By Omar Javaid
The idea of entrepreneurship being a viable, lucrative and possible career option is being promoted all across the country keeping in view the economic challenges such as unemployment; the untapped opportunities & potential we have.
The system of education which the country has been following up till now was developed & perfected to meet the requirements of a very different kind of circumstances. 2013 TED prize winner and renowned educationist Sugata Mitra explains it as a perfect system to produce managers for a Weberian style bureaucratic machinery which in fact still exists, but perhaps not for so long. The graduating students were/are considered as standardized 'products' as if they were coming out of an assembly line. Renowned educationist and thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson, Noam Chomsky, Seth Godin, and futurist Alvin Tofler has compared the traditional design of education system with the design of a factory intended to transform students into subservient beings who submits themselves to the rules of the organization and authority, who are void of any critical thinking, have identical dialects, who largely thinks and stays within the box and are afraid of experimentation and making mistakes or take risks.
Individual with such a mindset was perhaps the requirement of the industrial age type highly structured and hierarchical organizations, however today a great shift is taking place in the institutional formations all over the world, and more broadly in the nature of socioeconomic and political challenges emerging in the post-modern information age, rendering the industrial age approach a thing of the past.
This new age requires a new type of individual equipped with a skill set and a mindset capable of meeting the emerging demands in the future; most critical of these demands is creation of employment opportunities. The large private sector organizations from the past has not been very successful in doing so. According to former labor secretary of USA Robert Reich, billionaire venture capitalist Nick Haunar, and award winning journalist Naomi Klein, this is due to the primary commitment of large global organizations to their share holder's value, for the sake of which they outsource their labor intensive jobs to cheapest labor provider in the world or they automate, and during financial crisis they brutally downsize their workforce to save the majority share holders. Such a model is not sustainable for the world's economy, let alone that of Pakistan.
Milford Bateman in his research has argued that it is the strengthening of small and medium size industry of the country which increases the employment. Having said this creation of new organic & flexible business models is therefore inevitable for bringing an economic turn around. The kind of business administrators and managers being produced by business schools all across the world so far are not quite well equipped with the necessary skill set for such a revolutionary task.
This new individual which we must produce would poses an ability to think independently and critically, learn and create on his own, is street-smart, not afraid to experiment, not afraid to failing and trying again, a connector, a leader, a life long learner, and most significantly a socially responsible individual having an abundance mentality. It is inevitable to cultivate such traits among students to transform them into entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks and create sustainable ventures.
Generally speaking it is the formal and informal interaction between the teacher and students, the student to student interaction particularly with the senior ones, and the mechanism of reward and punishments within and outside the class room, transforms a students behavior during the time he or she spent in an educational institution. It is these critical cultural components which we need to effectively transform to create an atmosphere conducive enough to produce the desired outcome. Only changing the course outlines, and or just adding on the number of courses on entrepreneurship will not solve the problem.
On of the fundamental change in our pedagogical methods which needs to be stressed upon is incorporation of experiential learning in our approach. This is a top down approach where the students are first confronted with the problem and work around by exploring, researching and experimenting on how the problem would be solve. The most revolutionary aspects of this approach is recognition of mistakes as acceptable rather then reprehensible due to the learning in the process.
This is revolutionary because in traditional bottom up approach students are expected to digest various theories and facts, where mistakes leads to deduction in marks, hence instilling a fear of failure and fear of not knowing. In experiential approach not knowing something is re-branded as curiosity and fear of failure is replaced with excitement of discovery, therefore transforming two key psychological barriers into a catalysts for the life long learning process and while planting the seed for the entrepreneurial spirit or risk taking.
Such fundamental and revolutionary changes are inevitable if we ought to transform our education system to meet up with the challenges of a new age which our coming generations will encounter after us. "Great transformations" as the great economist & historian Karl Polyani has put it, may not be unfathomable as they have occurred before, however victorious are the ones who foresee it coming and poses enough humility to embrace it, not the ones who remain in the state of denial and hubris. The choice is indeed ours.
The idea of entrepreneurship being a viable, lucrative and possible career option is being promoted all across the country keeping in view the economic challenges such as unemployment; the untapped opportunities & potential we have.
The system of education which the country has been following up till now was developed & perfected to meet the requirements of a very different kind of circumstances. 2013 TED prize winner and renowned educationist Sugata Mitra explains it as a perfect system to produce managers for a Weberian style bureaucratic machinery which in fact still exists, but perhaps not for so long. The graduating students were/are considered as standardized 'products' as if they were coming out of an assembly line. Renowned educationist and thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson, Noam Chomsky, Seth Godin, and futurist Alvin Tofler has compared the traditional design of education system with the design of a factory intended to transform students into subservient beings who submits themselves to the rules of the organization and authority, who are void of any critical thinking, have identical dialects, who largely thinks and stays within the box and are afraid of experimentation and making mistakes or take risks.
Individual with such a mindset was perhaps the requirement of the industrial age type highly structured and hierarchical organizations, however today a great shift is taking place in the institutional formations all over the world, and more broadly in the nature of socioeconomic and political challenges emerging in the post-modern information age, rendering the industrial age approach a thing of the past.
This new age requires a new type of individual equipped with a skill set and a mindset capable of meeting the emerging demands in the future; most critical of these demands is creation of employment opportunities. The large private sector organizations from the past has not been very successful in doing so. According to former labor secretary of USA Robert Reich, billionaire venture capitalist Nick Haunar, and award winning journalist Naomi Klein, this is due to the primary commitment of large global organizations to their share holder's value, for the sake of which they outsource their labor intensive jobs to cheapest labor provider in the world or they automate, and during financial crisis they brutally downsize their workforce to save the majority share holders. Such a model is not sustainable for the world's economy, let alone that of Pakistan.
Milford Bateman in his research has argued that it is the strengthening of small and medium size industry of the country which increases the employment. Having said this creation of new organic & flexible business models is therefore inevitable for bringing an economic turn around. The kind of business administrators and managers being produced by business schools all across the world so far are not quite well equipped with the necessary skill set for such a revolutionary task.
This new individual which we must produce would poses an ability to think independently and critically, learn and create on his own, is street-smart, not afraid to experiment, not afraid to failing and trying again, a connector, a leader, a life long learner, and most significantly a socially responsible individual having an abundance mentality. It is inevitable to cultivate such traits among students to transform them into entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks and create sustainable ventures.
Generally speaking it is the formal and informal interaction between the teacher and students, the student to student interaction particularly with the senior ones, and the mechanism of reward and punishments within and outside the class room, transforms a students behavior during the time he or she spent in an educational institution. It is these critical cultural components which we need to effectively transform to create an atmosphere conducive enough to produce the desired outcome. Only changing the course outlines, and or just adding on the number of courses on entrepreneurship will not solve the problem.
On of the fundamental change in our pedagogical methods which needs to be stressed upon is incorporation of experiential learning in our approach. This is a top down approach where the students are first confronted with the problem and work around by exploring, researching and experimenting on how the problem would be solve. The most revolutionary aspects of this approach is recognition of mistakes as acceptable rather then reprehensible due to the learning in the process.
This is revolutionary because in traditional bottom up approach students are expected to digest various theories and facts, where mistakes leads to deduction in marks, hence instilling a fear of failure and fear of not knowing. In experiential approach not knowing something is re-branded as curiosity and fear of failure is replaced with excitement of discovery, therefore transforming two key psychological barriers into a catalysts for the life long learning process and while planting the seed for the entrepreneurial spirit or risk taking.
Such fundamental and revolutionary changes are inevitable if we ought to transform our education system to meet up with the challenges of a new age which our coming generations will encounter after us. "Great transformations" as the great economist & historian Karl Polyani has put it, may not be unfathomable as they have occurred before, however victorious are the ones who foresee it coming and poses enough humility to embrace it, not the ones who remain in the state of denial and hubris. The choice is indeed ours.
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