03.11.2013 Citizenship through education
By Irfan Muzaffar
If there is one thing that can bring our country out of the current social, economic, and cultural turmoil, it is a decent education for children from all households irrespective of the current social and economic status of their households. You do not need to look toward research-based evidence to support this contention. Just reflect on the role of education in your own life and in the development and progress of the people you know. Even after you factor in the contribution of social and familial backgrounds to people’s success you will still not be able to ignore the returns on the investments that parents made in good education of their children.
We have numerous personal stories of how education has changed the lives of individuals. Yet, on the societal level all we have is a saga of persistent failure in education. Why is it that our individual experiences of the importance of education are never translated into a national narrative of a whole-hearted support for universal education? In today’s article, I attempt to think through this failure in terms of state’s lack of reliance on citizenship, and a consequent deficit of its stake in education. In simple words, I am not sure if Pakistan, collectively speaking, relies on production of good citizenship values through education as a cornerstone of peace and security.
My basic premise in this brief argument is that citizenship is not a natural endowment and must be cultivated through education. Once cultivated, it plays a central role in establishing the writ and the jurisdiction of the state. While in the past the writ of the sovereign was established through the use of brute force, this is no longer the case. Education must play a role in developing a productive relationship between the individuals and the state.
But in Pakistan, where millions of children do not go to schools where they could be educated into citizenry, the use of the term citizen rings hollow. The process of nation building is but the process of development of citizens. In other words, it rests directly on citizenship education for all children. The education is not merely developing the ability to read and write [literacy] but about cultivation of some core shared values. How could our leaders fail to recognize this? I do not assume that they are stupid. In fact, we can understand this failure in terms of a lack of a reliance on cultivation of good citizenship and more use of force as a strategy of government. It mistakenly assumed that everyone born within the marked off boundaries of Pakistan was naturally endowed with the membership of an imagined community called Pakistani nation.
Briefly speaking, the concept of citizen in the modern discourse is independent of such entanglements as religion, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. A state that subscribes to such a notion of citizenship is simply blind to these categories and, therefore, cannot discriminate between its citizens on the basis of any of the above-mentioned characteristics. Now you do not ordinarily interact with people devoid of these characteristics. That is to say, the individuals usually have a religion, belong to one or the other ethnic group, and come with different levels of financial worth. Yet, when it comes to dispensing justice and other public goods, the citizens are regarded as similar beings, with same rights and responsibilities towards each other and the state.
Since these notions of the citizenship, the state, and the mutual relationship between the citizens and state are not a fact of nature, they are made available to children through the process of education. We all know that development of good citizenship is one of the central purposes of education. Since good citizenship is needed by the state for its own preservation, it has naturally developed a powerful stake in education and production of citizens has been offered as a central justification for the involvement of state in financing and provision of mass education systems.
One reason that education indicators for Pakistan remain dwindling has to do largely with lack of Pakistan reliance on the development of good citizenship for its preservation. This lack of commitment to citizenship is compounded by conflicts about the meaning of citizenship itself. The lack of consensus is evident in the heated debates about what it means to be a Pakistani citizen between zealots in both the liberal and the conservative camps. When the state does not value citizenship, and when the society is confused about its meaning, the value of education also recedes into the private sphere.
A robust public system of education would respond to the interests of the state in development of good citizenship as well as to the individuals’ goals of social mobility. But when state foregoes its stake, it sees no real reason for investing in education. The emergence of a huge private school market, therefore, is an indication of this critical state’s failure, or shall we say state’s choice.
Some of you will remind me that I am wrong and that Pakistan’s commitment to education is enshrined in its constitution under which the state must provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of 5-16 years. But this talk of constitutional right to education (RTE) when measured against actual policy suggests that most of this endorsement remains rhetorical in nature. On one hand Pakistan declares education free and compulsory and on the other it encourages development of a for profit private school market with impunity. How can education be declared free and compulsory by the state and yet be exchanged as a private good in a free market? There is thus a contradiction between the state’s constitutional commitments and its actual policy.
Let us for a moment buy into the argument that Pakistan does not have the resource to run a massive system of education and that private sector should play a larger role in sharing the burden. But then why indulge in a political rhetoric of inalienable right to education. The rights are not bought and sold in a market place.
I am surprised that this contradiction between the rights based language and market-oriented policies is not picked up even by the advocates of the RTE. The multilateral and bilateral supporters of Pakistan’s education sector are also encouraging the involvement of private sector in education by a variety of schemes including provision of easy loans to the private school entrepreneurs and limited education voucher schemes. All of this is happening regardless of the fact that Pakistan’s constitution guarantees free and compulsory education. Is this governmental and development partners’ support to private entrepreneurs not contrary to the constitutional promises?
Those who think there is nothing alarming about a virtual takeover of education by private entrepreneurs should appreciate that there must be a reason that even the flag carrier of the free market capitalism, the US, behaves as a socialist country when it comes to education. It continues to support a public school system financed and provided largely by the state and the district governments. Public financing and provision of education for all children has been an integral feature of most liberal democracies. Those societies recognized that unfettered markets could destroy the fabric of the very society in which they were grounded. The markets needed public education and other public services to save them from themselves.
But we have apparently left the bastions of capitalism far behind us when it comes to marketising the delivery of most basic of the public services. We want to universalise education at all costs but by undermining our own constitutional promise for free and compulsory education for all children. A highly inequitable marketplace of education where haves would remain at an advantage because of their capacity to buy a better education and where the have-nots will be consigned to the low quality schools that their parents can afford. The public education system will continue to dwindle due to apparent lack of resources and exit of students to private schools.
Where do we go from here? There is no easy way forward. But first and foremost the state must recognize the stake it must have in education. Second, it must be able to pay for education through taxation and public private partnerships and should not begin to rely on foreign donors on paying for the education of Pakistani children. Whether education is provided by the state or through a private entrepreneur, for the constitutional promise to be met, it must be free at the point of service. Otherwise, the rhetoric of free and compulsory education will continue to ring hollow.