Education

[hira iftikhar rana]

GIVEN how the education sector has always been neglected as a low-priority area, it is clear that Pakistan will not be able to achieve the 80 per cent literacy rate by 2015 set out as one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Just how far behind we are can be gauged from the depressing findings reported in this year’s ‘Education for All’ global report. At 53 per cent, Pakistan’s literacy rate is still the lowest in the region. Its illiteracy rate has increased since 1990, indicating that efforts to improve illiteracy have all but failed. At 0.73, the country’s gender parity index is one of the world’s lowest. As against this, other countries in the region have made considerable progress. The report also notes how factors like long distances between homes and schools act as a deterrent to education for girls and how poverty affects children’s education. While there is nothing new to these disclosures, the government must ask itself why it is lagging so far behind in achieving these goals, and what steps it plans to take to meet the targets.

Undoubtedly, the road to achieving the goals by 2015 is paved with problems and pitfalls but if the government shows the needed political will, the targets in question can still be achieved. To arrest the high dropout rates, it must make education accessible to the large rural population where the problem of ghost schools and absentee teachers is rampant. So far, various initiatives have been hampered by weak implementation mechanisms and lack of monitoring for which inspectors must be held answerable. It will need to improve the basic conditions of existing schools — 107,000 are without electricity, 68,000 do not have drinking water and 82,000 lack boundary walls. Although the government increases the budgetary allocations to education each year, the amount is still paltry and there is no visible improvement in this sector as a result. Pakistan spends only 2.1 per cent of its GDP on education compared to India’s 4.1 per cent and this allocation must be increased if we are to meet the MDG targets.

[hira iftikhar rana]

A friend was saying the other day that but for frequent cataclysmic changes in our politics and in the country's constitution, the problems of education might have been taken more seriously by successive governments. They might even have been dealt with to some purpose if the elected representatives of the people, or the military regimes, had not had other things on their mind. Their own survival, for instance.

There have been commissions galore as well as numerous syllabus committees. There have been more changes in the education policy than in any other policy, and every change has been described as revolutionary. Maybe our educationists are just not made to bring about the required improvements. For instance, I can think of some decisions that were senseless. The teaching of Persian was abandoned although it is inconceivable to develop Urdu without classical Persian or even to practice Urdu literature. This was done to promote Arabic, but poor Arabic was hardly promoted.

Then, the script of children's Urdu textbooks was changed to the naskh and, after ten years, when children had mastered the unfamiliar script, we went back again to nasta'aliq. No one has been able to understand why this was done, nor did the government have a plausible explanation. English was relegated to the background but now it is a popular pursuit again after we saw India moving ahead fast by concentration on the lingua franca of the world. The subject of drawing was given up and drawing masters became extinct.

All these were not very vital matters, but they are symptomatic of mindlessness and the tendency to fumble without the ability to choose the right path. You can only imagine how educational planners would have treated really important things. After every decade, the old nostrums were tried all over again, but with the same lack of success, and given up. And now of course the government seems to have come to the conclusion that education is too big a task for it to handle and every day more and more stress is being laid on the increased contribution from the private sector.

The biggest hurdle in the way of spreading education and making it meaningful is that the existing faulty structure must first be demolished, and this means re-education of teachers themselves. The host of difficulties that are bound to crop up in the process will be too daunting for timid planners to tackle and overcome. These would cover new syllabi, new textbooks, making up the shortage of staff and school accommodation, and the most important could be the sheer shortage of educational facilities for the ever-growing population.

The other day, I read a news report pertaining to the availability of staff. In a newly opened intermediate college in a small town, posts of principal and twelve lecturers had been sanctioned but only two lecturers and the principal had turned up. The townspeople had written in despair to the newspaper. They said -- if the boys are admitted who will take the classes, and if admissions are not made what would be the point in spending lakhs of rupees on the building and its appurtenances?

This is a case that is quite common in Pakistan and may perhaps be found in no other country. Influential legislators get colleges started in places where they are actually not needed, whereas the government does not have the finances to equip them properly. My mind went back to the sixties. In Parachinar, in the heart of the tribal area, a brand new degree college had been constructed and the situation was the other way round. When admissions were over, it was discovered that there were more teachers in the college than students. That too was a case of ignoring reality and trying to please a lobby.

Few people realise (least of all politicians) that the system of education faces massive hurdles with its shoddy quality, duality (Urdu versus English medium), neglect of science and questionable examination system with rampant cheating. But since the malaise is chronic in nature, it does not draw the attention of the authorities and the public as much as, say, the issue of law and order does. We talk about it with concern, discuss it like an abstract issue and then go over to worrying about sectarian killings or gossiping about some prime minister's undemocratic ouster.

Sometimes, however, we are shaken out of our apathy when we see a newspaper photograph showing little boys and girls being taught in the open in a municipal primary school where the only chair is for the underpaid teacher. Naturally he or she must be shown respect since we can't show them consideration salary-wise. In a society where respectability is measured by the money you possess, teachers should be thankful they are not equated with sweepers.

And sometimes we are really shocked to read that the roof of a school has collapsed burying children underneath and bringing tragedy to so many homes. But we never read that so-and-so has been punished with imprisonment for causing the tragedy, because essentially it is the government which is responsible. You can't send the government to jail. Though that is the heartiest wish of some citizens. On the other hand, the prime minister visits his old school, a fancy place in the Murree Hills and announces a handsome donation -- for an institution run by the government!

There is also another problem. Every political and religious party has invaded the colleges and universities. What our politicians lack in guts and militancy to promote their respective ideologies, they expect the student wings to make up, with naturally violent and disastrous consequences. Has any party ever honesty assessed the immeasurable damage it has done to the nation by politicising education? And yet every politician issues a statement every other day appealing to students to keep away from politics.

Do you know that more has been spoken and written about education than on any other subject in Pakistan during the last 59 years? But if you read a speech on the subject by Mr. Fazlur Rahman, education minister, made in 1948, and a speech by the present education minister you will hardly find any difference.

Both the speeches say the same things about re-fashioning education to suit the genius of the people and meet their aspirations. Either our leaders have not been able to discover the genius of the people or they are rank hypocrites who live on spouting platitudes and making fools of poor Pakistanis. One is inclined to believe the latter.