45
SOMEBODY once said that if you have one good suit and can speak fluent English, you won’t starve in Pakistan.
This is probably true, for it implies that you were most probably born into a well-connected family that sent you to an (expensive) English-medium school where you acquired a network of useful friends. And a well-cut suit can get you into most weddings where you can get a free meal.
All this is bad news for the vast majority who aren’t similarly privileged. With a small pie to start with, the elite grab a larger portion before the young have even put a foot on the ladder of adulthood. This injustice is largely due to our skewed educational system that perpetuates the social divide through its emphasis on the English language. Although many of them teach at a mediocre level at best, the label ‘English medium’ encourages less affluent parents to send their kids in the hope that they will have a better chance to get ahead than they did.
Poorer, mostly illiterate parents send their sons to madressahs which graduate them with virtually no skills other than a rote learning of the holy texts. This qualifies them to work at mosques; the worse options are lives of crime or ‘jihad’, both careers often cut short.
The third and most desirable educational choice that opens many doors is admission to the good private schools that teach in English at a high standard. Very few of these exist and places are much sought after. Parents pay high premiums, including contributions to ‘development funds’, apart from an advance on fees. This buys their children openings into the corporate sector, the civil service or the possibility of setting up their own business.
Pakistan should invest in translating foreign titles.
This lottery of life exists all over the world, with the privileged able to launch their children into the world with an edge over other, less advantaged kids. However, in few other countries is the divide as sharp as in Pakistan.
An old friend wrote recently about the unfairness of the existing emphasis on English. According to her, perfectly bright young people were denied opportunities due to their poor grasp of the English language. She singled out the IT profession where, according to her, fluency in English was not really a prerequisite for excellence in technical skills.
I put this to a highly successful young entrepreneur who hires many IT engineers. According to him, while many non-English speaking staff were very competent, to get to the next level of creative coding, they needed to read advanced computer textbooks which were all in English.
When I was president of a private university that specialised in textiles, I insisted on a minimum level of proficiency in English, not because it was necessary to run weaving and spinning machines, but as it opened up the world to graduates. After all, the word ‘university’ derives from ‘universe’, implying the ability to acquire knowledge in a range of subjects, and not just textiles. Then, of course, employers needed people who could correspond with buyers around the world.
One reason Urdu has fared poorly in the marketplace is the lack of translated books. Although politicians and judges have been droning on about the need to use Urdu in official correspondence, the fact is that they send their own children to the best English-medium schools available locally, and then to private colleges and universities abroad. To be honest, this is the route my son took, and neither he nor I have any regrets.
Without a regular supply of translated books, both fiction and non-fiction, combined with an abysmally low number of Urdu books published, you can see why we are sliding backwards so fast. Let me give some numbers to underline this point:
While Iran, with a population of 70 million published 73,000 titles in 2014, Pakistan managed just 4,000. In fact, this pattern is repeated in the Arab world. The total number of books translated by 22 Arab countries with a population of 300m over the last 1,000 years is less than the number Spain translates in one year. Eleven million Greeks translate five times more books than 300m Arabs.
This one fact goes a long way in explaining the backwardness of most Muslim countries. However, Iran with a proud, ancient civilisation is clearly an exception: it has a thriving translation cottage industry, with the state employing scores who translate hundreds of technical books a year. Private publishers offer many foreign titles in Farsi, making the latest books available to their readers.
So until the Pakistani state puts its money where its mouth is, and actually invests in publishing and translating in a serious way, nothing will change. We will continue to graduate young people who have been effectively excluded from the global market of ideas.
The poverty we are so indifferent to is clearly unsustainable.
Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2017
