Education Statistics in the Poorest Countries of the World

I have been consulting in the development sector for the past few years.  I found the data above of great value representing extremes in education in some of the poorest countries in the world.

Communities Of Choice - The Avenue For 21st Century Breakthroughs

I have written consistently and proven the point that there is a myth called wisdom of the crowds. Perhaps it is a marketing term now engulfing the tera-intellect.


An excellent example in the Wired magazine article "There's Power In The Puzzle" here, highlights yet again how the power of communities formed by choice can drive breakthroughs past the imagination of the initiators of the idea for the community. The article discusses a SETI@home like program yet driven from a gamer's perspective, i.e. putting the people in the center of the process. The result is a game called Foldit -

"It simply serves up a multicolored knot of spirals and clumps—a 3-D render of a protein. Players use the cursor to grab, bend, pull, and wiggle the chain of amino acids anywhere along its length, folding the protein into its optimum shape. The only rules are based on physics—opposite charges attract, atomic bonds have limited angles of rotation, and the parts of the molecule that stick to water tend to point outward. The closer your model's properties adhere to those rules, the more points you get."

Yet, the important part of this activity was:

"Working on test proteins for which Baker already knew the structures, folders quickly started to make friends via the in-game chat channel. They shared insights and half-finished puzzles; teams emerged, and collective efforts proved far more successful than any solo folder. A member of the leading team named Jason Kuznicki ... set up a wiki that Popović adopted as Foldit's official manual. "We even built a mini-Facebook for them," he says."

I believe the 21st century is going to be about "communities of choice" driving breakthrough innovation. The internet will continue to flatten the intellectual landscape and making collaboration ubiquitous, where a student who has completed the MIT computer science course work through MIT's open-courseware in Vietnam's low socio-economic class (see excellent article here) can engage in direct scientific analysis with individuals independent of geography.

Note that the winner of the game of Foldit who developed a complex protein is a 13 year old.

World Perspective / Photo - 5 [Education]

Taking metric (equivalent of class 10 or 10th grade) examination on the premises of Peshawer University, Pakistan.  Candle lights are lit as the power outages are often and unplanned, lasting 12 hours or more in a day. 

Below, students of a local school in Swat, Pakistan solve their examination papers in the debris of their school.  The school was destroyed during fighting between the Pakisani military and insurgents.

Update on American university campuses in the Gulf

George Mason University has a campus in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah in UAE that will be closing. See details here. Please note the comments to this article that provide good insights.

In comparison, the campus of Texas A&M setup in Qatar under the requirements of Qatar Foundation (see details here) continues to thrive. The Qatar Foundation loosely requires that the educational institutions setup should show direct value to Qatar and to its future growth.

Please see details on the other university campuses in Qatar here that include Virginia Commonwealth University, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgetown Uniersity and Northwestern University.

If this interests you, then you may want to look at the Qatar Science and Technology Park here.

USA: Political Changes Impact Science

Here are a few articles that share the extent of funding cuts on education and scientific research in the US in the past few years:

• "Federal budget impact on Fermilab"
• "Cutbacks Impede Climate Studies"
• "Nuclear Waste Funding Slashed..."
• "House Budget Committee" - Report

With the change in the political landscape in the USA, the Science Magazine published an article stating that there is good news for research in science, see here.

World Perspective / Photo - 3 [India Institute of Technology]

Above is the picture of Hijli Dentention Camp at Kharagpur established during the British Colonial Rule in 1930 to accommodate those who were involved in the armed struggle for freedom of the Indian Sub-Continent or the non-cooperation movement.

On the same grounds of the infamous detention camp on the right is the picture of the first Prime Minister of India, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru (see biography here), laying the foundation stone for the first of India Institute of Technologys (IIT) at Kharagpur.

At the ceremony on April 21st, 1956, Mr. Nehru said:

"Here I stand at this place and my mind inevitably goes back to that infamous institution for which this place became famous not now but 20 to 30 years ago- the Hijli detention camp. Here in the place of that Hijli detention camp stands this fine monument of India (IIT) today representing India's future in the making."

Read historical details of the Hijli Detention Camp and IIT Kharagpur here.

IIT Kharagpur today (see the University website here)  is ranked among the top Universities of the World and continues to gain ground in delivering the best in class talent.

[Below is the renovated detention camp serving as part of IIT]

As I post this blog I find it difficult to imagine the pride that the students and alumni of this institute must feel - to deliver and create knowledge through the passion and persistence of humans from the place of human misery created by humans. At the same time, I am confident that the experiences of these student's grand fathers and great grand fathers must reach deep within their hearts to kindle the desire to be the best that only the results we see in the World today can show. I will attempt to obtain a list of IIT Kharagpur alumni conducting the business of the World to post here in the near future.

The statement I make here is not that India has achieved such. The insight is for the astute - that if this has been achieved in such a short time then what is to come in a shorter time from South Asia?

Education Systems

Here is a link to a good TedTalk on Creativity and Education (given by Ken Robinson) forwarded by Aylin Koca. I have seen across the world while lecturing in Universities in North America, Scandinavia, Middle East and South Asia that a large number of students coming out are thoroughly unprepared for the 21st century. From having no concept of what the Global business world is about to not being able to look beyond what they have been taught. I truly see some of these students looking like deer when they look at headlights coming at them at 60 mph.

I believe that just like the consumer has come to realize that they can choose, similarly the students will start to ask why we are still using the same methods of teaching from 100 years ago while the world is moving at 100 times the speed from 100 years ago.

And the students must (as they are the consumers of education), otherwise... the educational bureaucracies (the corporation) must continue to sell and make money from the shortest and easiest paths available to them.