Why schools in Pakistan should be teaching basic life skills

Cryptocurrencies are another one of those things Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have a hard time understanding and accepting. While many bankers are still sceptical of today’s cryptocurrencies, they do acknowledge the value in blockchain and distributed ledgers, the technology that underpins them. A good number of mainstream investment advisers have blessed the use of major crypto coins like Bitcoin as a store of value with a speculative upside for a small portion of savings.

Early last month, the price of Terraform Labs’ Luna crypto coin dove from $80 per coin to a fraction of a cent. Terraform’s other coin, the UST, was what is called a ‘stable coin’, a cryptocurrency whose value was supposedly pegged to the US dollar (or other stable asset like gold) – but really was not and which nosedived to $0.11. A lot of people around the world, including Pakistan, lost the shirt on their back and, in some extreme cases, even their entire life savings. The sudden drop had a knock-on effect on the entire sector, which brought down the prices of even the most established cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) to less than half of their all-time highs.

People have been investing in cryptocurrencies since the late 2000s with the launch of Bitcoin, but like in many other things, Pakistan was a little late to this investment trend. Crypto trading took off in Pakistan in the years after 2014. By that time many early investors had partially cashed out and were flaunting that money, which attracted the suckers.

In our thin labour market, coupled with an endemic high youth unemployment rate, a lot of new graduates ended up trading in and out of these risky assets. According to a report titled ‘Cryptocurrencies: Review of Economics and Policy’ by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), around nine million people in Pakistan own cryptocurrencies. If this number seems high that is because it is. In comparison, according to a 2021 report in a major English daily paper, the National Clearing Company of Pakistan (NCCPL) disclosed that the number of active Unique Identification Numbers (UINs) allotted to each investor trading on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) stood at a mere 252,322 – which means that almost 35 times more Pakistanis own cryptocurrencies than there are people trading and investing in securities in the local stock market.

In our country where most people’s idea of ‘investing’ begins and ends with buying a plot of residential or commercial land and stories of people falling for too-good-to-believe get-rich-quick scams like Ponzi schemes (remember ‘Double Shah’?) abound. Schools teach less than nothing resembling basic financial literacy. In such an environment, many Pakistani crypto ‘investors’ were flying blind, guided only by whatever they could teach themselves from possibly biased and questionable sources.

This is evidenced by the fact that a lot of retail investors overlook the first rule of investing: Do not put all your eggs in one basket; do not invest in a single asset class or sector. This is an elementary lesson many crypto investors around the world recently learned the hard way.

Financial literacy taught in schools seldom extends beyond computing zakat as a math problem (calculating 2.5% of a given amount) or computing compounded profit on a PLS account. Beyond that, basic personal finance skills like money management, household budgeting, balancing a checkbook, and in the Pakistani context, how to write a check, make a deposit, fill out a bank challan form, are all unheard of. Basic explanations of what a share in a company is, what mutual funds and exchange-traded funds are and how one can invest in the stock market are on nobody's radar yet. In a world where jobs with (government) pensions are headed for extinction and every person is responsible for making their own retirement nest egg, these are basics everyone needs to know about right out the gate (high school, college, university).

Beyond personal finance, this is true of life skills more broadly. When I talk to employers, one of their biggest gripes is their inability to find fresh graduates ready to fit in the workplace when they have available openings. Many start off with a casual attitude towards punctuality and deadlines and lack awareness of office etiquette, norms of professional communication, office wear, personal boundaries and even personal hygiene. For many new entrants into the workplace that spent their lives in segregated (public) schools and colleges, these difficulties are further compounded when the office becomes the first place outside the home and family settings where they must deal with persons of other sexes.

In many countries, young people pick up basic workplace behaviour while working internships and summer jobs, which are generally encouraged for building character. While things are slowly changing in some corners in Pakistan, work, particularly manual labour, is largely still looked down upon. That is why the vast majority of high schoolers and university students have never worked as much as an internship, not to speak of a job. Entry-level jobs and even internships are often evaluated in terms of the salary or stipend they pay (by which they are seen as unenticing) rather than the opportunity to get one’s feet wet. Everyone wants to be a manager – hard work is for other people. The experience that comes from dealing with superiors, colleagues, customers and/or clients is still discounted as worthless. This means that for most young people their first experience with a workplace comes only after they complete their education.

This lack of essential skills extends all the way into the home. With the notable exception of a sizable population of the human male species, every animal on Earth has the ability to feed and sustain itself. Yet, most men in Pakistan are unable to cook for themselves. Basic home maintenance tasks like changing a light switch, running some cable, and even home improvement tasks like painting a room, putting up wallpaper, changing a tap, laying tiles, etc and the use of basic workshop tools remain the exclusive purview of the handyman.

In several European countries schools spend a few days over a few weeks teaching children the most basic rules of traffic – how to cross a road (look left, look right, look left again), the rules of driving a bicycle on the road and in traffic and a good many basic road signs. Perhaps this is why so many grown adults do not know any better than to cross a road without looking left or right but by running across it like a headless chicken. Even city cats seem to have developed a better sense of this than many people.

Whether one is a high-school dropout, a tradesperson or a university graduate, these are things everyone has to deal with in life: handling money, saving and investing, dealing with people in the workplace, cooking for oneself, maintaining one’s dwellings, negotiating traffic, etc. Yet, open up any schoolbooks of the last few decades, from the Zia-era 80s all the way to today’s SNC, and you will find none of them touching any of these subjects in any meaningful or useful way. Instead, every update of the school curriculum has been loading up contents with more religious instruction and whitewashed history. When public school education is sanitized of all life skills, is it any wonder that it struggles to be relevant?

The writer has a PhD in Education.

Originally published in The News