fnalanalysis

We have a Problem…
Mashhood Rizvi

The Education & Development 'industries', created during the past four decades to respond to a global commitment for alleviating poverty and seeking global equality, are in a state of disarray. The landscape is littered with evidence of the failures of development efforts. The largest multilateral and bilateral assistance agencies have responded to this failure by focusing once again on accelerating economic growth. They claim that if adequate growth rates can be sustained, the poor will be swept along with the tide of rising income and will ‘somehow’ have access to all necessities of life. This argument is reassuring, but it reflects a more hopeful myth than a pragmatic reality. The reality is that the poor are caught in the cycle of flood and drought, desertification, communal violence, unrestrained population growth, wretched educational facilities and the ebbing employment and income generation opportunities. Education & Development have become big businesses, preoccupied more with their own growth and incentives than with the people both were originally created to serve.

It is becoming evident that the hope for dealing with the global education and development crisis rests not with these industries, but with the great social movements of contemporary societies such as peace and social justice. It rests with people who are driven by a strong social commitment rather than by the budgetary imperatives of huge global bureaucracies. It rests in particular with the more forward public and private institutes of the South that find themselves immersed in the political, educational, environmental, and economic struggles of the poor with whom they work and who lack the luxury of closing their eyes to the real nature of the problem. Yet the South remains dependent on Northern donors whose funding policies and procedures are grounded in old myths about development and the processes by which it is achieved.

A Need for Change...

The need for change has become increasingly evident. Yet our ability to take corrective action continues to be inhibited by an interlocking set of interests that are sustained and legitimized by a development vision based on flawed assumptions about our natural and social reality. In order to overturn this inability, we at the Sindh Education Foundation, through EDucate! strive to be a part of past, present and future efforts aimed at establishing an intellectual basis for us to realize that the critical issue of this century is not economic growth; it is social transformation. We believe that our collective future depends on achieving a complete transformation of our institutions, our technology, our values and our behaviors consistent with our ecological and social realities. The future editions of EDucate! will hopefully provoke readers to rethink and acknowledge that real transformatory efforts must address three basic needs of our local, national, regional and global society:

Future editions of EDucate! will focus on these issues from a social and human perspective. The content of EDucate! will not be restricted to issues of Education and Development in Pakistan but will strive to highlight and discuss global concerns and translate those into local social realities. It should be borne in mind that EDucate! is not a despairing effort but should be conceived as a ray of optimism and hope even in the not-so-hopeful scenario. Its philosophy is not based on any ideology or social system neither is it projecting any - its essentials are humanity and social justice. And, its purpose is definitely not to attack any institution or individual. The entire effort can be summed up in Noam Chomsky’s words, “I would like to believe that people have an instinct for freedom, that they really want to control their own affairs. They don’t want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed, etc., and they want a chance to do things that make sense, like constructive work in a way they control, or maybe control together with others. I don’t know any way to prove this. It’s really a hope about what human beings are like, a hope that if social structures change sufficiently, those aspects of human nature will be realized.”...