Modern Education

By
Prof.Zia-Ul-Haq Husamuddin

We dont need no education.

We dont need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher, leave those kids alone.
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!
All in all its just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

The above lyrics of the Pink Floyd’s song say a lot about the
attitude of young people about education. Will Durant said
“Education is the transmission of civilization” and to create
transmission of civilization what is needed is a “system” of
education. Is the system working? Let us look at some of the
statistics, education starts with literacy, according to
UNESCO which conducted a survey few years ago stated
26% of the people in the world are illiterate, that will be
about 1 billion people. If you believe that those 74% who
are literate are better than the illiterate’s then you will be
surprised to know that in a country like United states of
America where there is 99% literacy, a third of the
employees in the nations blue chip companies wrote poorly
and business are spending $3.1 billion dollars every year on
remedial training. That is a kind of money which can feed
the whole of Africa for many days. People might be literate
but the quality of literacy is inefficient, I realized this when I
was working for a language institute and majority of the
students their came from English medium schools with over
12 years of education but the problem is they cant speak or
write in English properly. If you can imagine this is the state
of literacy then you can also imagine the state of technical
and professional education.

Many nations spend more

money on defense than education. Professional education
such as medicine is very expensive and competitive which
leads to fewer people doing these courses and this creates
problems, such as African and Asian countries suffer from
lack of good health care but there is acute shortage of
doctors, in China there are only 1.06 % doctors per 1000
people worst than Cuba where the average per 1000 people
is 5.91.

The modern education is depriving

students of moral values; one reason might be due to
extensive commercialization of education. Where the college
management sees students as customers and would not like
to upset them by moral rules and regulations.

The modern education can be more

effective and can contribute to the upliftment of society and
eradication of poverty if it is affordable, easily accessible and
creates awareness about environment and human rights.