EDUCATION of the poor, by the poor and for the poor seems to be the message of the new Education Policy announced recently. This is in response to the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary education to be achieved by 2015 by all nations of the world. Pakistan is among these nations but its literacy rates are abysmally poor by world standards or even South Asia standards.

The present government’s emphasis on this aspect in the education policy needs to be commended. But the solution it comes up with of the problem is the setting up of “Apna Ghar Schools” to provide education to the poor. It is highly questionable. Why build new schools to educate the poor when 145,000 public or government schools which are already on ground can be utilised, upgraded and improved to fulfil the needs. Free education up to primary level (Education Policy 1972) and free education up to matriculation (Education policies 2002 &2009) has already been promised.

It would be in order to remind ourselves that according to Unesco, “education is a fundamental human right and essential for the exercise of all other human rights” and that the United Nations and Unesco lay down international legal obligations for the right to education which must be promoted and developed as the right of every person to enjoy access to education of good quality, without discrimination or exclusion. In Pakistan’s context the real challenge lies here.

Despite the MDG vision, millions of children and adults worldwide remain deprived of opportunities to get education, mostly because of conditions of poverty. Recently, a joint effort by the Unesco Institute for Statistics (UIS) and Unicef of global statistics in education states that one-third of the world’s out-of school children live in South Asia. This region also has one quarter of the world’s primary school age population and out of 162 million school-age children, 42 million are out-of-school. The highest share of out-of-school children in South Asia is found in Pakistan where more than eight million of almost 20 million school-age children (or 40 per cent) are out-of-school.

The Pakistani state is committed since 1947 to provide all basic facilities to the country’s children including education which has been reiterated and re-emphasised in the Constitution of 1973. Even after 63 years, Pakistan faces low enrolment, a high drop-out rate and a significant gender gap. According to the 2006 Unesco study, 8.1 million children were not enrolled in schools in 2002-04. The United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) ranks Pakistan 134th in the list of 177 countries and this low ranking is due to Pakistan’s poor performance in education. (Development Studies, 2005)

In Punjab province, the provincial government is focusing on providing quality schools for the poor under a scheme called ‘Daanish School’. This ambitious project defines itself as “Aitchisons for the poor” and, again, this can be called in question as to why we need such schools. Aitchison College was meant for the sons of Rajas, Maharajas and Nawabs to grow them into ‘brown sahibs’ during British rule in the subcontinent. In 1835, Lord Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education had stipulated English education for the minimal numbers of Indians and the ‘trickle-down’ concept was to take care of the poor masses. These Aitchisonians would act and think like Englishmen despite their skin tones being brown.

Post 1947, this college caters to the elite of Pakistan and the culture of the ‘brown sahibs’ is still being maintained. Will the ‘Daanish Schools” provide the poor with an education that will also cater to making them into English gentlemen? Maybe, the concept of Aitchison means large grounds, grand buildings and state of the art laboratories and libraries. Even so, does a nation which is constantly begging for its running costs be able to afford such grand schools? It will take a huge amount of money to build these schools and then the government will have to bear the running costs of maintaining these schools and their facilities.

Pakistan is still an underdeveloped country and must adopt a realistic approach to providing education to all its citizens, to meet the MDG goals. One may learn from the example of Bangladesh which has improved its literacy rate by introducing a ‘one room, one teacher’ schools. This is a good starting point to make a large population of children literate. However, in our country the problem continues to be a misconstrued approach towards the education of the poor. We are constantly lagging behind in the race to create equal opportunities for the poor when opportunities to catch up are becoming more and more impossible.

Lyndon Johnson, in 1965, started the Head Start programme under the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It is the longest running programme in the US to address systemic poverty. Although the concept of Head Start is to try and give children from disadvantaged backgrounds a fairly good start to education which fortunate children take for granted. But studies of the Head Start pre-school education raised the issue that the “children who finish the programme and are placed in disadvantaged schools (i.e. for the poor) perform worse than their peers by second grade.

Only by continuing to isolate these children (such as dispersing and sending them to better-performing school districts) can the gains be captured? Thus, schools just for the ‘poor’ cannot give the same results that mainstream public schools of a high standard can do to facilitate the children’s educational growth. Here, a few “Daanish Schools” for excellence and mainstreaming bright students can be thought of. The NGO schools in Pakistan should work on the early childhood and primary stage of education of the disadvantaged. The children could then be placed in mainstream quality public schools to be given the best chance at social mobility.

The whole approach to the problem of putting children into schools has to be carefully considered so that it can be easily implemented as well. Many NGOs are already trying to educate children at no cost to the parents. This effort can only be a drop in the ocean for the numbers we are looking at in terms of Pakistan’s ever increasing population. The solution would then be to go back to the initial project of public schools providing education at low cost to the nation’s children. Most countries of the world depend on the public sector to fill this gap of schooling for the population at large. This also provides the children with a right to education by their country rather than being labelled as being from a ‘poor’ school for the rest of their lives. Public schools provide the best level playing field to children from all backgrounds.

However, if the Head Start concept is problematic for Pakistani standards in terms of organisation and money, early childhood education can be serviced by television programming for learning and teaching. The number of private television channels which operate can easily make programmes for literacy and numeracy to target the 3-5 year age group and of educating children up to primary level (5-10 years) if the government is willing to spend money here for the greater good of poverty-stricken families. Radio and television could have made many out-of-school children literate over the years even though schooling had been denied to them.

What is needed is a sustained effort by the government to provide education to the children who are denied this right as a result of poverty. Moreover, it is not just a matter of enrolling children into “poor” schools but, also to make sure they complete primary schooling equipped with a comprehensive set of literacy and numeracy skills. Conditions of out-of-school children need to be studied alongside needs of educational quality and learning outcomes.

Quality and quantity must go hand in hand for any further interventions in the education sector for optimum results. Our survival lies in redeeming the public schools for the greatest good of educating the people of Pakistan rather than making more and more variety of schools at higher expense. All the ‘missing facilities’ of public

schools quoted ad nauseum in policy documents can be rectified if the will to do so is there. Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, wisely said, ‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.’