aware of the state of the field and hence a better, more exciting teacher. Book knowledge becomes stale fast, particularly these days. Second, knowledge is advanced only through research, and Pakistan should play a role in this some day. India already is doing so, and Iran has begun to as well. Theoretical research is intellectually harder and more demanding than experimental research, and it consumes far fewer resources. Thus it should be strongly encouraged.

But since “research” is a widely abused term in Pakistan, some careful consideration of its meaning is necessary before attempting to evaluate its current importance in our universities. Research in any professional field — mathematics or physics, molecular biology or engineering, economics or archaeology — does not have a unique, precise definition. But a tentative, exploratory definition might be that research is the discovery of new and interesting phenomena, creation of concepts that have explanatory or predictive power, making of new and useful inventions and processes, etc. In the world of science, the researcher must certainly do something original, not merely repeat what is already known. Just doing something for the first time is not good enough to qualify as research. So, for example, one does not do meaningful research by gathering all kinds of butterflies and listing the number caught of each kind in a particular place at a particular time, etc. Nor does it come from making standard measurements, substituting one material after the other just because “it’s not been done before”.

We must recognize that very few Pakistani universities and their faculty currently have the capacity for real research. Nevertheless, they can still function quite well as knowledge transmitters. For example, some of Pakistan’s elite private universities have good teaching standards although they have few journal publications at this stage of their development. My feeling is that if a university teacher does not have the physical, material, or intellectual resources to do genuine research, it is far better that that person be made to improve his or her pedagogical practices as well as subject understanding. This is far better than churning out junk papers, which no one reads.

STEP: You have been a leading critic of some of the policies the HEC has initiated to address the state of research in Pakistan. Let’s say you are given Rs 21 billion (HEC’s 2009 budget) and stewardship of an organization with a mandate to reform universities in Pakistan. What would be the three most pressing items on your agenda and how would you go about instituting them?

PH: I would shift priorities drastically and emphasize improving the physical infrastructure of the 1000+ colleges rather than pampering a few public universities. Of the available money and effort, I would put 90% towards improving teaching quality at our public universities and colleges. Only promising research would be supported. Today’s atrocious teaching quality comes largely from having university and college teachers with very poor knowledge of their subject. Therefore I would call for the following:

1. Require that every applicant for lecturer or assistant professor, either at a public university or college, pass a relevant internationally administered examination (such as the GRE subject test if one is available in that field, else the GRE General Exam). The test would ensure that that person has enough basic knowledge to properly teach the subject. The applicant would also be required to give an introductory lecture, open to all who wish to attend, on a subject belonging to the applicant’s claimed field of expertise. The entire process of teacher selection needs to be made transparent and above board.
2. Create large-scale teacher-training academies in every provincial capital. Established with international help, these academies should bring in the best teachers as trainers from across the country and from anywhere in the world. A few master trainers might be willing to come from western countries in spite of the security situation, but hopefully attractive salaries might be able to lure some from India or from outside the Western world. These academies must be on the scale of a mega-project, say on the order of a billion dollars over 5 years. As high-quality institutions, they should have a clear philosophy aimed at equipping teachers to teach through concepts rather than rote learning, use modern textbooks, and emphasize basic principles of pedagogy, grading, and fairness. To be effective, they must be degree-awarding institutions.
3. Build on various current HEC initiatives such as foreign faculty hiring and scholarship schemes for university teachers. There are simply not enough qualified persons within Pakistan to adequately staff university departments. The fact that these schemes have been mismanaged by the HEC should not prejudice one against their potential usefulness if proper procedures and rules are adhered. Those selected for overseas scholarships should be required to clear an international subject test.

STEP: You note that “university and college teachers [have] very poor knowledge of their subject.” Yet, the scope of the teacher-training academies would presumably be pedagogical technique and not the outright re-education of teachers in their subject material. Is a multi-billion rupee investment in pedagogical training worth it, when subject proficiency seems like the fundamental problem?

PH: Thank you for forcing me to clarify. I very much have subject proficiency in mind. In fact, in the proposed new teacher training institutions I would give 90% importance to re-teaching subject basics and only 10% to pedagogy. So, in fact, teaching teachers “teaching-methods” is a very distant second priority. Let me say that those studying in these hypothetical NFAs (National Faculty Academies) would be relearning materials that they are actually supposed to know from their time in college or university. But there would be a crucial difference: this time they will be graded not by how much they have memorized but how well they are able to use what they have learned in order to solve problems. In science, knowledge is useful only if it is internalized rather than memorized. It must become part of your mental tool box.

There would be another important side benefit to having competent teachers. I am convinced that if a teacher knows his or her subject and is able to comfortably solve all or most of the problems at the end of a chapter, it would lead to important attitudinal changes. Some of the authoritarianism of teachers would surely go away. It is a fact that teachers often discourage students from asking questions because they know that their lack of understanding would be exposed. This is lethal for an academic environment.

STEP: Your proposal has a parallel to the erstwhile universities mega-project in that, rather than reforming and investing in existing universities, it recommends creating entirely new institutions. Why the inclination to create new academies instead of focusing resources and effort into reforming existing programs?

PH: Suppose you had inherited an airline company but no pilots. Would you like novices to take your planes up in the hope that they will learn flying that way? Of course not! Similarly we have entire universities, but with almost no people who are fit to teach in them. But they still teach, and nobody stops them. So although we don’t have crashed planes, we have armies of university students who graduated but didn’t survive their mis-education. Therefore, they could never become good scientists, engineers, economists, or whatever. In the hard sciences, I’d estimate that a miserable 20-30 percent of university teachers are actually qualified to teach — and I’m being generous.

To fix this situation, I just don’t know of any way other than training teachers in dedicated, specially created, teaching institutions where, at the end, they would be required to show proof through proper examinations that they’ve learned their subject well enough. It’s like a pilot certification requirement. If you don’t pass, you are not allowed to fly — or teach.

To respond specifically as to why we need new institutions: it’s because we just don’t have any teacher training institutions with anything close to the required intellectual capacity. It’s not about reforming something that presently exists but which is not good enough; nothing presently exists where college and university teachers can be adequately taught subject basics.

I might add one caveat: creating any good educational institution in Pakistan means that we will have to get at least some key people from other countries. Unless Pakistan stabilizes and deals with terrorism effectively, no persuasion will ever succeed in bringing them here. Or, perhaps, even expatriate Pakistanis. So this is a super-priority.

STEP: Why did you choose to return to Pakistan after your bachelors and masters degrees from MIT?

PH: Like some others of my generation, in the early 1970′s I was witness to the huge political upheaval in the US. American students were staging protests against their own government over its wrong and immoral war in Vietnam. Hitherto I had regarded politics to be a mere game and had barely any interest in these matters. As a naïve middle-class apolitical Pakistani youth, it seemed totally unbelievable to me that MIT students would be protesting against their own government and country — and that too when it was at war. There were huge protests, boycotts, and even occasional violence. I remember witnessing the violent protests against the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory on campus, which was involved in MIRVing nuclear missiles. It was so liberating for me to see people follow the dictates of their conscience. Now a part of the anti-war movement, I fully understood the ugliness of imperial power and participated in the teach-ins and sit-ins. The atrocities that the US was committing in Vietnam had made me so very angry that I did not want to live a day longer in America than was necessary to finish my degrees.

Then, closer to home, there was the slaughter in East Pakistan being carried out by the West Pakistani army. At the same time, there was a movement for social change in Pakistan that promised socialism and justice for the masses. It was initiated by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who brought revolutionary politics to Pakistan. What happened to him, and how he reneged on his promises, is another story but those were times of immense hope. I was one of the many overseas students who went back to Pakistan dreaming of changing everything, and of replacing feudalistic and capitalistic exploitation with socialism. So, with a job in hand at Islamabad University (QAU went under this name in the 1970′s) I joined up with others who had also recently returned and we became part of a workers movement in Rawalpindi, known as People’s Labour Federation. With another group of friends who were inspired by the idea of a peasant revolution, I became involved with working as a paramedic and school teacher in a remote Potohar village.

Part 2 is shared here.

Kudos, as well, to the organizers and team-leaders: Dr. Zafar M Khalid and Dr. Muhammad Saeed of NIBGE Faisalabad and Al Hasanat Rasul of STEM Careers Programme (IBO), Dr. Khalid M Khan and Dr. Raza Shah of HEJ Research Institute, Karachi (IChO). Dr. A D Raza Choudary and Dr. Ahmed Mahmood Qureshi of ASSMS, GCU, Lahore (IMO), and Dr Shahid Qamar and Dr Masroor Ikram of PIEAS, Islamabad (IPO). This is an outstanding initiative undertaken by SCP, HEC, and the mentoring institutions: HEJ, NIBGE, ASSMS, and PIEAS.

Further details on the STEM and the Olympiad can be found here.

The USAID Pakistan Mission Director Robert Wilson commented,

“We all recognized the great need for improving the skills and qualifications of new teachers in order for Pakistan’s overall education system to improve. We are committed to supporting Pakistan in its education reforms…notably, we plan to develop closer ties with Punjab province on education programs specifically, and on broader development issues, especially in southern Punjab.”

The scope of programs like this should also include school leadership, i.e., some training for principals and administrators on best practices and goals. Proactive leadership can induce and sustain quality in schools, whereas as stodgy administration will have a continual downward drag and can discourage enterprise on the part of motivated teachers.

In any case, this is an excellent initiative, and hopefully details of the program will be forthcoming.

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. A Google scholar search of citations for this conference shows an abysmal citation record: not a single paper in the 13 year history of the conference has managed more than 10 citations. While this Google scholar search may have missed some papers, it is a reasonable indicator of the influence of a conference.

I suppose an argument could be made that there is value in its function as a gathering place for researchers in Pakistan, but if this is really the purpose of the conference, a symposium with invited speakers may be more worthwhile than a parade of poor research. In any case, the scientific community in Pakistan may have now reached a critical mass making these multi-topic conferences somewhat obsolete. Thoughts?

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.

“In Bajaur, just 10 miles from the Afghan border, flattened buildings are all that remain of this former trading hub, once home to 7,000 people.

The Army claims it destroyed the town because it was the only way to free it from militants. This hard line approach has left hundreds of thousands of refugees, many winding up in makeshift camps on the edge of the Tribal belt.

It’s the largest internal displacement Pakistan has ever seen, Obaid-Chinoy reports. Almost a million people have been forced to leave their homes.

Visiting one such camp in Peshawar, we meet two young men among the 15,000 children displaced there. Wasifullah and Abdurrahman are best friends, but they have different ideas of who is to blame for this war. Both boys fled their village when the Pakistani Army began bombing. Their district was also targeted by American missile strikes. In one of those strikes, Wasifullah’s 12-year-old cousin was killed.

“We brought his remains home in bags,” he explains with little expression. “We could only find his legs so we buried them in our village.”

There have been more than 30 U.S. missile strikes in the tribal areas in the last year. They target Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, but civilians are often killed as well. It’s an easy recruiting tool for the Taliban, and Wasifullah is eager to sign up.

But his best friend Abdurrahman blames Al Qaeda for the destruction of their village. He would prefer to become a captain in the Pakistan Army. The two friends sadly represent the fault lines in this unstable nation.”

The portrayal of the Taliban in this documentary is squarely two-dimensional, without a serious engagement of articulate voices inside the movement — only a man-child is interviewed in any detail. While access would understandably be difficult to obtain, it would have been interesting to know the spectrum of opinion spanned within the Taliban regarding issues like education and child recruitment. Still, well-worth half an hour of viewing.