By Dr Ateequllah Hayat
Lecturer in Drug Development
Institute of Medical and Biomedical Education
St George’s University of London
Email: ahayat@sgul.ac.uk
In Afghanistan, the establishment of formal modern education did not exist until 1875. The turbulence of opening and closing educational institutions for girls is something that has taken place in the past. In 1929, Habibullah Kalakany closed girls’ schools during his 9-month rule. Shortly after, Zahir Shah allowed girls the freedom of education once more and established Kabul Medical Faculty in 1932. Afghanistan’s educational infrastructure grew the strongest in the 1960s and ‘70s, until the Soviet invasion in 1979. More than a century later, the turbulent nature of education at all levels continues in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is currently facing a dire situation in higher education, its infrastructure, and the development of contemporary higher educational curriculum. While universities in Afghanistan have expanded over the last decade, teaching methods have not improved at the same pace, slowing student progress. Lectures are generally delivered in the most traditional sense and have taken precedence over critical and analytical thinking, limiting student progress. These teaching methods are teacher centred rather than student centred with lecturers dictating to students with reduced class activities and participation, resulting in low learning rates.
Afghanistan’s higher education requires strategic reformation where it faces the greatest educational policy challenges, which are in two-fold; firstly, enhancing the delivery of educational material from traditional teaching methods to modern student-centred approaches. Secondly, the expansion of current higher education curriculum, notably in life sciences. For example, life science students are taught biological sciences in-depth, but lack teaching of relatively modern biological disciplines such as “epigenetics”. This can be largely explained by the issue of “brain drain”, which depletes the stock of well-educated Afghans available as academics for the universities. There are clear causes for the “brain drain” in Afghanistan. Earnings and living standards in developed nations are considerably higher. In addition, research opportunities and facilities are substantially better in wealthy countries. Overcoming the issue of brain drain is a major challenge that Afghan policy makers will have to address in any human resource development strategy for university academics. A strategy, adopted in developing countries, including Pakistan and Sri Lanka, is to offer incentives, including tenure track appointments, to highly talented individuals early in their academic careers. Among South Asian countries both Pakistan and Sri Lanka countries have systems in place, which are linked with opportunities for overseas study and tenure track appointments.
Developing inclusive and contemporary higher education in Afghanistan will contribute to social cohesion, including shared norms or values, and a shared sense of identity. Particularly considering the varied social landscape and ethnicities of Afghanistan, higher education institutions provide one of the few spaces to demonstrate collaboration and foster shared values among the diverse citizens. The academic content and research provide further opportunities for promoting the shared values which contribute to a cohesive society.
A challenge for Afghan policy makers would be to strengthen the governance of university education. Globally, the trend in developed and developing countries over the last two decades has been to promote greater autonomy of universities. This trend has been driven by the observation that most the world’s most famous universities, especially the celebrated elite research universities in the USA and UK, have enjoyed and operated within an atmosphere of considerable autonomy. In addition, as higher education systems have grown rapidly, close government control has tended to hamper the improvement of quality and the ability of public universities to respond flexibly to evolving economic and social needs.