Educational Planning at Akhuwat University

It is a simple fact that the education we provide to our children shapes the future of the nation. From personal observation over twenty-five years, I can testify that our educational processes destroy the potential of our students, instead of building it. Furthermore, this problem can easily be remedied by adopting Islamic models of education, instead of mindless imitation of Western models which currently dominates the field. It is horrifying to contemplate the enormous amount of time we waste, teaching materials of zero value to the cream of our youth. But this disastrous educational methodology also means that there is enormous potential for improvement.

Meaningful discussion of educational policy must begin with recognition of the dramatic differences between the English-speaking elites and the vernacular classes. The foreign exchange spent by the elites on taking exams from England exceeds by far the government budget for primary schooling for the masses. This discussion is mainly about the non-English speaking masses, and not about the English-speaking elites. Our educational system fails the masses on all fronts. It does not prepare them for life, does not provide job skills, and does not create understanding of the forces which shape the world around us. One critical barrier is the medium of instruction, which is English. Whereas our elites speak English from early childhood, the masses never acquire proficiency in this language. This makes it impossible for them to master complex materials from an alien culture in a foreign language. Instead, rote learning of a narrowly circumscribed set of topics makes a mockery of the concept of education.

The single most important policy for the future of Pakistan would be the provision of equal educational opportunities for all the children of Pakistan. For the long-run, this would provide far greater returns than any of the standard set economic policies being touted as the solution to our current economic problems. If we could create the feeling of being united like one body, so that the whole feels the pain of any part. If we could treat all children of Pakistan as our own, this would be sufficient to change the future of the nation. I am not asking for the moon; all I would like is that, within the means available to us, we provide the best possible education to all our children, irrespective of their social class. Given the current setup, where what the elites spend on their children’s education exceeds by far the government budget for educating the masses, this seems like a pie-in-the-sky dream. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I hope to describe the first few steps in this post, in the context of a very practical example of Akhuwat University.

It is the dreamers and the visionaries who change the destiny of nations. Pakistan is fortunate to have been blessed by many visionaries, including Dr. Amjad Saqib. He is famous globally for introducing interest-free Islamic microfinance, which was considered impossible by many. Over the past two decades, Akhuwat has made interest free loans of billions of Rupees to millions of people, and lifted countless out of poverty. As an extension of this vision, Akhuwat University was launched about four years ago, to provide completely free education to the poor. Currently, it has only BS IT, BS Econ and a Diploma in Tourism and Hospitality. It chooses students from all provinces of Pakistan, and strives to integrate them in the hostels.   

When Dr. Amjad Saqib asked me to head the Economics Department at Akhuwat, I accepted the challenge. I was confident that I could teach economics in a way that would be far superior to what is currently available in Pakistan. Having studied economics throughout my career, I have become deeply aware of the failings of the subject. For starters, modern economics was developed by Western authors for Western economies, and is blind to the economic problems facing Pakistan. So, it is easily possible to provide a far superior approach, which would give students insights into the Pakistani Economy, instead of the US Economy. I wrote up an initial plan for pedagogical changes in the BS Econ program here: Akhuwat University: A Paradigm Shift in Education.

After spending some time on campus, and meetings with students and faculty, I realized that my initial plans for revising the Economics curriculum had many defects. What I wanted to teach our students was not compatible with HEC requirements for the BS Econ degree. Furthermore, it required a lot of reading materials in English. The teachers were not available to teach this program. And the students did not have sufficient English skills as well as maturity to read the materials available. Furthermore, if by some miracle, all of these problems could be overcome, students with a highly unorthodox training in Economics would face great difficulty in a market where conventional teaching is prized. On the other hand, if we taught a conventional economics degree, it did not seem likely that our students could rise above second-rate copies of the best programs in Pakistan. Based on these considerations, I decided to drop the BS Economics program, and replace it with a BBA program, designed to make students self-sufficient after four years of Education.

To support and justify this change, I made a presentation to the Senior Management at Akhuwat University. The audio recording of the introduction by Dr. Amjad Saqib, followed by my discussion of the planned change, is given below. A brief summary of the highlights of the talk is given below. You can also access the complete audio file for the meeting.

started by noting that the faculty and staff must buy in to the vision of Dr. Amjad Saqib, to make it sustainable in the long-run. And what is the vision we need? We want to create a model for Islamic Education, which is very different from the Capitalist Educational paradigm which dominates the market and mindsets. The educational model we are all familiar with is a market transaction, where services of a teacher are purchased for teaching a specific subject to a group of students. In the Islamic paradigm, a teacher is in loco parentis, and acts as a guide, counsellor, confidante, and life-coach to the students. For more details, see Islamic Pedagogy.

We want to design education so that the students become self-sufficient after four years. They should acquire life-skills, character, awareness of their social, civic and religious responsibilities. They should be able to understand the forces which shape the world around us. They should also be able to provide for themselves, without being dependent on vagaries of the job market. This requires substantial changes in the substance and style of pedagogy.

We would like to put Character Building at the center of our curriculum. But this is now a lost art, and we need to rediscover effective methods of achieving this goal. We want to students to be service oriented, not to seek fame, status, and luxuries, for themselves. In a fascinating book, Julie Reuben (The Making of the Modern University) has documented how the mission of character building was central to education in the early 20th century, but was dropped completely by mid-century. A university education provided technical skills only, with no discussion of the higher purposes, ideals and dreams which shape our lives. As a consequence, David Halberstam has documented in his book The Brightest and Best, that the best educational institutes of USA turned out people who could engage in mass murders in Vietnam without any moral compunctions.

All over Pakistan, we see high losses in inefficiencies due to corruption. But this is because character development is simply not a part of education. If we could just one objective: create honesty and integrity in our students, that would be enough to create a revolution. But this is a big ask which required coordinated efforts on multiple fronts. At the same time, if we do not even try for it, we will never make any progress.

Since it seems impossible to achieve the desired goals from a BA Econ, it seems advisable to shift to a BBA. But our planned BBA is different from LUMS/IBA style, which aims to equip students with skills to land jobs in the corporate sector. We want to produce job-creators and not job seekers. One of the books of Dr. Amjad Saqib entitled “Successful People” describes the life histories of our indigenous business communities and their methods for doing business. These models are radically different from the ones taught at Harvard Business School, and imitated at our local universities, without any understanding of the differences in our environment. Fortunately, Dr Shahid Qureshi and associates at IBA have created an entrepreneurship program which teaches the principles of doing business in an Islamic style. This program has enjoyed huge success, and turned out thousands of successful entrepreneurs. We hope to launch our BBA program with a tentative title “Chinioti – Memon School of Business” and differentiate ourselves strongly from the general trend of BBA programs currently available. Hopefully, our new BBA program will instill our students with the confidence and capabilities to launch their own business, and become job creators instead of job seekers.