Choice for Survival

Ever since independence of Pakistan technology has sneaked in tardily. Paradoxically, these years have produced equally strident laments concerning the state to which Pakistan’s education has sunk. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.

When information technology was approaching in the sixties the US changed the school curricula for preparing students for the future. Contrarily we continue to turn our eye from the need to adopt new technologies and consequently our students are not being prepared (IT students included) to live in a competitive world.

We have managed to survive without adoption of IT for forty years. It will be impossible to continue to exist even for a day if we failed to adopt the approaching technologies. For instance Nanotechnology—examining the world at a millionth of meter and utilizing the ability to manipulate our universe at a molecular or atomic perspective—has united scientists across developed world in the belief that the worlds of medicine, computers, biotechnologies and eventually all manufacturing will never be approached in the same way again. We can’t afford to respond as laggards and follow the same doom which ancient civilizations faced. They perished for resistance to new technologies.

In ancient Greece then, all of the energy sources in use today, with the exception of nuclear power and hydroelectric power (both used exclusively to produce electricity) were known, available, and in limited use. Why then did it take so many centuries for energy sources and technology to come together to produce the Industrial Revolution?

From ancient Greece into the early Renaissance technological development was not only frowned upon, it was downright discouraged. People with money did not invest in it. It was socially unacceptable for the elite to involve themselves in what they considered a degrading activity.

The Greek philosophers, for all of their delving into how the world was made up and how things worked, had a strong aversion to the development of technology. They called it banausikon, meaning, fit for mechanics. It was considered a filthy business beneath the dignity of any intelligent, thinking person. Aristotle held that industries that earned wages degraded the mind and were unworthy of the free man. He would not stoop so low as to attempt to verify by measured observation his reasoning concerning physics or dynamics. As a result, some bad science went unchallenged for almost 2,000 years.

The Museum and Library at Alexandria, established in 290 BC by the rulers of Egypt, was a research facility that attracted scientists from around the known world. Researchers would use valves, expanding gases, solar thermal power, cams, screws, pulleys, levers, springs, siphons, and cogs—the basics for an industrial revolution. They developed double-action pumps and a compressed air cannon. It was there that Hero demonstrated a steam reaction turbine in 60 AD. The Library at Alexandria could have been an ancient model for Silicon Valley, but the research did not lead to improved manufacturing processes, better machines for industry or agriculture, or even for increasing wealth. Rather it was used to amuse royalty or to amaze worshipers in temples.

A valid argument can be made that metallurgy, manufacturing processes, and transportation facilities were too primitive to allow for exploitation of energy and technology at that time. But, absent the social barrier to technological development that existed, it is likely that the great minds, the available wealth, and the power concentrated in the likes of Alexander the Great, and the Roman Emperors could have laid the groundwork for a much earlier development and diffusion of technology.

We are accustomed to resist technological change with full force. We not only refuse to recognize it; we close our eyes to evade it. The attitude that we demonstrate confirms our nasty characterization as a nation of laggards.

Embracing technology is a laudable objective for which our society must aspire. It should provide a classic demonstration of the principles of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle and attempt to explain the pros and cons of investing in new technology. It must transform itself as innovators, early adopters, and not as laggards on a technology adoption timeline.

We should inculcate education of technology at every level of learning. If we claim to know more about how people learn, if we have better tools for facilitating learning, why do so many studies of technology in education show no significant difference from traditional methods? Why are we producing graduates less able to cope with the issues facing them?

Making matters worse, the criteria for success have changed. Our institutions were designed not for an industrial society. Now we've entered the Information Age. Increasingly, even blue-collar jobs require critical thinking, rather than monotonous task performance. To meet these demands, our graduates need different competencies than we typically provide. Intuitively, one would expect technology to be a powerful tool for meeting these new requirements.

We are entering a world in which jobs are requiring technological competency--a world in which they must continue to update their occupational and technological skills in order to be successful. We must enable them to become technologically competent. We must take advantage of the capacity of technology to enhance our traditional classroom presentations and to engage our students in active learning.

Pakistan’s decision-makers must focus on new challenges and issues instead of waiting for emergencies to react. They need to focus more on policy than management issues. They need to be knowledgeable about what rest of the world is doing to achieve change. They should know that change and implementing technology often go hand in hand. The key to success in both is a thorough, inclusive planning process. The disregard of new technologies by ancient civilizations offers us a choice: to embrace new technologies or perish. (www.aifjmir.com)

Globalization: Bumping into the poor

The urbanization of poverty is being propelled by a tremendous increase in the transnational movement of people and capital. The rapid transfer of money and jobs to cities and countries where cheap labor can be found has fueled by a race to the bottom. For the urban poor who are impacted by this race, there are no winners, and the losers will most likely find themselves among the projected two billion people who will be living in slums by 2030.

Hardest hit by globalization are women and children - the most vulnerable of urban dwellers. Poor women are becoming increasingly marginalized as the feminization of poverty manifests itself in many parts of the world.

The positive aspects of globalization, including greater longevity, increased literacy, lower infant mortality and wider access to infrastructure and social services, mask the unfortunate truth that these benefits are not being shared equally. The effects of globalization on cities – both positive and negative – need to be better understood if public policy is to be effective in bettering the lives of those who live in them.

Under globalization, manufacturing activities in cities have been relocated offshore to the developing economies whose lower labor costs, lower taxes and less rigorous environmental protection enable higher profits. The socio-economic consequences of globalization weaken access to basic infrastructure and housing, fuel the creation and expansion of slums, and reinforce the negative environmental and health impacts affecting the urban poor in many cities.

Demographic shifts, including transnational migration and poor integration of ethnic and racial groups, add impetus to these changes. So, too, does the ability (or not) of households and individual people to cope with rapid economic change. Those on the losing end of these changes can easily find themselves confronted with the loss of jobs, and the consequent sale of assets in order to survive, converting them into the new poor, leaving them even more insecure and vulnerable in the face of economic change.

The last two decades have witnessed a transformation of the global economy, which has led to vast economic, social and political realignments in many countries and cities. The trend towards open markets has enriched some countries and cities tremendously, while others have suffered greatly. World trade in this period has grown from about US$580 billion in 1980 to US$6.3 trillion in 2004—11-fold increase. Flows of capital, labor, technology and information have also increased tremendously.

Among the losers in this race are female workers, whose wage levels and working conditions have declined as a result of the dropping of barriers to footloose industries. This same dynamic is evident inside individual cities as well, leaving many people unable to obtain stable jobs and incomes. This leads to changes in patterns of social inclusion and exclusion across cities, often along racial and ethnic lines.

The distribution of the fruits of globalization reflects private-sector judgments about the expected financial returns to these investments, their security, and the economic and political environments in which they occur. Corporations have tended to concentrate direct investment in ten countries, including China, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia and Thailand. In stark comparison, the poorest countries have seen no such investment.

The vacuum created by footloose industries is rarely filled by job opportunities for the poor. Rather, any new jobs tend to be in knowledge-intensive industries, many requiring university-level education.

The race also occurs within individual cities, resulting in job losses where large segments of the labor force have to shift from one sector to another. The urban poor are losing jobs and benefits and must now find other income-generating opportunities in the informal sector, which offer no security or benefits.

The loss of secure jobs with secure community roots fosters an informalization of the urban economy, with more people eking out a living in unregulated sectors. Several economic processes converge to informalize employment and other aspects of urban life. The closing of formal-sector enterprises often coincides with the downsizing of ancillary industries and services. As one industry declines – as with light engineering in Karachi - incomes in the city as a whole reduce. Former employees are no longer able to purchase services on the street; hence, street vendors also suffer. Simultaneously, if utility tariffs increase, other enterprises suffer and are forced to reduce their operations or close altogether.

Globalization has set cities against each other in a desperate competition for a share of highly mobile capital and trade. The needs and desires of global capital must be balanced with policies based on the needs of the region’s own inhabitants. Otherwise, any effort to alleviate urban poverty will expire, as meaningless gestures that provide little more than temporary relief – and the gap between rich and poor will continue to grow larger.

Jobs, consumption patterns and opportunities for social mobility are all easily influenced by external factors. This instability can be manifested in both national and local contexts through at least four important channels: patterns of investment, labor markets, prices and public expenditures. Moreover, they occur in different locations within the city, creating patchworks of decay, renewal, and economic revitalization. The challenge for national and local authorities is to identify which kinds of changes are occurring, or better still, which types of changes can be anticipated, in order to consider whether there are measures that can cushion or mitigate these impacts. To do that, changes must be anticipated and capital set aside to deal with them.

While governments may feel their budgets are severely constrained, they need to apply discipline to save some of their resources for these future needs. This does not mean borrowing and thereby passing on debts to future generations. It means saving for the future. In reality, this saving is an insurance policy against future unknowns. Having such resources at hand allows decision-makers to face the future more confidently and to smooth out the impacts of volatile changes in the global economy at large. (www.asifjmir.com)

The Sounding Bells of Brain Drain

The future trends explain that the nanotechnology will elongate life spans and thus the West and the Japan is going to have enlarged older populations and diminishing youth. To fill in the demographic gap those countries will hire skilled youth from Asia. This will intensify the stream of brain drain from developing countries. This calls for use of strategic human management and economic reasons as key actions needed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The term brain drain was popularized in the 1960s with the loss of skilled labor-power from a number of poor countries, notably India. Of particular concern was the emigration of those with scarce professional skills, like doctors, engineers and management scientists, who had been trained at considerable expense by means of taxpayers' subsidies to higher education.

UNESCO defines the brain drain as an odd form of scientific exchange among states because a movement in one direction that inevitably flows to developed countries characterizes it.

Developing countries suffer from two main problems, one is poverty, which is increasing day by day and the other is increasing rate of crime. Both are result of unemployment. The wrong distribution of wealth due to wrong policies and over-population has made the situation even worst. This paves a way for skilled citizens to go abroad especially, the educated youth.

Other reasons include: they feel that they have a better future, a greater security; will be better off financially, and they feel that they and their children will get better education.

The receiving countries are the winners while the sending countries are the losers. The receiving countries include the US, England, Australia and West Germany. The rulers of developing countries who remain indifferent to prevailing problems, and fail to respond to the employment problem creatively, contributes to brain drain.

Those nationals of developing countries who complete their studies in Europe and the US are not returning back to their homelands. Since one in three such professionals will like to live outside their homelands, The universities of these (developing countries') are actually training one third of their graduates for export to the developed nations. Developing countries are thus operating one third of their universities to satisfy the manpower needs of Great Britain and the United States. Stated differently, the education budgets of developing countries are nothing but a supplement to the American or British education budgets. In essence, developing countries are giving developmental assistance to the wealthier western nations, which makes the rich nations richer and the poor nations poorer.

It is the best and brightest that can emigrate, leaving behind the weak and less imaginative. Developing countries cannot achieve long-term economic growth by exporting their human resource. In the new world order, people with knowledge drive economic growth. These poor countries talk a lot of poverty alleviation. But who is going to alleviate the poverty? The uncreative bureaucracy that creates poverty? Hypothetically, the most talented should lead the people, create wealth and eradicate poverty and corruption.

In theory, overseas citizens of developing countries are morally obliged to return back home. In truth, it is unrealistic thinking that that such national professional will resign from his $60,000 a year job to accept a $3,000 a year job in his homeland. A more meaningful question will be to ask: What measures can be taken to entice overseas citizens to return home and what can be done to discourage those professionals in developing countries to remain in their homelands?

The brain-drain seriously affects the quality and delivery of public and private services there are two obvious solutions (a) make it worthwhile for highly-trained professionals to stay and (b) replace them with competent locals at a rate as fast or faster than their departure brain train.

Another solution is to devise strategies of brain gain. These can take the development of a brain gain network. The developing countries are not effectively encouraging the use of their diaspora in contributing to development at home (e.g., 80 per cent of recent foreign investment in the People's Republic of China came from overseas Chinese). The brain gain network can help in the promotion of joint research and teaching posts, the use of medical specialists in periodic return visits, short-term training assignments and even systematic professional and research collaboration on electronic networks. These could be effective ways of harnessing the skills of some of the distinguished scientists, medics, artists and educators living abroad.

With good employers, attractive working conditions, improved telecommunications and the entrepreneurial climate in India today, young professionals are moving back and strengthening the economic sector. Then IT professionals in India are quite often paid in foreign currency at international rates to prevent brain drain and hence exports of Indian software industry is now in the range of $10 billion.

The bureaucracies of developing countries, rigid hierarchies and frustrating professional fragmentation also pushed people away. Most developing countries are a mess, a haze of over-regulated and overcomplicated bureaucracy smothering the rare flames of true entrepreneurial brilliance.

Government managers who have been utterly unsuccessful in planning for even paltry matters only creates road blocks for such citizens of developing countries who want to come back. Rhetoric aside, one question dominates my mind: do govenments of poor countries have any repatriation policy for their citizens who are highly talented and who are capable of offering prescriptions for prevailing ills? (www.asifjmir.com)

Boiling to Death

As in the experience of all other civilizations it can be with Pakistanis if its people do not recognize the principles for survival. If they failed to learn from history and recognize the future trends they will eventually go back into darkness from whence they came, and perish from the earth.

If you retrace your thoughts back to where there were those old civilizations, some five or six thousand years ago, the Egyptians, you will find that they were very intelligent, highly advanced but through corruption, selfishness, prejudice and moral degradation went into the debris of ancient history. Pakistan society, in this advanced civilization, is representing similar predilections, can also follow the same destiny and go back into the dark-age from whence it came.

Egyptian civilization has been forgotten. It went down, not just mentally, scientifically, intellectually, but also physically, to let us see and know that those who go down mentally and do not alter their ways also go down physically.

After the Independence, Pakistani society lost its vision, transformed into one of the corrupt nations worldwide, all the nasty crimes once akin to the West is now dominating its national life, and last but not the least each individual of Pakistan seems to be on the looting binge. Instead of contributing their role in nation building, Pakistanis started pillaging their own land. When the society is nurturing the same traits that caused extinction of Egyptian Civilization, why then its destiny would be any different?

The societies that sustain physically, mentally, and otherwise are those which undergo a series of divergences in development, much like the branching of a tree. The dynamic people are those who are responsive to issues, essentially open, fast paced, balanced, and tend to survive and prosper on a fairly reliable basis. Problems come to them, but they usually manage to work them out.

The struggling society of Pakistan, contrarily, outdoes the people in narrow areas of endeavor from time to time, and becoming more retarded in overall development as time goes by.

Outwardly, Pakistan is a developing society. But like a muscular athlete with a terminal cancer, a disease is eating it away from the inside. A well-balanced nation cannot be destroyed from the outside until it falls first from the inside.

No matter how well the society might arm itself against enemies outside its borders, it needs to primarily identify the more detrimental enemy. And this greatest enemy is none else but each member of Pakistani society, who place destructive devices inside their destructive minds, causing them to morally implode, like an imploding building.

Ever since its independence in 1947, Pakistani society has experienced a complete abandonment of its sense of good and evil. The true crisis of its time has nothing to do with monetary troubles, unemployment, or terrorism. The true crisis has to do with the fact that it has lost its way.

If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, the frog will immediately jump out. But if you place the frog in a pot of lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, the relaxed frog will just swim around, growing accustomed to the increasing warmth until it eventually boils to death. This is what is happening to Pakistani society and its cultural decay. It is a gradual process that slowly dulls the senses of every individual Pakistani until what was once seen as unacceptable somehow becomes acceptable.

After the death of Quaid-e-Azam, Pakistan has allowed corruption to creep into the society as a way of life. Thus, it has become desensitized to corruption and its moral judgment is impaired. Even worse, at each step along the way, it eliminated Islamic injunctions from people's lives and culture.

What will remain of civilization and history if the accumulated influence of Islam, both direct and indirect, is eradicated from literature, art, practical dealings, moral standards, and creativeness in the different activities of mind and spirit?

Consequently, a flood of immorality, corruption and violence has entered into the national life, and Pakistanis have unfortunately been recognized as a culture of death from the womb to the streets. Many of the young people of Pakistan have no concept of the true spirit of Islam and are connoting falsely to satisfy their political agendas. Hence, many are tragically engaged in dying or killing the innocents. A sense of hopelessness prevails, a feeling of fear surrounds.

Pakistani society has forgotten its true nature, divinity, because scientifically it cannot be proved! It is ignorant of true purpose of life. Values like solidarity, natural love, forbearance, compassion, generosity, and altruism do not find any place independent of an 'individual'.

The culture shows signs of degeneration into lawlessness, disease, and want on one hand, and affluence and sense gratification of wanton degree on the other. With this decline in cultural values, ethical values are also eroded. Not one particular field is afflicted with this 'virus of corruption'; all departments of human interaction show the same trend. It is difficult to find an isolated island of purity in the sea of corruption all around.

Ethics is the reflection of cultural health of the society. In course of evolution of human societies, man creates progressive cultural and moral ethos. But then a stage comes when cultural growth slows down for want of fresh ideas. Consequently ethics also remain a mere shadow of its own pervious glory. However, when matter is worshiped as supreme and privileges are sought after, ethical decline is not a surprise. The remedy lies in adding spiritual dimension to existing culture and in course evolving a new moral and ethical code for coming generations. Time is still not gone. Pakistanis can learn lessons from Egyptian civilization or else face extinction. Choice is only theirs. (www.asifjmir.com)

Anti-poor Development

The stump oratory of the rulers in developing and under developed countries reaches people about de-regulated policies and economic reforms, GDP growth rates; foreign exchange reserves, record surge in exports and also a much hyped tub thumping about foreign investment. Ipso facto, that's nothing more than fiction. The governments completely fail in trickling down benefits to the poor. Consequently, they contribute sweet nothing in reducing poverty and hunger that goes on to sustain stark national inequalities in wealth, assets, incomes and opportunities.

Consequently, millions of people drag on teir living below the poverty line. In their stated bids to ensure national security they spend more on arms and defense, and less on social security and protection, public distribution systems and welfare programs.

Poverty is on the rise. Ironically, while the rich defaulters benefit from enhanced facilities to restructure debt and continue borrowing, the overwhelming burden of national debt is borne by the poor.

Lacking job opportunities in rural areas cause migration to urban cities. This takes the form of low quality jobs in the informal economy, or in the case of women and girls, prostitution or domestic service. Migration under conditions of economic stress exacerbates food insecurity. Owing to weak national economic and social profiles of such luckless countries, the adult population can't be gainfully employed, resulting in an exhorbitant unemployment rates, plus substantial under-employment.

More and more workers, especially women, are being forced from the relatively protected formal sector to the unprotected informal sector. This is accompanied by concentration of assets and resources in the hands of the rich and newly prosperous, who have been able to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by modernization and globalization.

Graft and corruption in governments are a significant cause of continuing poverty and hunger.
Sitting in luxurious offices the economic managers of poor countries juggle with statistics rather than conducting surveys. This is often done to draw statistics acceptable to donors or financial institutions. To duck the WB in 2001, for instance, Pakistan drafted the poverty reduction strategy, just about the time when the WB initiated a new line of credit (PRGF) for countries that were equipped with such a strategy.

The increase in the tax-GDP ratio is apparently marginal but in the numerical terms, bulk of the burden is shifted from direct to the indirect taxes and the share of the regressive sales tax recovered from consumers. This affects the whole population.

The narrow focus on economic growth not only fails to eliminate poverty, it also results in policies that create new forms of, or aggravated existing conditions of poverty and hunger. Public support and subsidies are systematically torn down, and market based price systems make the primary determinant of allocation and distribution. With privatization and withdrawal of government subsidies for domestic industry, a significant proportion of the work force is shunted into the informal sector. By and large, economic growth is achieved at the cost of well being of workers, small-scale agricultural producers and consumers. The greatest beneficiaries of adjustment programs are the rich, large private producers, distributors, traders, and MNCs.

Poverty and hunger are violations of human rights. They result in exclusion and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. The human rights of people to housing, water, and sanitation—guaranteed under international law and commitments of development targets made at global summits, including the Millennium Summit and the World Summit on Sustainable Development—drag on to erode. By ratifying a number of international human rights instruments, such as, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, developing countries voluntarily accept the obligations to progressively realize human rights to food, health, adequate housing, water and sanitation, which are essential for the well being of citizens.

The developing countries need policies that protect the rights of people to water, land, forests, other natural resources, biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Policies are also needed that ensure people’s access to a services essential to their development especially among the poor and historically marginalized, this includes education, social security, healthcare and information, etc. Access must be equitable and the quality of services must not vary according to socio-economic or gender backgrounds. (www.asifjmir.com)

Academic Excellence

In 21st century there is a need to develop a new entity in higher education - one that educates and develops graduates for meeting the challenges of this century. Such an institution must emphasize the creation and development of knowledge into practical, sustainable solutions to today's problems, and the commercialization of those solutions to create wealth. This must be done within a learning community that emphasizes communication and teaming skills leading to creative problem solving and within an environment that emphasizes a sound appreciation of humanity’s ethical and moral principles. Anthony G. Collins, President of Clarkson University, has expressed this in: “The Evolution to Academic Excellence.”

He asserts that with the advent of the industrial revolution during the nineteenth century, some liberal arts institutions added faculties that supported economic growth and spurred business development. At the same time, technological institutes sprang into action to create manufacturing professionals and some colleges even specialized in the art of business itself. After WWII a new emphasis began to emerge on research - the creation of scientific knowledge.

Those who have a vision to track the process of economic development – the connection of science to engineering to business coupled with liberal arts to provide the humanistic elements are best suited to create this type of institution. Ideally this type of institution would have engineering at the core of its being and value interdisciplinary activity rather than a culture that wants to retain disciplinary purity. The very interdisciplinary intellectual capacity and fundamental mathematics and sciences needed for engineering, technology and business degrees create the academic institution of the future.

General Francis Walker, President of Massachusetts Institute of Technology once said: “In the present stage of social and industrial change, change almost bewildering in the rapidity of its movement and in the extent of the field over which it is taking place, it is most reasonable to believe that great gaps exist between the public needs and the supply of those needs by the existing institutions of learning. As a result of their freedom from obligation to the general system of education, they not only will be at liberty, but they will be strongly impelled to search out those real needs of the people in the matter of education which are at present unsupplied. It is essential to this function that they should remain in a state of flux; open to all impressions; mobile under all influences; not too soon assuming that they have found their ultimate resting place and have taken on their distinctive character.”

The mission of the institution has to be of graduating and developing students who lead and practice technology. Our focus must be on this “product.” While we must recognize the influence of nanotechnology, we have to fully grasp that “technology” and also the engineering to embrace a new knowledge-age definition that includes biotechnology and info-technology. We have to broaden our vision of technology to include contributions from the life sciences, to embrace the vitality of new disciplines within engineering, and to appreciate how businesses operate with the sophistication of integrated technology systems.

We have not recognized the dramatic changes in demographics - the changing fraction of underrepresented individuals, the geographic shifts in population centers, the socioeconomic profile of our constituents - nor have we fully recognized the need to introduce new majors to draw more women into the technological workforce so that their talents can be developed and utilized. In short, we need to and should be obligated to deliver education that is appealing to a broader range of potential students.

In addition to lagging behind in reacting to changes in student interest, the marketplace, and the demands of employers, we have failed to react to the roles our educational institutions must play in the economy. We must now recognize that the creation of knowledge can no longer be our end goal. We must also develop intellectual property, transferring technology to the marketplace, and become a central part of the economic enterprise that values innovation, creativity and creates wealth. Implicit in this direction is the development of research at all levels of the institution.

Given this unsettling background of an institution dependent upon its external environment, our institutions must revitalize higher learning in order to provide a more comprehensive, unique image that remains true to core mission and values.

The students ought to know that they are the center of the educational process and all academic staff demonstrates an unparalleled commitment to creating a person-to-person connection within our living, research and learning environments. The faculty needs to collaborate, innovate and create knowledge across disciplinary boundaries and educate students to have a particular appreciation for the opportunities that lie at the intersection of traditional disciplines.

Our campus community must stimulate the intellectual environment that attracts a diverse pool of exceptionally talented women and men who will rise to be leaders of the 21st century with the passion to create enterprises that benefit society.

The evolving strengths and vision for the future must intersect precisely with the growing technological needs of the society – a society that must depend upon a workforce capable of creating, adapting and managing technology regardless of discipline of study or natural individual talents.

To fulfill this vision for academic excellence, our educational institutions should uniquely position to further stake their legacy to society based on commitment to technology and leadership in marrying coursework, research and extracurricular pursuits in engineering, business, science, health sciences and arts.

We should create a distinctive place in the higher education order as attainable as we each ought to continue to promote and explore innovative ways to arrange the basic building blocks of traditional fields of study to reflect new avenues for interdisciplinary education, research breakthroughs, and solutions for society.

Our education system is a pack of confusion disorder. Can we transform it for delivering academic excellence as envisioned by Anthony G. Collins? (www.asifjmir.com)

Pakistan - A Country of Young Men

In more than 100 countries, people are getting not only more numerous, but younger. Youth bulges, combined with economic stagnation and unemployment, can burden these countries with disproportionately high levels of violence and unrest—severely challenging their hopes for social and economic stability. Pakistan is one such country

Pakistan currently has the largest number of young people in its history, with approximately 25 million people between the ages of 15 and 24. Pakistani youth makes up 63% and adolescents nearly 43 % of the total Pakistani population. Illiteracy, lack of awareness, poverty and dearth of focused attention to youth-related problems add to the complexity of the problems currently faced by the country in social sector development.

The predominance of young adults can be a social challenge and a political hazard. Our economy and labor markets have been unable to keep pace with population growth, contributing to high rates of unemployment. While unemployment tends to be high in Pakistan in general, it is among young adults three to five times as high as overall adult rates.

Young men in rural areas are often hardest hit relative to their expectations. Agriculture is the single largest source of livelihood worldwide, but many young rural men expecting to inherit land increasingly find themselves disinherited.

With few opportunities in rural areas, young people in Pakistan are increasingly forced to leave behind more traditional lifestyles and migrate to cities in search of work, education, and urban amenities.

Many urban areas are thus now home to significant, and potentially volatile, youth bulges. Rapidly industrializing cities and frontier areas can be spawning grounds for political unrest because thousands of young men migrate to these sites in search of already in short supply livelihoods.

Yet urbanization is proceeding faster than municipalities can provide infrastructure, services, and jobs. Municipal governments in Pakistan are the least able to muster the human and financial resources to contend with these problems, especially when the poorest, nontaxable segment of the urban population continues to grow rapidly.

Most young people, men and women, work in agriculture. Other types of work are segregated by gender, with females engaged in stitching, embroidery, and knitting (largely based at home) while young men work in factories, are self-employed, or perform skilled labor. Young people’s attitudes about gender roles remain traditional, with well-defined lines between the domains of males and females.

The UN projects that by 2007, for the first time ever, more people will be living in cities than in rural areas. This urban share could top 60 percent by 2030—with almost all of this growth projected to occur in the developing world.

We have a large number of youth between 18 and 35 who are properly educated, but have nothing to do. Urban discord, more than the rural sort, afflicts diverse social classes, including the angry unemployed. The risks of instability among youth are increased when skilled members of elite classes are marginalized by a lack of opportunity.

It isn’t difficult to find contemporary parallels. The collapse of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s in part to the mobilization of large numbers of discontented young men who were unable to put their technical educations to use due to party restrictions on entering the elite. And Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor and author of the controversial treatise on the Clash of Civilizations, has pointed to connections between tensions in the Middle East (where 65 percent of the population is under the age of 25) and the unmet expectations of skilled youth. Many Islamic countries, he argues, used their oil earnings to train and educate large numbers of young people, but with little parallel economic growth few have had the opportunity use their skills.

Pakistan where a large youth bulges, coupled with high rates of urban growth and shortages of employment opportunities, is already creating a very high risk of conflict.

The US has begun to take notice. In April 2002, in a written response to congressional questioning, the US, CIA noted that “several troublesome global trends—especially the growing demographic youth bulge in developing nations (Pakistan included) whose economic systems and political ideologies are under enormous stress—will fuel the rise of more disaffected groups willing to use violence to address their perceived grievances.” The CIA warned that current US counter-terrorist operations might not eliminate the threat of future attacks because they fail to address the underlying causes that drive terrorists.

Fortunately, demographics are not destiny. But the likelihood of future conflict may ultimately reflect how Pakistan chooses to deal with its demographic challenges.

There are nevertheless examples of some countries, where policies were in place that provided young men with occupations and opportunities—including land reform and frontier settlement schemes, migration abroad, industrialization, and the expansion of military and internal security forces. The latter strategy probably helped regimes such as North Korea, China, and Turkmenistan maintain political stability during the post-Cold War era despite large proportions of young adults.

In the short term, Pakistan government will need to tackle the underlying factors contributing to discontent among young people, including poverty and the lack of economic opportunity. And the government can address part of the risk associated with youth unemployment by investing in job creation and training, boosting access to credit, and promoting entrepreneurship.

Ultimately, however, the only way to achieve the necessary long-term changes in age structure will be through declines in fertility. Government can facilitate fertility decline by supporting policies and programs that provide access to reproductive health services—voluntary family planning services and maternal and child health programs and counseling, including providing accurate information for young adults—and by promoting policies that increase girls’ educational attainment and boost women’s opportunities for employment outside the home. (www.asifjmir.com)