Zahir
Ebrahim | Project
Humanbeingsfirst.org
First
circulated in email November 09, 2012 | Published December 04, 2013
Getting
admitted into the top universities in the United States does not
appear to be of much interest to many Muslims (for any number of
reasons). The article outlining an Aga Khan Education Board (AKEB)
USA initiative, ‘National
College Expedition prepares high school students for a brighter
future‘
( tinyurl.com/IVY-future ), is a must read for Muslim parents,
students, and educators alike, both in the United States and
worldwide, but especially in Pakistan. This Muslim public service
organization has stepped-up in the West to facilitate that interest
for American-Canadian-French high school students. Getting into top
graduate schools in the US is of course even harder than
undergraduate. This excellent article highlights some benefits of
college visits and the benefits of early college preparation. The
article also highlights the fact that financial aid is available.
College
education and advanced degrees from top IVY Leagues is an ‘American
Dream’ to die for, for some… I often ask whether
such an education really makes one super-learned, or merely a
super-anointed “likkha parrha jahil”? I don’t know…
I am a tad biased... College education in the US, regardless of IVY,
like the force of gravity, unfortunately only appears to pull one’s
intelligence down towards a standardized norm in thoughts and actions
— evidence of that is the ubiquitous ‘United We Stand’
with absurdities in America.
If
American higher education, never mind its IVY League education, was
worth the money and the youthful zealotry spent in pursuing it, apart
from it surely being a fantastic meal-ticket and great means of
career advancement, there’d be at least one distinguished
super-learned person from any of these master colleges of America to
escape ‘The
IVY League Morons Syndrome‘
( tinyurl.com/Ivy-Morons ). No? Do you know of any?
Something
happens when one lives or studies in America — now equivalent
of living and studying almost anywhere on earth due to the
‘globalization’ of American values and systems of
thoughts and pursuits. This is a statement of fact. Thomas Friedman,
though clearly not one of my favorite imperial columnist, let the
truth explode candidly through his pen in his 1999 New York Times
column “Manifesto for a Fast World”:
'The
hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist —
McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the
builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe
for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States
Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. “Good
ideas and technologies need a strong power that promotes those ideas
by example and protects those ideas by winning on the battlefield,”
says the foreign policy historian Robert Kagan. “If a lesser
power were promoting our ideas and technologies, they would not have
the global currency that they have. And when a strong power, the
Soviet Union, promoted its bad ideas, they had a lot of currency for
more than half a century.”'
I
am certain that the prominent Jewish columnist Thomas Friedman’s
observation is true of all dominant empires from antiquity to
modernity. When the British empire ruled the roost in
yester-centuries, their education system created the blithering
brown-sahibs they needed to run the Indo sub-continent after Lord
Thomas Babington Macaulay crafted the Indian Education Policy in
1835. In his seminal
speech
( tinyurl.com/macaulay-1835 ) to the British Parliament, the Lord of
empire stated, rather candidly:
'We
must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters
between us and the millions whom we govern, –a class of persons
Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in
morals and in intellect.'
It
appears that the Americans have topped even that and far surpassed
previous empires by way of successfully creating a ubiquitous class
of peoples worldwide who ‘United We Stand’ with the
master class on all its dominant narratives. Only a handful escape it
– but what an escape, few can make a decent living afterwards!
So the motivation to escape is outright negative.
How
did this happen?
Hear
Aldous
Huxley
explain the forces that drive it ( tinyurl.com/Huxley-listen ):
'You
can do everything with bayonets except sit on them! If you are going
to control any population for any length of time you must have some
measure of consent. It’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure
terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly
long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an
element of persuasion. An element of getting people to consent to
what is happening to them. Well, it seems to me that the nature of
the Ultimate Revolution with which we are now faced is precisely
this: that we are in process of developing a whole series of
techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have
always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people
actually to love their servitude! This is the, it seems to me the
ultimate in malevolent revolution shall we say.' — Aldous
Huxley, Ultimate Revolution, 1962 speech at UC Berkeley, minute 04:06
The
culmination of the standardization and uniformization of the public
as economic widgets, dystopically arranged in some kind of scientific
class hierarchy silently obeying orders in willing servitude without
any thought of rebellion, was most ably
depicted by Aldous Huxley in his 1931 allegorical novel Brave New
World (read
the book, watch
the movie). The above speech was in fact made on that seminal novel's
thirtieth anniversary to an audience of undergraduate students at
U.C. Berkeley. Please do spend the 40 minutes of your precious time
listening to Aldous Huxley's account of the “Ultimate
Revolution” with your own college students and high-schoolers.
The
ruthlessness of the coming world social order was also ably
propositioned by Ayn Rand in her many fictional novels which
principally expanded upon her philosophy of complete surrender to
selfishness. Most nobly christened “Objectivism” –
perhaps to make it sound objective and rational in opposition to the
“irrational” Christian charity to the “unworthy”
unwashed masses under its moral absolutism – her two novels:
Atlas
Shrugged
and The
Fountainhead,
and her collection of essays: The
Virtue of Selfishness,
should be made required reading for all high-schoolers as the sacred
path to an IVY education is opened to the non-elite. I suspect that
the talented elite American kids are already raised on that mind
numbing fodder in their English lit class. It will surely make the
middle class, kids, parents, and educators alike, feel a lot better
about abandoning false piety and self-deception.
The
Republican Party nominee for Vice President of the United States in
the 2012 election, Paul Davis Ryan, also the United States
Representative for Wisconsin's 1st congressional district and current
chairman of the House Budget Committee, credited Rand's philosophy as
something which had inspired him. His wikipedia
page reports the following politicism:
'At
a 2005 Washington, D.C. gathering celebrating the 100th anniversary
of Ayn Rand's birth, Ryan credited Rand as inspiring him to get
involved in public service. In a speech that same year at the Atlas
Society, he said he grew up reading Rand, and that her books taught
him about his value system and beliefs. Ryan required staffers and
interns in his congressional office to read Rand and gave copies of
her novel Atlas Shrugged as gifts to his staff for Christmas. In his
Atlas Society speech, he also described Social Security as a
“socialist-based system”.
In
2009, Ryan said, “What's unique about what's happening today
in government, in the world, in America, is that it's as if we're
living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best
job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality
of capitalism is under assault.”
In
April 2012, after receiving criticism from Georgetown University
faculty members on his budget plan, Ryan rejected Rand's philosophy
as an atheistic one, saying it “reduces human
interactions down to mere contracts”.'
--- wikipedia
The
National Security Advisor to former American President Jimmy Carter
(1976-1980), Dr. Strangelove, ahem, pardon me, Dr. Zbigniew
Brzezinski, fielded his own realistic version of the upcoming
scientific dystopia in his seminal 1970 narrative, Between Two
Ages – The Role of America in the Technetronic Era, as
outright inevitable (read,
search).
That seminal book seems to accurately blueprint modernity, like
everyone of Brzezinski's strategy books both psychologically and
militarily maneuvering America on the Grand
Chessboard (read,
search).
What a brilliant savant! And certainly no less brilliant than the
Fabian philosopher of the British aristocracy, Bertrand Russell, who
both speciously argued and self-servingly predicted in his own
seminal sophistry, The Impact of
Science on Society, that a dystopic global police-state is
the natural outcome of the pursuit of science and technology for a
stable society: “There is,
it must be confessed, a psychological difficulty about a single world
government ... It seems to follow that a world government could only
be kept in being by force”
(read,
search).
Comparing with what Aldous Huxley observed in 1962 as the intrinsic
limitation of the bayonet quoted above, please read learn what the
massa class already knows and believes.
And
so, it is already evident to many, modern education, be it in an IVY
League in America, or at UET or LUMS in Lahore, Pakistan, is ab
initio designed to mainly craft
diploma-wielding economic widgets arranged in some sort of scientific
caste system based on their natural talents who, regardless of their
position in the class hierarchy, together welcome their own servitude
with a happy-happy smile :-)
The
truth of this sweeping statement can clearly be seen at least in the
case of the inventor of Active Pixel CMOS camera on a chip who was
inducted into the American National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011:
Eric
Fossum
( tinyurl.com/Fossum-talk ). His invention “is
used in nearly all camera phones and webcams, digital-still cameras,
high-speed motion capture cameras, automotive cameras, dental x-ray
cameras, and swallowable pill cameras.”
The
Aga Khan Education Board (AKEB) USA initiative article mentioned at
the beginning shows the fast-path to similar “Brighter Future”.
Of
course, please do sensibly note that modern Western
education, regardless of at an IVY on the fabulous East Coast of
America, or at Stanford, Caltech, and UC Berkeley on the beautiful
all season West Coast of America, or at UET or LUMS in Lahore, or Aga
Khan University in Karachi, does not have to craft economic widgets
only… right?
It
surely can produce thoughtful people too, No? Like those who on the
very day of 9/11 could have spotted it to be self-inflicted
“operation canned goods” of the Third Reich in action
replay.
Right!
If
it is arguably plausible to raise thoughtful generations in the now
dominant Western Education system worldwide, it is also safe to
assert that one would have to work awfully hard to overcome the
entrenched forces of indoctrination, ahem, socialization and
manipulation, to escape modern education’s pernicious primary
intent: crafting economic widgets “content
to labor hard all day long” as per the Fable
of the Bees (Ibid.):
'The
economic well-being of the [world] depends on the presence of a large
number of men who are content to labor hard all day long. Because men
are naturally lazy they will not work unless forced by necessity to
do so.' — Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the
Bees, 1705
It’s
almost like escaping the force of gravity — a force one can’t
see, smell, touch, or even feel… unless one tries to escape
it!
Assuming
however that one does want to pursue this “brighter future”
and is most amiably willing to ‘United We Stand’ with the
paradigms du jour in the pursuit of one's American Dream, it
is worthwhile to again highlight the observation made in this article
that financial aid is available in America’s top Ivy Leagues.
In
fact, the ability to pay is more or less separated from the
competition to be admitted in America’s top schools only. That
is how I got to attend MIT from Pakistan over three decades ago.
Whether
dreaming of an undergraduate education in America or some
professional graduate degree, most Pakistani students, like American
students highlighted in this article, are not intimate with the
overly complex admission processes and what it takes to be admitted
to top American universities. Be aware that it's a joint family and
school initiative and takes a lot more commitment and hard work than
just the student's own dreaming to realize the American Dream,
albeit the latter has to be the prime-mover. But its enablement
remains largely a team effort across many fronts.
Unfortunately,
there is almost zero smart college guidance counseling available for
high school and university students in Pakistan (just as it is for
most of the over-crowded public high schools in the United States
which reportedly graduate upward of a million eighteen year olds each
year). Of course we are only speaking of the “elite” who
can afford to pay for an education in Pakistan. To fill this gap,
snake-oil salesmen and saleswomen have evidently cropped up
throughout the big cities of Pakistan to mint money from mediocre
students by processing their paper-work for mediocre Western
universities for that oft glorified piece of parchment which will get
them suitably anointed in Pakistan.
The
Higher Education Commission of Pakistan
(HEC) even has an entire protocol in place to attest these pieces of
parchment to ensure they are not fake. The fact that these pieces of
parchment are being wielded by a serf-class excelling only in
mediocrity does not seem to bother them very much.
Why
strive for only mediocrity? If one is going to make the Faustian
bargain of the pursuit of the ‘American Dream’
anyway, if HEC is going to follow the American paradigms anyway, if
Beacon House is going to mass produce English-enabled kids anyway,
why not make that dream to reach the top of its very heap? Why create
and sustain, aid and abet, harvest and reward, systemic
crap
( tinyurl.com/Pakistani-Plagiarism ) like this?
Groom
them for the top Ivy Leagues in Pakistan… both undergraduate
and graduate school.
The
pursuit alone to effectively compete to get there will produce very
skilled professionals across the board, whether or not they get to
attend the IVYs. The level of that competition, and the sheer
competence needed to first get there, and then to survive there, will
surely be an eye-opener for many a Pakistani academic and student
alike. A sampling of the level of competence can be seen in the level
of the coursework taught at MIT. Visit its fabulous open courseware
website http://ocw.mit.edu
where anyone in the world can study MIT's almost entire curriculum,
1800+ courses online the last time I checked, all day long for free!
Can Pakistani professors and high school math and science teachers,
never mind their students, do any of those MIT problem sets and
exams?
Why
not take some benchmarks to evaluate all the bombastic proclamations
by HEC on academic success of Pakistani higher education under their
stewardship, by getting Pakistani students to take MIT open
courseware quizzes and exams in equivalent classes being taught in
their high schools and universities?
One
might even come to the realization that almost all Pakistani
universities can build much of their technical curriculum on open
courseware, and also employ their philosophy of education!
The
challenges of higher education in the twenty-first century are well
understood by the West, and most poorly comprehended by Pakistani
universities and by their national steward for academic
enlightenment, HEC. The former Dean of Engineering of Purdue
University, and former President of IEEE, Prof. Leah Jameison, in her
Keynote speech at the DesignCon 2007 conference in Santa Clara,
California, titled 'Engineering
education prepares for 2020'
( tinyurl.com/Higher-Education-2020 ), had emphatically noted some of
these challenges facing higher education today:
'In
many ways, the world is changing, ... Are our graduates going to have
the skills they need over the next 40 years? ... The "half
life" of an engineer's knowledge — the point at which half
of what the engineer knows is obsolete — may now be as little
as five years'!
The
West's stewards are seeking to “turn the curriculum inside
out.” (Ibid.) to meet the new challenges of empire due to
rapid development of science and technology which is naturally
creating a hybrid of superficial generalists and narrow-gauge
specialists. Neither is fortuitously able
to parse reality, to the complete benefit of empire (see The IVY
League Morons Syndrome and The Fable of the Bees cited above). A
famous robber baron is reputed to have accurately presaged the
empiricism du jour way back in the 19th
century:
'The
few who understand the system will either be so interested in its
profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no
opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body
of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous
advantage that capital derives from the system, will
bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even
suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.'
The
challenges facing the East are far more spectacular – to put it
mildly, and in positive light.
Therefore,
why wait until university? Even Pakistani high-schools can teach the
A-level and Intermediate equivalent math and science sequence from
open courseware, and adopt the same philosophy of breadth-with-depth
for far more basic skill and competence development than is presently
done in Pakistan even at the university level. The beauty is that all
of this is actually free.
Unfortunately,
empire is also very smart. It does not release its social sciences
and humanities curriculum to the world. Nor encourages its pursuit.
For it knows that not engineers and not scientists, not economists
and not technocrats, but language and political science majors,
psychologists and historians, run the world on behalf of the
international bankers who put various politicians in power across the
world to implement global policies which are frequently crafted at
privately funded thinktanks and tax-exempt private foundations by
English majors.
Thus
notice that social sciences and humanities are not a priority among
the colonized and developing nations of the world. But the smartest
kids in the United States and the developed West in addition to the
hard sciences, also go into social sciences, arts, humanities and
languages — unlike ours who mostly become engineers and
doctors… The economic system in developing nations is designed
ab initio to ensure that only serfdom is rewarded.
Thus
only those skills necessary to be an expert craftsman for the benefit
of the global military-industrial complex are encouraged and rewarded
– and that remains the essence of harvesting the developing
nations of their best and brightest young minds. Get them to work for
America and Western interests by suitably rewarding them for their
mindless pursuits for the military-industrial complex. It creates a
self-perpetuating system that was already well-tread by the British
empire. Modernity has merely stepped up the ante for that harvesting,
whereby, instead of only creating the traditional feudal class
designed to politically control the masses through oppression, a
scientific technetronic class has been fashioned in keeping
with the rise of science and technology. The first-principles of
harvest however remain the same despite the bayonet being replaced
with a measure of public consent for their servitude.
But
so long as you are gonna work for empire, produce economic widgets
for its imperative
of global governance
( tinyurl.com/Modernity-today7 ); so long as you are gonna be a serf
happy-happy in voluntary servitude; so long as you are gonna be
employed in their worldwide military-industrial-corporate-academe
complex; you might as well strive to rise to its very top rung and
enjoy its fruits, like your American counterparts!
As
already noted above, but bears repetition
to emphasize its practical benefits, that
race alone to rise to the top of the elitist heap can only make the
young herd even more skilled, more uniform, enabling them to actually
thrive in the higher tiers of economic widgetry as the most
“essential” category of the scientific class hierarchy,
rather than risk being slated for gradual elimination in the “useless
eater” categories, in the coming global empire of one-world
government.
If
you ape the elite in everything else, why not here?
Pakistan
might even begin to effectively compete with India in our
indispensability to empire from our present disposable status!
Groom
them for the top Ivy Leagues of America – both undergraduate
and graduate school – if you are gonna spend good money and
precious time on their American education anyway.
I
am not sure that higher education in the best universities elsewhere
in the world is really all that much different, and so, regardless of
which country you are gonna pay for your
children's Westernized collegization, groom them for the top most
ones that they can dare to dream of.
They
might just get in to the top school in the world ---- I did!
And
you can be 99% sure of what will come out --- a perfectly educated,
upwardly mobile, highly skilled, and most successful specimen of
“likkha parrha jahil”. Silicon Valley, California, my
home town of more than three decades, bears testimony to that
statement of fact.
I
may be among that lonely 1% exception, at least I'd like to believe
so, perhaps due to being only imperfectly educated in America despite
my best intentions. Heck, four years at MIT, another few at Stanford
while chasing my American Dream in American corporations....
something clearly went wrong from empire's point of view that it
instead produced a “maladjusted” “malcontent”.
You can respectively hear Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech
titled Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam, and read
H. G. Wells' sugared sales pitch for world government in his
non-fiction book New World Order, for the meaning of these
terms. I like to think of it as: the
wakeup call happened (
tinyurl.com/No-Military-Industrial-Complex ).
Going
back to sleep to dream the American Dream (note that one has
to be asleep in order to dream) has become well-nigh impossible
afterwards. Even sleeping pills don't work. I sometimes wonder now
that I am wide awake that had I realized all this as an eighteen year
old choosing the direction of my life at that pivotal time, whether I
would have made a different career choice. To remedy this situation
for the new generation dreaming of the Ivy Leagues, to offer them
that realization early so that at least some, those who have the
luxury to do so, can make a different
choice, I have written a young Muslim's guide to alternate career
choices before they cross the Rubicon of permanent sleep, FAQ:
Pragmatic Career Guidance for Young Muslims (
tinyurl.com/young-muslims-guide ).
Yes,
do prepare to attend the top IVY Leagues of Western academe, and
those who cannot make it there to strive for LUMS,
UET, and AKU, and continue dreaming of it for graduate school. Yes do
pursue professional degrees, and do
endeavor to rise to the top of the heap.
And
there is absolute guarantee, at least 99% surety, that you will also
come out a blithering idiot with only “learned” stamped
upon your forehead so hard, and so deeply invested in your American
Dream with medals and titles galore, that it will leave you bereft of
all moral courage and commonsense. You will no longer be able to call
reality the only way it is!
Don't
believe me?
Here
is a quick litmus test of the success of your investment
in your American Dream. For the medicine professionals
training, and already trained, at AKU in Karachi, Harvard in
Cambridge-Boston, and UCSF in San Francisco medical schools, see if
you can still dare to call a spade a spade publicly: Open
Letter to the Doctors of America.
And
that is the twisted reality of the matter – and that is also
why Pakistan has an abundance of these Western trained likkha-parrha
jahils all across our learned landscape no differently than in the
United States of America.
Please
share with your college students and high-school wards.
Click
on the link below to read the Aga
Khan Education Board (AKEB) USA initiative article:
First
emailed to stewards of Pakistan's public and private universities on
Nov. 09, 2012 |
Published for wider audience on Dec. 4, 2013 | Last updated Friday, December 6, 2013 02:00 pm 4187
Published for wider audience on Dec. 4, 2013 | Last updated Friday, December 6, 2013 02:00 pm 4187
Groom
them for top Ivy Leagues of America By Zahir Ebrahim | Project
Humanbeingsfirst.org 11
