The ever growing knowledge gap

Pakistan’s major concern across all areas

The amount of qualitative and quantitative knowledge provides fundamental ingredient for the socio-economic development of any civilized society. This is considered not only a prerequisite support tool for the growth but also presents a necessary mechanism about how a just nation should develop its roots, and materialize its true potential for economic progress that leads to its survivability at large.

A realistic knowledge gap is the proposition that a fair discrepancy exists in the amount of information that people possess in any country or society at varying diversified levels. In other words, an information-rich person gets richer if he keeps himself occupied in reading newspapers, using internet resources, watching television news or other relevant material that belongs to his profession, whereas those with relatively limited background knowledge typically gain information at a comparatively lesser rate and are thus intellectually suppressed.

Presented originally by Tichenor, Donohue and Olien during the 1970s, the knowledge gap postulated hypothesis cross the boundary between those with maximum and minimum formal education in hand. This knowledge-gap theory further suggests that there is always a gap in knowledge existing not only by default among different social groups but also this gap widens its scope when new diversified information gradually enters in a society. Essential notion behind a growing knowledge gap in any nation might alternatively lead to destruction and finally provide a route towards its ultimate demise.

A country rich in natural resources and with unlimited human capital, a growing knowledge gap is of major concern in Pakistan in almost all walks of life. Looking at the gross-root level of gap emergence, poverty is to be blamed in most instances because it provides a repulsive barrier of socioeconomic uplift among different segments of society. Note that the poverty affects not only the emotional and psychological resources of your body, but it also limits the well-being, and intellectual growth and development. So, children with very weak economic background always lag behind in intellectual maturity than the richer counterpart in a society. With very limited earning potential of those families, children cannot afford to buy books and other relevant literature for stimulating learning materials that keep them engaged with current state of the art knowledge.

The situation of widening knowledge gap is at its worst among the professional elite because of many other factors besides poverty. Here, a lack of professional ethics, negligence with professional code of conduct, limited accessibility to internet, ignorance about current professional knowledge, poor library infrastructure, limited state funded resources, limited capacity to attend international professional conferences, lack of personal will, unavailability of fresh scientific literature, intra-department political interference, fake degrees and very selective but obsolete professional knowledge in different disciplines are the major reasons to be blamed. Gleanings from the print media as well as reported data from World Economic Forum’s report, a collective collapse is recently witnessed in global competitiveness when Pakistan has slipped down from 118th (2011) to 124th (2012) and now to 133rd (2013) position among 148 countries.

This report reflects not only the institutional and economical weakness of the country but also presents a diminishing culture of industrial innovativeness.

Despite the availability of quality professionals at large in various disciplines, they desperately lack professional ethics and don’t apply code of conduct in practice. Here, a medical profession that directly impacts the life expectancy and human survivability is most seriously affected. Compared to Scandinavian (or other European countries) where doctors spend first 10-15 minutes with psychological treatment of patients through friendly introductory discussion before the real diagnosis, Pakistani doctors neglect these factors often and diagnosis starts directly with predefined routine conventional guesses and finally delivers tablets of all colours to respective patients. Simultaneously, patients lying on the bed with intravenous drip mixed with some vaccination in their shoulder are opted for as the best medical solution at ordinary clinics.

On the other side, a lack of modern medical knowledge for reasons mentioned earlier and unavailability of state of the art medical laboratory equipment and hygiene-wise poor working conditions along with environmentally polluted atmosphere signifies the true causes of concern.

More or less, a similar situation exists in other disciplines. Looking at the recent past, the pace of new scientific knowledge has witnessed an exponential growth trend. A more careful examination reveals that the rate of growth of scientific knowledge changes, actually accelerates, over time. While multidimensional nanoscience is still an alien subject in Pakistan, invention of Graphene (i.e., one to three nanometer thick atomic layer of only carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal form) by two Russian scientists (Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (noble prize winners in physics in 2010) presents a classical example of new knowledge that is going to revolutionize our world in 10–20 years from now.

Scientists believe that the Graphene material presents true potential of its usage with much superior performance than many other materials on this planet in electronics, energy, medical and environmental areas. Besides Graphene, many other research topics in engineering disciplines (e.g., microwave communication, millimeter wave communication, photovoltaic systems, wind engineering, bio engineering, optical communication, optical fibers, Nanotechnology, nanodentistry, nanomedicine, mechatronics etc.) are not even touched in the Pakistani universities.

While a number of new private/public universities have emerged in Pakistani market recently, major focus is given to information technology and business sciences while true engineering subjects are mostly ignored. More interestingly, university professors are not ready to deliver new knowledge because they themselves are not updated because of limited resource capacity.

What can we do to shrink this growing knowledge gap?

At the state level, it’s the government’s responsibility to provide a platform where we can live with peace and harmony as a just nation. Furthermore, the government should introduce a true system of national accountability and justice so as to develop national equality in our society. With this in mind, education should be given the first and topmost priority since it is linked with the knowledge economy and the government should ensure requisite funds to guarantee education for all. University curriculum should be frequently updated, leaving no place for obsolete knowledge. Fresh scientific literature should be provided (either through international journals or conference participation) to university professors so that they can keep themselves updated about current phenomenon, new inventions and hot research topics in real time. Above all, a unified private-public partnership at university level is required for not only industrial development and educational support but also giving students a chance to excel in their area of studies.

At primary level, hands-on knowledge-building experiences should be provided that help children understand their world. A collective responsibility lies on our shoulders to encourage children so that they question, discover, evaluate, materialize and use higher-order objective thinking skills.

While new government is now in place, this writer hopes that his dream will come true, and the Pakistan nation will gradually reduce this knowledge gap.

The writer is a senior scientist/researcher at ABB Corporate Research in Sweden. He can be reached at: [email protected]