PAKISTAN’S CONFLICTED CLASSES — PART 11

Being Paid to Grow up

The development of national capital and growth is associated directly with the level and reach of national education. The ruling elite’s ignorance stems from ignoring this simple fact. By believing in the redundancy of education, they forced the nation to live off epic loans from the Global North. They converted Pakistan into a basket of egotistical delusions that needed to be managed with wealth and power. As dynastic inheritors of national Sovereignty, the ruling elite intuitively bartered their “sacred inheritance” against international loans. It seemed to them to be the logical thing to do. If one can’t produce the education needed to produce value-added goods and services, how can one mind one’s business? One will be doomed to remain perpetually strapped for cash and working capital. So you take loans. What could be simpler?

It is common knowledge that the Global North still makes a substantial living by taking weak, deluded nations like Pakistan under their foster-care, giving them govt-to-govt loans, and living off the interest from loans. Even better, their leading cities rake in billions annually by offering financial money-laundering services. Their banks are awash with the earnings of corrupt ruling elites from failed states who treat national revenues as their personal fortune. But by far, the most important reason for making foolish countries chronically dependent is that it helps the Global North manage their strategic geo-political interests according to the number of captive nations in their treasure chest. Like other bottom-of-the list nations, Pakistan’s dependency was installed with the eager cooperation of the educated ruling elite.

They invited international NGO’s to swing into action and graft national social development programs that sprang all over Pakistan. It was followed by a steady mushrooming of local “implementing partners”. This class, too, came from the ruling elite who creamed off donor-funds to demonstrate to socio-medical establishments how to address the health-needs of the poor; likewise, peri-urban, rural teachers, educators would be paid by donors to learn how to teach their own children; state-owned education departments would be paid by international donors to run educational programs and projects to educate their own masses. All others, except the nation itself, pay to make Pakistan grow up and take responsibility for its own Awam!

To the Awam, all these funds appeared to come freely from above, like manna from heaven, with God’s blessings. It extinguished the need for the nation to work on developing its own knowledge-base, skills and expertise. The educated ruling elite did not have to excavate natural wealth to finance higher-end manufacturing services with their own resources.. Instead they felt grateful, even proud that their donor-linked activities could generate enough livelihoods, even subsidiary businesses, to yield tax revenues. It helped pay towards the interest charged against international loans. Escalating national debts that became the nation’s lifeline, served as a laudable source to finance the ruling elite’s lifestyles.

And so it came to pass that the entire nation was being “paid” to survive as a nation that is unable and unwilling to generate its own wealth. It was being paid to remain ignorant; paid to retain that status by displaying a sham appearance of getting educated. Far from getting an education, the nation’s future rested in the hands of untrained, semi-literate, uneducated policy-makers, educators, school principals, education-officers, teacher-trainers who spread a form of compound Ignorance via formal schooling. The toxic truth tricking down from the ruling elite regimes above, was planted deep in the fertile soil of popular ignorance:

“Education is nonsense. You don’t need it if you have wealth and power. Emulate us and you will be OK. Come under our patronage! Vote for us!”.

Root-bound and Book-bound

State-run educational institutions went about teaching all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons, with all the wrong motives and goals. They genuinely did not know any better. Even worse was their attitude of neither caring, nor wanting to know. This may be dismissed by many readers as “sheer rubbish” because it is hard to understand how it can be possible. One way to explain it is to regard education being offered as a “potted plant” that is being transferred from its old pot to the soil on the ground. If it has been in the pot for a long time, its trapped roots start to wrap all around the soil, over and over again until there is no remaining space in the pot or the soil, for it to grow.

If such a “root-bound” plant is transplanted into regular soil in such a state, the roots will remain bound and trapped, unable to free themselves to penetrate the fertile soil around it. It will remain alive but stationery inside the original potted soil. It cannot grow because its in-grown roots cannot spread. Eventually, it suffers a slow death due to starvation.

For the soil to receive the roots, the gardener has to peel the potted roots, scratch and tear them off gently, pull some of them out of the pot-soil and free them up, so that their ends dangle freely. When the plant is lifted out of the pot and transplanted into fresh, fertile soil, the root-ends having been freed, reach and penetrate the soil. The plant finally bonds with the soil. Its root connections grow out of the older soil and spread wide and deep into the new surrounding soil. When this happens, the plant finally “takes” to the new soil i.e. it can take in carbon dioxide, water, and light, and turn them into sugar and oxygen. Sugar is then used by the plants for food.

Teachers are like gardeners. They have to know and understand their content better than the print-bound content found in books. They have to use there own advanced knowledge of the subject to “peel off the content”, its print-bound roots, disentangle its meaning, flesh out its relevance and context from the book. So when they finally transplant them into the learners’ minds, they get rooted in a new cognitive eco-system. When this is done, the transferred knowledge “takes” i.e. it takes in the meaning, the understanding and the relevance just like the disentangled roots from the root-bound pot. When this is done, the knowledge spreads wide and deep in the mind. It grows, and so does the learner.

An educated elite that is knowledgeable, is one that has been able to convert print-bound knowledge (from books) into a living entity, like a sapling, in their mental and emotional universe. They know and understand what it takes to nurture it and make it grow into a bush and finally a tree, one that can bear fruits and flowers. Such ruling elites know the power of knowledge acquisition and by association, of education. With this in their arsenal, they are well-equipped to generate school-reforms. They know how to remove impediments created by culture, poor education or simply due to self-denial and delusion.

What is tragic, therefore, is how the ruling elite’s ignorance-driven attitude is inevitably replicated by the Awam. They take their lessons from those they look up to, those they trust to be truly wealthy and powerful. Among the many bad lessons the Awam has learned from the bad examples of the shallow ruling classes, the worst is: ”if they are wealthy and powerful, they must be knowledgeable”.

It feels good and right, for the Awam to offer their allegiance to the ruling elite just as the ruling elite feel good and right about offering their allegiance to the Global North. (“They are wealthy and powerful. So they must be knowledgeable!”).

This pair of duplicated attitudes and behaviors are in sync. They are interconnected and carry some political traction. If the ruling elite betray the Awam’s expectations, then they bear the risk of the Awam voting into power a rival predator Dynastic mafia as their “new king”.

This is democracy at work.

(To be continued, Part 12)

Copyright © September, 2023 Shad Moarif ALL RIGHTS RESERVED