22.09.2013 Education and self-interest
The elite in Pakistan are never genuinely convinced that expanding education opportunity will accrue benefits to them, even if they were to be in the form of enhanced stability and security
By Irfan Muzaffar
This is the first of a series of articles on education. In these, we will think through some very basic questions about education, such as, why do we need universal education? Should it be state’s responsibility to provide education for every child? Is education an instrument of equity and social justice? In addition to these and other key questions, we will also address some very specific issues pertaining to education reforms such as preparation of teachers, growth of private schools and their consequences, and other pressing issues.
In this article, I will consider the rhetoric of Education for All (EFA). Those of us working in education sector have repeatedly grounded their work in EFA. Since the introduction of the term in 1990s, both the civil society and government have talked about Pakistan’s efforts to expand educational opportunity in terms of an obligation to the international community.
Nearly every new proposal and policy framework that I have seen invokes EFA, and now MDGs, as international obligations to be met by our government. Just to give you an example, the second paragraph of the most recent National Education Policy (2009) justifies the review of the earlier policies in these words: “…the performance remained deficient in several key aspects including access, quality and equity of educational opportunities and secondly, the international challenges like…MDGs, …EFA Goals and the challenges triggered by globalization...” The policy proposals must be grounded in an overarching policy framework. The rhetoric of EFA and MDGs works to supply such a framework in the case of education sector in Pakistan.
Although EFA is usually traced to the UN conference on education in the Thai city of Jomtien in 1990, the rhetoric is certainly not new. Most countries becoming independent from the colonial rule mentioned the idea of universal education as a central plank of nation building.
In Pakistan, for example, the participants in the very first national conference on education held in Karachi in 1947 resolved to provide free and compulsory education for a period of five years, which was to be gradually raised to eight years. Likewise, even before the 18th Constitutional Amendment that made state responsible to provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of 5-16 years, education for all was on the constitutional anvil as a principle of state policy. So the rhetoric of EFA only assumed an international tenor after Jomtien, while it had been with us all along.
But there was one crucial difference between the new and the old EFA. The early advocates of universal education grounded its justification in terms of such imperatives as nation building, individual and national progress, and so on. The later advocates of EFA needed only refer to the international obligations of their state. While the early advocates of EFA articulated it in terms of state’s obligation to its citizens, the recent advocates justified it in terms of state’s obligation to the international community. Does this difference matter in terms of actually achieving education for all? Let us this question by looking at the history of the struggle for universal education.
Not many people realise that human civilizations have not always entertained the idea of universal education and that it was necessitated only after substantive changes in the organisation of societies. This has nothing to do with the importance given to education per se. For instance, it is undeniable that Islamic civilisation at its peak supported both knowledge acquisition and production. Yet it did so without ever requiring all children to be educated at state’s expense.
If you could go back about 300 years in a time capsule, and then keep going further back, you are highly unlikely to find any civilisation on the planet that supported universal education. It is only in the last three hundred years or so that the idea of universal education took roots. How did nations arrive at this strange idea to educate everyone at state’s expense? As you may have guessed, the rationality behind this universalisation of education was anything but moral.
Establishing a system of universal education required huge financial commitments by the state. This is never easy as demonstrated by our own experience with frustrated attempts to raise the percentage of GDP spent on education. How difficult it must have been to persuade the policy elites to pay for basic education of all children with public funds. The advocates of common schools in most countries that universalised education in the mid to late 19th century were involved in a protracted struggle to convince the policy elites of the benefits that would accrue from educating everyone in the society. Their arguments were largely pragmatic.
Just to give you one example, Horace Mann, one of the most fervent advocates of common education in the US, used to draw the attention of policy elites towards a growing tide of menace and decline at the source of which, he claimed, was the unschooled mind. The following quote from his lecture succinctly captures the argument for EFA in his times: “The mobs, the riots, the burnings, the lynching, perpetrated by the men of the present day, are perpetrated, because of their vicious or defective education, when children. We see, and feel, the havoc and the ravage of their tiger-passions, now, when they are full grown; but it was years ago that they were whelped and suckled. And so, too, if we are derelict from our duty, in this matter, our children, in their turn, will suffer. If we permit the vulture’s eggs to be incubated and hatched, it will then be too late to take care of the lambs.”
So those championing common education saw it as an instrument to create a secure society, to ward off the menace of undesirable ideologies, and to help achieve the goals of economic progress and individual fulfillment. It is easy to see that Horace Mann’s frontal arguments would have lost their rhetorical force if he were to ask his fellow citizens that it was their international obligation to expand educational opportunity.
It is not always the fact that the policy elites are well meaning, that they really intend to expand public education of a decent quality to all citizens for moral reasons, but are finding it hard to do so.
The findings of some recent research on political economy of education are quite provocative in this respect. When the governments undersupply public education they do so because those who control the policy do not want other people’s children to become educated (B.W. Ansell. (2010) From the ballot to the blackboard: The redistributive political economy of education).
Let us imagine a society, which, in its given state, consists of two segments of population, a small educated elite and a very large inadequately educated semi-literate or illiterate segment. Someone demands that this society should be given educational opportunity and that doing this will increase the life chances of everyone in it. Imagine further the existence of a small policy elite in this society and assume that it has the wherewithal to make and influence all policy decisions. If the size of the economy of this society is small then it is imaginable that redistribution of resources aimed at making the disadvantaged better off would leave the rich worse off. If so, wouldn’t it be perfectly rational for the policy elite to block educational expansion if it were likely to leave them worse off?
The readers can see how difficult it might have been to persuade the key players within a political economy to expand educational opportunity. It only happened because the elite were convinced that it was in their own benefit to spend on education of all children. It was not because they owed it to some international agreement but because they were genuinely convinced that they would be better off by spending on education.
In this country, we have a similar situation. The elite are never genuinely convinced that expanding education opportunity will accrue benefits to them, even if they were to be in the form of enhanced stability and security.
As I mentioned earlier in this article, the rhetoric of EFA has been with us all along but after 1990, the civil society and government started referring to Pakistan’s efforts to expand educational opportunity in terms of her obligation to the international community. I would like you to contrast this with the justification for education proffered by Horace Mann to his own policy elite in the mid 1800s. The justification appealed to the self-interest of the people and not to external treaties.
The recent rhetoric of EFA and MDGs etc. has had an unfortunate effect of justifying in terms of international treaties, what should have been grounded in, and justified on the basis of, a compact between the state and its citizens and on the basis of enlightened self-interest of all segments of the society.