When Misbah Rashid taught Chinese 30 years ago, few signed up. Today his department has more than 200 Pakistani students, increasingly attracted by the prospect of an affordable education and a job.
For decades, a foreign education was the preserve of the richest who could afford the stratospheric expense of sending their progeny to Oxford or Harvard to mingle with an international Westernised elite.
But Rashid's pupils are mostly middle class. Ambitious and academic, they lack the means to afford an American or British education and so they sign up for Mandarin Chinese at the National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad.
(...)
"Nowadays as Pakistanis, you may not be as welcome in all other countries as we were a few years ago," says 18-year-old Ali Rafi, who applied to study economics at Shangdon University after visiting last summer.
"But when we went to China, there was one major difference in that we felt at home, the people relations were really, really good. We were always welcomed, honoured and everyone was really pleased when they learnt we were Pakistani." Full story...
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For decades, a foreign education was the preserve of the richest who could afford the stratospheric expense of sending their progeny to Oxford or Harvard to mingle with an international Westernised elite.
But Rashid's pupils are mostly middle class. Ambitious and academic, they lack the means to afford an American or British education and so they sign up for Mandarin Chinese at the National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad.
(...)
"Nowadays as Pakistanis, you may not be as welcome in all other countries as we were a few years ago," says 18-year-old Ali Rafi, who applied to study economics at Shangdon University after visiting last summer.
"But when we went to China, there was one major difference in that we felt at home, the people relations were really, really good. We were always welcomed, honoured and everyone was really pleased when they learnt we were Pakistani." Full story...
Related posts:
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