‘I DO not care what career it is, as long as I can make a lot of money.’ This was the gist of the responses by a significant number of students in recent research conducted by our university.

Preparing students for careers is one of the aims of education — the economic aim. Education, of course, has other worthwhile aims too: inspiring the pursuit of truth, nurturing emotional and moral maturity, boosting creative expression and creating an informed sense of belonging. In recent decades, in Pakistan and elsewhere, the economic aim has come to dominate other educational goals, with significantly harmful consequences.

Though building one’s earning capacity has always been an aim of education, it has become prominent in modern education systems, which were created explicitly to meet society’s industrial and bureaucratic needs. Over the past 40 years, the pecuniary focus has become all-embracing, much like the boat being flooded with water rather than floating on top of it. This is due to the deliberate dismantling of public services, the encouragement of market-based approaches and privatisation in all walks of life, and the resulting growing inequities in wealth distribution — an era known as neoliberal. Like much else, education is seen as an investment for future higher returns.

There are many manifestations of the overshadowing of education by economics. One is the strongly held assumption that the job market is a given and that education must adapt to it; there is the perennial complaint that the graduates weren’t fit for the jobs. The economic focus also leads to grade obsession in schools, with teachers attributing exam-centric teaching to parental demands. Parents, in turn, argue that they are not being materialistic but rather reasonable, given the shrinking quality of public services and the need for individuals and families to fund education, healthcare needs, retirement living and emergencies. Perhaps that same reasoning underpinned the student responses noted above.

Economics dictating education has also led to the growth of adjunct faculty in universities, the closure of humanities departments, and revenue generation becoming an exceedingly important criterion in faculty promotion. Furthermore, research priorities are driven by funding agencies rather than the professional interests of scholars. Finally, most government reform projects focus on economically attractive subjects like science, math and English.

There are many manifestations of the overshadowing of education by economics.

One would have been fine with the lengthening economic shadow over education had our present system led to a fair distribution of wealth and an excellent quality of life for all or at least the vast majority. But this is not the case, and we have, instead, escalating concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, with dangerous social and political consequences. Today, over 75 per cent of global wealth is possessed by 10pc of the wealthiest people; 22pc of the wealth is with the next 40pc wealthy people, leaving the bottom 50pc with only 2pc.

As fewer and fewer resources are sought by more and more people, competition — a potentially healthy wellspring of achievements — mutates into a constant source of stress, precarity and feelings of being inadequate. Competition is glorified to promote the idea that individuals are solely responsible for their fate and that the structures of society, such as the skewed distribution of wealth and moral luck, have nothing to do with it. Writers such as Gabor Maté, Shoshana Zuboff, Jonathan Haidt and Michael Sandel, among others, have persuasively shown the disastrous social, psychological and political impacts of unchecked capitalism and the resulting wealth inequities.

Can education reclaim its right to focus on multiple aims by cutting economic goals to size? I propose three ideas focused on the individual, institutional and structural levels.

At the individual level, schools should help young people discover and nurture their passions. The unadulterated pursuit of material success is often a compensation for the lack of joy and meaning in work and social relations. A fulfilled inner life encourages cooperation, shifting from schadenfreude (pleasure in others’ failures) to freudenfreude (joy in others’ success). With a cooperative spirit, the planet’s resources can meet everyone’s needs.

Second, at the institutional level, a conceptual and practical separation of lower grades of schools from higher grades is needed. The lower grades, till age 12, should be devoted to fostering morals, emotions, imagination, and literacies of various kinds (computer, languages, math, science), artistic talent and a love for knowledge through intrinsic rewards.

There should be no concern for grades or careers, only for cultivating humanity. Here alternative schools such as the Waldorf, Shantiniketan, democratic schools, forest schools, the Sudbury model and Summerhill can provide inspiration. The higher grades, age 13 and upwards, by when the foundations of personality are laid, could then be concerned equally with economic aim through engaging in subjects and skills that would eventually lead to qualifications of various kinds.

Finally, we come to the structural level. The problem discussed here is not organic to education. It is in the larger economic structure whose flaws are borne by education. Parents are reasonable in their expectations from education. Hence, a new social contract is needed that ensures that the basic human needs of all are met through the market and robust publicly funded health and education systems. This requires a thorough recasting of the dominant economic approaches that currently work for a few and against the many.

The three proposals are interlinked but can also be approached independently. Any school can pursue the first individual-level proposal. The second requires a system-wide effort and the third requires citizenry activism and political reforms. James Baldwin noted that ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ We have attempted to face the issue.

The writer is a professor and dean, Institute for Educational Development, Aga Khan University.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2024