WITH rapid industrial and technological advancements, the educational landscape has evolved to a great extent. But maximum efforts are being made to align the educational system with the needs and demands of the industrial sector. This industry-education alignment concentrates on skill-based education, a standardised curriculum and assessment, alongside homogeneous or one-size-fits-all global education reform initiatives.

The transformation in industrial trends generates new skills, which leads to new educational goals and learning milestones, making it more of an employment-oriented education system that requires graduates for industrial production. Although job security is the state’s responsibility, learning has now become a means to an end — make investment to get returns on investment in the form of a job. Individuals are responsible for both success and failure as well as job attainment.

But the controlled purpose of learning prevents a broader understanding of and participation in a social-ecological framework. Education has fundamentally become a private good, determined by the need and satisfaction of private desires rather than a tool of societal progress and evolution.

Educational researcher Gert Biesta has used the term ‘learnification’ for marketised learning, which favours data-intensive practices. Learning has also become unidimensional in the areas of policy, research and practice; ‘what’ is learnt and ‘why’ it is learnt are obscured as the purpose is limited to excelling in a particular skill set and on being beneficial for industrial production.

What is important is a shift in the purpose of learning.

In learnification, the primary focus is on a procedural array of policies and practices, individual learning and measurable outcomes. The datafication of learning for its development and outcomes is the norm in the post-digital era. The most relevant examples are standardised exams, uniform learning designs and pedagogies with grades or scores being the focal point of parental, societal and industrial goals, which drive the economic success of education providers. Quantification is the only measure of learning and success in the education system.

By categorising learning as an easily quantifiable sphere, we overlook the wider functions of education, such as critical thinking, individual growth, social engagement and societal well-being. Consequently, a large number of exam toppers are hardly a reflection of social advancement, even in basic forms such as abiding by traffic laws and being punctual.

The instructional practices simply transfer a standardised curriculum to passive learners — a monologue-oriented curriculum with stratified capital resources ignores the ground realities of a diverse educational landscape, yet expects all learners to excel equally. Our pedagogies prepare students for exams rather than nurture them as drivers of social change.

In the same learnification landscape, our policies and educational management remain more administrative than academic, trapped in superficial measures of quantification such as staff attendance through biometric attendance systems. Instead, it should analyse and nourish the academic rigour, contribution to learning improvements and social benefits.

Renowned scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux, therefore, terms such standardisation and quantification of education as ‘neoliberal pedagogical terrorism’, as it curtails any collective struggle to preserve education as the process of creating critical citizens who contribute to social advancem­e­­nt. Instead, it has a corporate drive for efficiency through standardisation, rigid testing and accountability met­hods and privatisa-tion.

While the number of out-of-school children is becoming a national crisis, those in school are left with poor learning. Moreover, unemployment and the rapid growth in population have become key reasons for the increase in school dropouts.

Societies such as Pakistan, unfortunately, fall into this learnification trap, which is asymmetrical to their societal and structural fabrication. Hence, the country faces mass joblessness. The state offers extensions in the employment age limit as a remedy, which further increases the unemployment rate.

What is important is a shift in the purpose of learning; it must move away from corporate or industrial uplift and job-oriented perspective to societal well-being, with bottom-up education for productive learners as opposed to passive ones.

Education should not only produce skilled human capital but also nurture them holistically to address diverse societal needs so that they can contribute to the collective social good. Potential learners need to be sensible human beings, responsible citizens and drivers of social change.

The writer is an educationist.

Published in Dawn, September 10th, 2024