Poverty of Nations: Quality Education and National Development with Special Reference to South Asia

By Namdar Khan

Poverty of Nations, by Professor Namdar Khan (1915 – 2002), is a book on education and development for all nations of the world—not just the poor but the rich nations as well. Namdar was a famous educationist from British India, Pakistan, and the United States, whose message was clear that the resources of the world are unnecessarily absconded by the rich and the corrupt, and ignoring the vast majority of the world’s poor and underdeveloped nations is a mistake. His main message was that one day the poor will become a huge problem for the rich—and the main culprit is, and will remain, the lack of education and skills. His remedy was that the rich and poor nations alike must provide resources and skills to its populations. He emphasized that education is not just schooling and college degrees, but includes the whole spectrum of learning, including job skills, trade and vocational training, women’s education, adult education, rural education, teacher education, and basic electronics, mechanical, and other technical and vocational trade skills.

Namdar was in a unique position in Pakistan, where, after the British India Partition, the country was left with a poorly educated labor force with little or no skills, and not much education, either. The local and migrant population that moved to Pakistan in 1947 was basically comprised of unskilled labor. The British and Hindu merchants had left many operating factories, mills, and industries in Pakistan, but the labor force did not have even the basic of skills to operate them. Fortunately for Pakistan, Namdar was in a unique position to create public and education policy in the early days of the young nation—and he developed a comprehensive plan for education and training at all levels. The plan, when implemented, became so successful in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that Pakistan experienced a mini industrial growth period, including export of skilled labor in trades to Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian countries. Other nations came to Namdar for adopting the plan for their own—including China, South Korea, Singapore, and Malaysia—all of which are the most advanced economies in Asia and the world.

Although the data and statistics used by Namdar in this book seem old, the message provided by him to the world is timeless. In today’s world, we are experiencing the onset of climate change and other natural calamities and disasters, thus, the population will either need to relocate or adapt. People may need to hone new job skills and trade skills. In other words, Namdar’s warnings are more relevant than ever, and the need to pledge support for education and changing job skills is even greater for the poor and rich nations alike. This book is a must-read for everyone, but most importantly for economic, political, and education policy makers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jamshed Khan
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463528341

Book preview

PREFACE

by

Professor Charles S. Benson

This is a book about the central problem of our age. Each year, a rising number of people are born into abject poverty. This tragic fact stands alongside another fact, namely, that the rate of exploitation of expendable resources of our planet rises decade by decade. Some feast exceedingly well at the world’s banquet table, but the crumbs that the rich drop do not suffice to succor the poor. As Robert McNamara stated at the annual meeting of the world bank, Nairobi, on September 24, 1973,

Absolute poverty is a condition of life so degraded by disease, illiteracy, malnutrition, and squalor as to deny its victims basic human necessities; a condition of life so limited as to prevent realization of the genes with which one is born; a condition of life so degrading as to insult human dignity; and yet a condition of life so common as to be the lot of some 40 percent of the peoples of the developing countries."

And the largest number of persons in abject poverty, by far, live in South Asia.

Professor Namdar Khan is uniquely prepared to examine the contribution that education has made to the eradication of poverty in the Third World, and he writes with special competence about the problems of education and development in South Asia. During my own brief tenure as foreign educational advisor in the subcontinent, I found his name to hold the highest respect among educators in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Professor Namdar Khan brings to bear a lifetime of observation and reflection on the accomplishments, the shortfalls, and the potential of educational systems for promoting growth and ending poverty.

No honest student of public policy can now claim that state-supported education has not been particularly helpful to unnumbered millions of poor people in the Third World. As John Simmons has written:

During the past ten years many observers have noted that formal education was failing to meet the needs of the poor majority. Formal education provided training for urban white-collar jobs while lost jobs, and most skills required for development, tended to be manual and in rural areas. Moreover, students from poor families are usually unable to continue formal education to the university level. Instead of acquiring useful skills, the poor are usually taught by formal education that they are inferior. (The Education Dilemma, New York, Pergamon Press, 1980, p. 7).

Professor Namdar Khan helps us understand why such a summary statement may be true by revealing the details of how educational systems function in the Third World, and it is in the details that the truth lies.

It is not enough, nevertheless, either to deplore or to explain the failures of education systems toward poor people. Education remains a necessary condition for individual advancement. Hence, one needs to imagine that educational systems can be changed to become more relevant for poor people and more accessible to them as well. I can happily report that Professor Namdar Khan shows us precisely what steps Third World countries need to take to bring about these changes that are so urgently needed.

University of California

Berkeley, June 1983

PREFACE

to the second edition of

Poverty of Nations

by

Mr. Humayun Namdar Khan

Mr. Jamshed Namdar Khan

1

In early 2000s, a delegation of Pakistan’s education ministry visited South Korea to study their education system for its success and achievement, and how their educational success supported their economic growth after the Korean War, and in particular their exponential growth since the mid-1960s. This delegation visited the Korean education minister, who was a little surprised that a Pakistani education delegation would visit South Korea for this purpose. He asked his staff member if they had the country right, only to confirm that it was truly Pakistan. He called the delegation into his office and asked them again if they were really an education delegation from Pakistan. This was a strange encounter and the Pakistani delegation was confused why the minister repeatedly asked for confirmation.

As the meeting went on with introductions and pleasantries, the South Korean minister paused and asked his staff member to go back to the library and bring a particular paper for the discussion. The minister was very proud that this paper set their country’s guidelines and changed their strategy on education and economic development, and they have used these guidelines again and again whenever they went off track. The Pakistani delegation was also excited, as they were ready to review this paper and learn South Korea’s secrets.

After about half an hour, the staff member brought back a bound journal one inch thick. The delegation thought this must be a simple plan. But surprise! The paper was a short strategy prepared by none other than the Pakistani government, which was prepared for its third five-year plan (1965 – 1970) during the presidency of Ayub Khan, and the main author for the education and training section was none other than Professor Namdar Khan. The minister explained that after Pakistan had devised this plan, a South Korean delegation visited Pakistan circa 1968, and met with Professor Khan several times on the subject of education and training.

Professor Khan believed primary, secondary, poly-technical, vocational, and university education constitute a pyramid, with each step expanding with the other—and that poor countries lack the resources to support the cost of simultaneous and equalized development at all steps. He further explained that an increased output at one level must equal expansion at every level. The plan further emphasized priorities even for the poorest of countries, where poly-technical and vocational education with specialized training can be afforded even by the poorest of nations. Professor Khan had argued that this training goes hand in hand with economic development of a poor country. Further, he believed that the graduates of the poly-technic institutes would be instant contributors to the economic development of a country. Pakistan sorely needed technical people and technicians like electricians, carpenters, home builders, motor mechanics, engineers, and the like.

The South Korean minister explained that this idea alone was the basis for South Korea’s success, and had resulted in double-digit economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s. What a novel and simple idea, said the minister. The Pakistani delegation left embarrassed.

This story has been told to Professor Khan’s family members by several members of this delegation.

Professor Khan believed in these ideas throughout his career in South Asia (initially during his early career in India and then Pakistan), then later when he championed Comparative Education in England and the United States. This book, Poverty of Nations, the culmination of his ideas, along with years and years of fighting for education, was completed in Berkeley in 1989. Starting in the 1950s through 1971, he worked tirelessly on education and development in Pakistan, a country well suited for his ideas, and for a few short years, he was able to obtain sufficient funding to lay out his plan. He started many poly-technical and vocational schools, initially in the Punjab and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), then the whole of Pakistan, while also funding new primary and secondary schools.

Additionally, he founded the Institute of Education and Research at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, which brought in scholars from around the globe to study education systems and development in poor nations. He also established international funding for this institute, which supported his ideas for the country. He hosted many professors from various international universities, including ones from British and American universities. His main message to the international scholars was that the two-thirds of humanity starving today will one day become a major problem to the one-third living in the rich world—and that the need for investment in them is essential.

He argued, too, that the underdeveloped world had been stuck in economic strata established under colonial rule that was later replaced by corrupt elite who wanted to retain the status quo. The simple idea of training a populous to support technical fields in industry, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture are only successful if a nation is willing to spend the resources, he argued.

After partition of British India, Pakistan had been left with a new labor force without much of any technical training and even less education. His efforts started many of these poly-technical schools throughout Punjab and Pakistan, which included learning basic mechanics, machinery production, factory trades, and agriculture trades. Fruits of his efforts resulted in a mini-industrial growth in Pakistan, and export of Pakistan poly-technical labor to the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The need for primary education also existed throughout the country, and the new budget called for constructing high schools in cities and middle schools in rural areas. Further, the plan emphasized teacher education. Professor Khan said that if education is to play an effective role in the social and economic growth of a nation, the teacher and his education must receive the highest priority. Another part of the plan was to provide further international training to college professors who would be selected and sent to various universities in England and the United States for further education.

The education budget for Pakistan increased from 1965 until 1971. This comprehensive plan was appreciated by several countries, and delegations from South Korea, Singapore, China, and Malaysia came to Professor Khan for additional details, in order to adopt them for their own countries. These countries are now some of the most advanced countries, with very high rates of education.

The plan also recognized the need for education for women, adults, and people living in rural and backward areas. For women’s education, Professor Khan recognized that women’s education stems from deep-seated social and cultural attitudes, and a radical change need be applied to yield better results. To achieve this, he emphasized cooperation from various national women’s organizations and giving equal education for female teachers to teach primary schools in the country. The change called for primary schools to be common for boys and girls. For adults, he recommended pilot projects of adult education throughout the country. For rural and backward areas, the emphasis was on training skills and providing special assistance for primary education.

In this book, Professor Khan indicates that the problems of education still persisted around the world, even in rich countries where the wealth of those countries is diverted by those interested in political success but not national success. Professor Khan was astute with regard to these issues and was considerably disheartened by the developments in Pakistan in the early 1970s. Thus, after a lifetime of struggles and successes for education, he decided to leave the country. The main problem, Professor Khan points out, is that poor nations tend to have massive corruption that steals funds and results in deficiencies in education and development. This book is more than applicable, even for today’s both developing and developed nations.

Starting from his higher education in England in the 1930s until he retired in Berkeley, California, in the mid-1970s, Professor Khan reviewed and compared educational systems in poor, developing, and rich countries, including countries that offered free education at all levels. This specialty of comparative education was in high demand by the best universities in England, Europe, and the United States.

Professor Khan had open invitations to teach comparative education, but resisted the temptation, as he was doing great work in Pakistan. He instead hosted several renowned education scholars from the United States, who were sponsored under the Ford Foundation. They included Professor James Kelly from the Ford Foundation; Professors Ernest Horn, Bill Porter, and Chris W. Jung from Indiana University; and Professor Charles S. Benson from the University of California, Berkeley.

Professor Khan’s lifetime of achievements ended in 1971 when a new government reduced his funding for education and research. He decided to leave South Asia for good. Both Herman B Wells, a long-term Indiana University chancellor, and Professor Benson from Berkeley, asked him to join their respective institutions. Professor Khan chose Berkeley, which suited his liberal thoughts and ideas better, although he remained great friends with Herman B Wells at Indiana.

2

Mission

Professor Namdar Khan studied at the University of London’s South Asia Studies, or SOS, (now called the South Asia and African Studies [SOAS]) in the 1930s. He originally had plans to study law, as most of the British Indian students in London at that time did, but his thoughts on poverty in British India pulled him toward education. His studies, however, were cut short by the onset of World War II, and he sailed back to India in 1939.

He started his career in India as a lecturer at Government College, Shahpur, in 1942. He then joined Government College, Montgomery, in 1944. Soon after that, he became its first native principal after the previous British principal retired. After partition, he joined Government College, Lahore, as its first post-partition Pakistani head of history and political science departments, and stayed there until 1954.

He was an avid tennis player and often rode his bike from Scotch Corner, Lahore, to the college to play his favorite sport.

In 1954, Professor Khan joined Government College, Lyallpur as its principal, and then became principal at Central Training College, Lahore, which had been established to train teachers in education and provide them with standardized curriculum. This is where Professor Khan realized that training teachers and professors was just as important as the educational development of a country.

Soon after, Professor Khan joined the Planning Commission of Pakistan in Karachi in 1964 as their Chief, Education Section, and in 1965, he developed the comprehensive third five-year plan for education development of Pakistan.

Professor Khan also believed in full physical fitness of the young, and encouraged college students to participate in sports as a means of building both physique and moral development alongside scholarship. While as a principal at Government College, Lyallpur, he encouraged the hockey team to develop a regimen of exercise and nutrition as a means of achieving excellence. As an advanced innovative approach, he also bought and distributed multivitamin pills for the hockey team and advised taking a daily pill for overall physical well-being and development. The hockey team did, in fact, find success and won tournaments.

Professor Khan was friends with a number of the intellectual, political, and artistic elite of Pakistan. They included Nobel Laurate in Physics, Dr. Abdus Salam; pre-partition cricketer, professor, and colleague, Dr. Jahangir Khan; colleague and great friend at Government College, Lahore, and Lenin Peace Prize winner (and nominated for the Nobel Prize), Faiz Ahmad Faiz; poet and great friend, Ghulam Mustafa Sufi Tabassum; poet and national anthem writer, Hafeez Jalandhari; poet and Urdu literature writer, M.D. Taseer; and many more. Faiz, while in political self-exile in Beirut, Lebanon, often wrote letters with poetry to Professor Khan.

While Hafeez Jalandhari was composing the national anthem of Pakistan, he invited Professor Khan, amongst others, to form a committee to provide their thoughts and critiques for the various verses of the national anthem. As he was fluent in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, and Persian, he made many suggestions for the anthem, which were well received and incorporated by Jalandhari in the final form. Professor Khan often related that Jalandhari would request that members of the committee provide their suggestions by singing them (Tarranum), such that he could judge the meter, cadence, and rhythm for incorporation.

3

Family

Professor Mian Namdar Khan (Jan 19, 1915 – Dec 17, 2002), was born in Kapurthala State. He is the son of Khan Bahadur Mian Altaf Hussain Khan (1874 – 1946) of Batala (Sub-Divisional Officer of Amritsar and Montgomery Districts, colonizing the Punjab) and Mehndi Begum (1893 – 1970) of Kapurthala State; grandson of Khan Bahadur Mian Hussain Bakhsh Khan (1838 – 1878) of Batala (Rajput lord and defender of his estate in Batala); and (maternal) great grandson of Col. Ali Altof Khan (1842 – 1935) of Kapurthala State (highest ranking officer of the Kapurthala State artillery forces, landlord in Lyallpur, and barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, London, 1884 and 1905). Professor Khan is the direct descendant of Rajput Raja Rai Ram Dev Bhatti, who founded the town of Batala in 1465 AD. Professor Khan passed away in Lahore while attending his granddaughter’s wedding in December 2002.

Professor Khan married Saeeda (Ghani) Khan (b. Jan 26, 1926) in 1946 in Nabha State. The wedding was held at Sardar Bakhshi Wali Mohammad Khan’s 100-acre-garden Asiana Estate, also attended by the Maharaja of Nabha and other nobles of the state. Both Professor Khan and Saeeda were in Srinagar, Kashmir, in the summer of 1947 when partition of British India was announced, including last-minute boundary changes to Gurdaspur District and the town of Batala.