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Old Friday, March 23, 2012
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Pakistan’s education emergency: Failing its future
March 22, 2012
By: Adam Thomson

In 1947, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah said: “Education is a matter of life or death for Pakistan. The world is progressing so rapidly that without the requisite advance in education, not only shall we be left behind others but we may be wiped out altogether.” And yet, if the global knowledge economy were a school and Pakistan its student, Pakistan would currently get a failing grade.

The global average primary school enrolment is a shockingly low 87 percent and yet Pakistan’s is even lower at 56 percent. The economic opportunity cost of not educating Pakistan’s children is the same as suffering a 2010 flood every single year. The nation’s health and its stability are affected too. This is an education emergency.

Seventeen million school age children are out of school. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Karachi. For every 10 kids out of school around the world, one is Pakistani.

Progress has been made. Under the 18th Amendment, for the first time, education is no longer a privilege, but a fundamental right for all children. Article 25-A says: “The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of 5 to 16 years.” But this progress has not been fast enough. Still barely one child in four makes it into secondary education. Children are a country’s future and Pakistan is failing its future. No country can follow the path to a happy future if it cannot read the road signs. Nothing short of an education transformation is required.

The UK is already working with Pakistan to assist in this necessary transformation in Pakistan’s education. The UK has more to offer Pakistan on education than any other country. UK and Pakistan are linked by more than just our history and language. More Pakistanis still take English exams than any other nationality outside a formal government education sector. UKAid and the British Council are engaged in vocational education in Pakistan, and UKAid is investing nearly the equivalent of Rs 100 billion over four years into primary education.

UKAid will help four million extra Pakistani children into primary school by 2015 – about as many as are in primary school in England. We are aiming to train 90,000 teachers, fund six million textbook sets, and rebuild schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa destroyed by militants or floods.

Imagine lifting primary school enrolment across Pakistan to the world average of 87 percent within five years. It is entirely possible. Imagine the social and political partnerships that would have accomplished this – between media, civil society, the private sector and politicians. With parents mobilised to demand, and political leaders galvanised to deliver, better education for children.

Imagine then how good the nation would feel about its achievement and how much it would want to complete the easier rest of the journey to 100 percent. All it needs is leadership.

The Pakistan and the UK are connected, joined at the hip. We cannot flourish if you do not flourish. You cannot flourish if your population is uneducated. The Quaid-i-Azam recognised the importance of education in 1947. Sixty-five years on, the UK is working in partnership across the country to tackle the current education emergency and to help to secure a prosperous future for Pakistan.

The writer is British High Commissioner to Pakistan
-The Nation
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Want unity? Tolerate diversity!
March 25, 2012
By Khaled Ahmed

Why do we seek unity but end up with uniformity? If you want unity, teach yourself to tolerate diversity. Today, we are returning to a failed cure for our criticism of diversity in education. It should be interesting to examine this passion. A quick diagnosis says: we are leaning on intense isolationism to preserve the righteousness of a cause that doesn’t appeal to the world. English-medium education — called Boko Haram in xenophobic Nigeria — is our opening to a world we want to say goodbye to.

Imran Khan says there should be a uniform system of education in Pakistan. Instead, there are three: state sector, private sector and madrassa. Someone has applied a gloss to his thinking: we are producing three types of educated individuals who tend not to agree in their attitudes. Somehow, uniformity of thinking is the criterion and Pakistan will be better off if everybody thought the same and did not differ.

For some, it is wrong that the private sector stream is where only the privileged are educated. It offends their egalitarian view to see the poor remain outside the ambit of good-quality education. But the private stream of education is not only for the rich; some low-grade English-medium schools cater to the middle and lower middle classes as well. That’s the way it has always been in Islam’s historic madrassas too.

Those who point to ‘three nations’ being nurtured by the trifurcated system remain too scared of the non-state actors to criticise the madrassa system. Given that Pakistan’s ideology continues to converge to stringency of faith, the madrassa may be the utopian locus to aspire to. Currently, the mind is focused on how to reduce the salience of the ‘unbridled’ private sector education which makes its pupils take ‘foreign exams’. Boko Haram?

The private sector is often said to be ‘out of control’. But it is the madrassa in a kind of administrative wilderness that is often subjecting poor resident children to sexual violence. The madrassa might dominate in the coming days also because of the powerful nexus of the madrassa network with the nonstate actors and their financial hinterland in the dollar-heavy Gulf. Islamabad is quickly legalising hundreds of illegal madrassas and mosques it knows are aligned with the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The state-run system is either dead or dying because of the declining outreach capacity of the provinces and a derelict teaching community. Research shows that the private sector English-medium institutions — where all subjects are taught in English — have better teachers. Circumstances have pushed the parents to lean on this system to make their children more suitable for the job market which, in turn, interfaces more than ever before with the global job market.

One critic of the ‘three streams’ could not hide his offence at English-medium schools ‘aspiring to multinationals instead of state employment’. (It is true that universities such as LUMS have lowered the quality of civil service by attracting the good graduates to the private sector; but this has happened in India too.) Normally, anyone would think of up-grading the state sector instead of punishing the private sector.

Pakistan has often been called a ‘state without a nation’, meaning that it is a geographic unit without much cohesion among the people who live in it. Pakistan first became conscious of it after 1947, and soon found its cure in One Unit, which wiped out the provinces and their regional identities. After that, ideology was roped in to create the unity the state lacked. Today, Pakistan remains nation-less. We tried unity. Let us give diversity a chance.

The Express Tribune
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Quality and plagiarism
By Dr Pervez Tahir
March 30, 2012

Dr. Adil Najam, the vice chancellor of LUMS has raised an important issue on the quality of higher education in an interview with this newspaper “Quality education to drive Pakistan forward: LUMS VC” (March 28). He was, however, less convincing in contending that the issue of plagiarism was being addressed by the Higher Education Commission (HEC). There is, as he put it, “a stream of PhDs (irrespective of their quality) returning to the country.” The major contribution to this stream has also been made by the HEC in the choice of institutions abroad and the selection of candidates. The HEC incentives structure contradicts its own policy of producing better quality PhDs within the country. There should be a proper assessment of both foreign and local PhDs.

An unplagiarised thesis can still be of very poor quality. Turnitin, the plagiarism-detection software applied by the HEC, only detects similarity of the text. There are now, in fact, softwares available for paraphrasing, which rewrite a document in a way that the chances of detection by Turnitin are reduced. The significance of the problem being researched, the appropriateness of the methodology used and the logical connectedness of the argument must be judged by human beings, not by softwares. While the drive to do original work has to come from the supervisee, there is no better judge of quality than the supervisor. If the supervisee’s work were to be of original and sound quality, then they are unlikely to feel the need to plagiarise. Next, comes the examiners’ judgment regarding the suitability of the thesis to receive award for a research degree. The examiners also have to be competent and chosen with utmost care. The HEC has laid down the criteria for examiners to choose local PhDs, but it has no say in the matter of these examinations. In the end, it is not just the supervisee, but also the supervisor who should be held responsible for the quality of work produced.

A lot more remains to be done on the effectiveness of the HEC’s anti-plagiarism policy. MPhil is a degree that prepares students for PhD work. In the very first application of Turnitin to the MPhil theses, four Quaid-i-Azam University students were reported to have substantially plagiarised. Only recently, the HEC had rated the same university as the top-most in terms of research. This casts doubt on the qualifications of the supervisors and the examiners themselves. How else does one explain the pride of performance award by the president on March 23, to an academic accused of plagiarism? Isa Daudpota, the lone crusader against plagiarism, brought the issue to the attention of the HEC in November last year and again on March 11 this year, but to no avail. By the HEC’s own admission, the cases of plagiarism are on the rise. Isa has also identified a number of fake journals edited by the plagiarists which are then used as outlets for their own publications. All his efforts to encourage the HEC to revise its toothless policy against plagiarism has come to a naught.

Our Constitution stipulates a regulatory role for the HEC. Instead, its focus continues to be on being a funding agency. This was the main point of the last meeting’s proceedings of the vice chancellors committee. With priorities like these, quality and originality will continue to invite laments similar to that of Dr Adil Najam.

The Express Tribune,
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Emergency or no emergency — education is destined to face a budget cut

Ehsan-ur-Rehman

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani declared 2011 the Year of Education, and also announced an educational emergency in the country.

A good step in the right direction, no doubt. Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had said in 1947: "Education is a matter of life or death for Pakistan. The world is progressing so rapidly that without the requisite advance in education, not only shall we be left behind others, but we may be wiped out altogether."

But what happened next? The same year, the federal government drastically slashed the higher education budget for the third consecutive year, starting from 2009. The federal parliament approved a budget of 14 billion rupees (US$ 162 million) for the financial year 2011-12, compared with 22.5 billion rupees (US$ 281 million) in 2009 and 16 billion (US$ 189) in 2010.

The same year, the defence budget was increased by nearly 12 per cent. It was jacked up from Rs. 444.2 billion to Rs. 495.2 billion for 2011-12, in addition to over Rs. 73 billion, allocated for pensions of military personnel that would be paid from the civilian budget.

What does it show? It clearly shows that educational emergency or no emergency, the education budget is destined to go down with each passing year. And, hence, a decline in education as well.

According to UNICEF statistics, the global average primary school enrolment is a shockingly low 87 per cent and, yet, Pakistan's is even lower at 56 per cent. According to a research study last year, the economic opportunity cost of not educating Pakistan's children is the same as suffering a 2010 flood every single year.

Official documents say seventeen million school age children are out of school. That is equivalent to the entire population of Karachi. For every 10 kids out of school around the world, one is Pakistani.

No doubt progress has been made. Under the 18th Amendment, for the first time, education is no longer a privilege, but a fundamental right for all children. Article 25-A says: "The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of 5 to 16 years." But this progress has not been fast enough. Still barely one child in four makes it into secondary education. Children are a country's future and Pakistan is failing its future, Adam Thomson, British High Commissioner to Pakistan, wrote in an article recently. No country can follow the path to a happy future if it cannot read the road signs. Nothing short of an education transformation is required, added the high commissioner.

Adam Thomson wrote that his country was already working with Pakistan to assist in this necessary transformation in Pakistan's education. UKAid and the British Council are engaged in vocational education in Pakistan, and UKAid is investing nearly the equivalent of Rs. 100 billion over four years into primary education. It will help four million extra Pakistani children into primary school by 2015 - about as many as are in primary school in England. The UK government is aiming to train 90,000 teachers, fund six million textbook sets, and rebuild schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa destroyed by militants or floods.
Besides Britain, various other countries and donor agencies are also extending a helping hand to the government of Pakistan to increase the literacy rate in the country. But here arises the question: how is it possible for literacy rate to start going up when the government has been slashing funds for the sector drastically with each passing year? No way at all. If the government is really serious about the issue and it really wants to develop the education sector, it would have to increase the annual allocations for the sector significantly. The people attached to the sector believe an additional spending of Rs. 100 billion would be required, which is 50 per cent more than the current spending.

In 2005-06, Pakistan spent 2.5 per cent of its budget on schooling, and now it spends just 1.5 per cent in this area. That is less than the subsidies given to the PIA, PEPCO and Pakistan Steel.

A research report released in mid-2011 estimated that with the current rate of progress, no person alive today would see a Pakistan with universal education as defined in our Constitution. Balochistan will see it in 2100 or later.

When the prime minister declared an educational emergency last year, he said in a statement that Article 25-A of the Constitution enjoins upon the state to provide free and compulsory education to all children aged between five to 16 years, which makes this task a shared responsibility between the federal and the provincial governments. He said that after the 18th Amendment, education is precisely a provincial subject and the federal government would only extend policy guidelines. The comprehensive National Educational Policy 2009, set the goals of raising the annual budgetary allocations for the sector to seven per cent of the GDP and increasing literacy to 85 per cent by 2015. But are we really prepared to meet these goals? After the devolution of education to provinces, have the provincial government given any importance to this vital sector? Have they increased allocations for the sector during the past years? Official data show no mentionable increase was announced. None of the four provincial governments - Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa - and the Gilgit Baltistan and AJK governments announced the increase which was expected after the devolution.

For the financial year 2011-12, the Punjab provincial government announced Rs. 23.9 billion for all education sectors, including primary and secondary schools, higher education departments, special education and literacy departments. Around Rs. 14.5 billion were allocated for the School Education Department, Rs. 6.5 billion for higher education, around Rs. 500 million for special education and Rs. 800 million for literacy development. There had been a total increase of Rs 0.6 billion in the education budget compared to the last year's budget: just peanuts.

The Sindh government, however, showed more "generosity". For the fiscal year 2011-12, it increased the education allocations by 15 per cent, though it also failed to match the education budget of five years back. The Balochistan government also allocated Rs. 19.256 billion for the education sector in its annual budget for fiscal year 2011-12. It was an increase of 11 per cent compared to the last year when Rs. 17.328 billion had been allocated for the sector. Again the allocation failed to match the funds announced during the previous government’s tenure.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government allocated Rs. 5.4 billion, almost equal to the previous year's allocations.

According to the Education Emergency Pakistan report, there are 26 countries poorer than Pakistan but they send more of their children to school, showing that the issue is not about finances, but the will and articulating demand effectively. It is too easy, and incorrect, to believe that Pakistan is too poor to provide this basic right, the report said. The most important thing is a political will on the part of the political parties, especially those in the ruling alliance and those in the opposition, to enhance the literacy rate in the country. They will have to reset their priorities, with the agenda of educating the nation placed at the top of the list.

http://www.weeklycuttingedge.com/index.html
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Academic responsibility
By Tanvir Ahmad Khan
April 2, 2012

The discussion about threats to academic freedom became noticeable some time after Ayub Khan established the first military dictatorship in Pakistan though the Rawalpindi conspiracy case and widespread suppression of left-wing intellectuals including Faiz Ahmad Faiz, in and outside academia, took place. The leitmotif of this early debate was that the state –– driven by the vested interests of its ruling elite and by its need to screen unpopular foreign alliances –– constrains the freedom of thought and action of intellectual constituencies. There has also been concern about intimidation from extremist religious groups that do not tolerate diversity of opinion. In Karachi’s intellectual culture, a particular political party has often been accused of using terror against those opposed to its ethnic agenda.

Sadly enough, sacrosanct principles of the autonomy, self-regulation and pluralism of the academic world are now being undermined in Pakistan by certain endogenous practices. As some renowned academics point out, there is erosion of integrity in academia. What invests this unease with urgency is the creeping disenchantment with the principal institution charged with the maintenance of high standards and norms, namely, the Higher education Commission (HEC).

Some academics are already talking of the need to limit the HEC’s role to more or less the same as once belonged to the old fashioned University Grants Commission and supplant it by a higher statutory body for the direction and oversight of higher education. An increase in regulatory mechanisms would inevitably be intrusive, rules-driven and restrictive of space for academic freedom. But just as a nose dive in law and order has led to ever increasing arbitrary powers for the coercive apparatus of the state, the academic world may well have to pay this price.

Several things have gone wrong after the planners woke up to the yawning gap between the ‘output’ of our universities and that of the other middle order nations. Apart from dilution of quality during indiscriminate expansion, there is a conspicuous lack of intellectual probity and honesty. As head of the largest think-tank in Islamabad for three years, I was dismayed by the demise of the culture of book reading, heavy desk-bound reliance on material instantly accessible from Google and, even more depressingly, recourse to plagiarism amongst researchers otherwise selected on merit. When challenged, their usual alibi was their ‘training’ at premier universities under teachers who had no issue with these ingrained habits. This is a clear abdication of academic responsibility rooted in the compulsion of university departments, and in turn of the universities themselves, to produce impressive statistics that get translated into grants and appropriations. In our larger social and political milieu, the dominant trend is trivialisation of norms and the academic community is not doing enough to immune itself from it.

Several academics are struggling hard and in the process generating a sharp debate with the HEC, to save the idea of a university and preserve at least minimum standards of research in sciences and social sciences. Universities represent the apex of a nation’s spiritual, cultural and intellectual life. They transmit and create knowledge. They are the main instruments of planned and orderly change that enables communities to keep pace with time. Modern societies are heavily dependent on excellence and achievement in higher education, particularly in science and technology. It is, therefore, natural that its practical functions receive special emphasis. But higher education is equally vital for objectives and purposes which are not directly related to economic progress but which are good in themselves and which lead to enrichment of life, be it individual or collective.

The choice today is stark: we can demand a much higher quality of performance from the existing HEC, or think of more watchdogs. Prudence requires that the government sets up a special commission to make recommendations on remedial measures after an intensive investigation of the state of higher education. Needless to say, academic leaders should have a key, though not exclusive, role in this process.

Published in The Express Tribune
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Education for all?
April 3, 2012
By Yaqoob Khan Bangash

The Holocaust and the horrors of the Second World War brought to the fore an important discussion about the inherent rights of humans. Grounded in Natural Law theory, it was argued that humans had certain fundamental rights which were inalienable and had to be safeguarded and enforced. Pakistan was part of the first group of countries which signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but, as obvious, we have made little headway in even ensuring that people are aware of these rights, let alone guaranteeing their enforcement. It is interesting to note that even after signing the Declaration, the Pakistan government was opposed to the idea of including all the fundamental rights mentioned therein in the first constitution of Pakistan.

In 1948, Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights made education a ‘right’ for all, and bound its signatories to make primary education free and compulsory for all member states of the United Nations. However, it was only through the Eighteenth Amendment to the Pakistani constitution in 2010, that the government has made it an enforceable fundamental right in Pakistan. Article 25A reads: “The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years in such manner as may be determined by law.” Why this long delay? First, let me point out that we are not alone in such a long delay. Even in India (our usual comparison) free and compulsory education became a fundamental right only in 2002. That said, the larger problem is the lack of awareness of these rights in Pakistan. I wonder how many people outside the NGO/education sector know about this fundamental right, even after nearly two years of it becoming enforceable? One simple reason for the lack of awareness is that these rights are simply not taught at any level in Pakistan. While these rights are inherent, the articulation of these rights is important so that people might be empowered to understand and utilise them for their development. In this regard, the effort by the South Asia Forum for Education Development and the Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi in collecting a million signatures in support of Article 25A is a commendable step. We have several good laws on the statute books, but the lack of public awareness makes them paper tigers and useless in development.

The second issue, on an equal level with awareness, is the enforcement of the right. Public awareness of a right must lead to its adequate implementation. What use will Article 25A have if the federal and provincial governments simply extend the current government schooling policies? We might increase our ‘officially’ literate population and legally fulfil a requirement, but would fail to actually ‘educate’ the people. Before we even get to the minute details of how we would practically ensure that all children between the said ages are given free and compulsory education, we must decide what we want as our end result. Do we want people who know simply a few facts and figures? Or do we want to form informed and discerning citizens? If it is the former, then not much thinking is required, and Pakistan will remain as it is for the foreseeable future. If it is the latter conception then with time, Pakistan will be transformed into a country of self-confident, self-aware and judicious people who work for their and their country’s betterment. Therefore, the realisation of Article 25A must be substantive.

At this moment, there is a great ping-pong match between the federal and the provincial governments about who has what responsibility. Then there is the issue of money: where will it come from and where will it go? Then is the problem of actually building more schools, hiring and training teachers and then lastly, how to ensure that children actually remain in school for the requisite number of years. All of these questions need to be dealt with dispassionately, but first we need to internalise this newly guaranteed right and think about what kind of an ‘educated’ people we want to be?

The Express Tribune
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Education in a quandary
April 18, 2012
Zubeida Mustafa

IN today’s age “of the one per cent, for the one per cent, and by the one per cent” (to quote Joseph Stiglitz) to seek equality — especially in education — amounts to looking for utopia.

Therefore the South Asian Forum for Educational Development, Idara-i-Taleem-o-Agahi (ITA), and other partners were brave to have ‘quality-inequality quandary’ as the theme of the regional seminar they organised in Lahore earlier this month. The idea was to get proposals to resolve this quandary.

Given the daunting agenda and the diverse participation, it was hardly surprising that no solution could be found. The theme implied that practices and policies would be identified to lift the standards of education for the poorest of the poor institutions to bring them at par with the best where the children of the privileged study. Research sharing at the regional level should facilitate this task.

This amounted to seeking equality on an issue which is the major dividing factor in society itself. With the chasm between the haves and the have-nots continuously widening and the state refusing to take responsibility for education — Article 25-A notwithstanding — there is no hope that the playing field can be levelled for all.

Hence the seminar’s achievement was limited to identifying many measures that would, if implemented, raise the quality of education in the weaker public sector and low-cost private sector educational institutions. But inequality would remain because generally the disparity between the elite schools and the poorly performing government institutions is not recognised as the problem per se. It stratifies society and allows the wealthy the privilege of merit to grab all the good jobs.

Since this equality is bound to be elusive when the entire system is geared to promote the power of the one per cent, the next best option is to strive for raising the standards of the schools for the 99 per cent. But even this limited goal of upgrading standards appears to be a daunting one, given our inability to walk the talk.

The problem is that simply devising a system that does not factor the disadvantages the underprivileged suffer in life will not pay dividends. If we could somehow wave a magic wand and ensure identical inputs for all children in every school in all categories, the learning outcomes of the underprivileged children will improve but a wide gap would still remain.

This evil has perpetuated itself over such a long period of time in Pakistan that finding solutions becomes a frustrating exercise.

Dr Iffat Farah, an education researcher, was spot on when she wrote in her summing up of the proceedings that the diversity in the learning levels remains unacknowledged. That results in inappropriate and uniform strategies being devised for addressing and responding to the varied needs of children.

The fact is that these diversities are born from the socioeconomic backgrounds of the children who are enrolled in school and their teachers. When children are undernourished and stunted and have not been exposed to a healthy and positive social environment that encourages mental and cognitive stimulation, they will not have the capacity to benefit optimally from good pedagogy and excellent textbooks even if these are offered to them in equal measure. In other countries where poverty is so rampant, governments have tried to counter the inherent weaknesses by introducing school programmes tailored to meet the needs of the poor.

So the regional seminar became an exercise focusing on the need to raise the quality of education in the schools of poor quality.

Of course, this would bridge the gap a whit but the ideal of all schoolchildren being given equal opportunities for education will remain a pipedream.

It will not be wise to turn a blind eye to these inequities which are the creation of our own society. What is needed is greater integration of the various systems that exist parallel to one another. This can be done in several ways. By twinning schools, inducting teachers from government and low-fee schools traditionally known to be weak into high-quality training institutions, having a language in education policy that does not discriminate against the poor, making it mandatory for private-sector elite schools to enrol a specified ratio of students from the underprivileged classes without charging them a fee, and so on.

This would require all partners to agree to the principle of equity in education. We know very well that many of those present at the seminar do not really believe this to be a basic necessity. It would mean more stringent social controls on the private sector — not by pulling them back but by encouraging them to take the weaker sections of society along with them. Instead, we have the elite institutions becoming more and more exclusive as they raise their fees to the skies to become inaccessible to the majority.

Equity would also require the government to become accountable for its own institutions. But what we have is the mantra voiced by the education bureaucracy all over the country that civil society must take ‘ownership of the schools’. Public-private partnership programmes are now being promoted in a big way. But on the quiet the government is using them as a pretext to disengage itself from the education sector.

The contradictions are glaring. We now have Article 25-A in the constitution. The ITA is campaigning to collect a million signatures (346,547 collected so far) to demand a law to implement this right. Its stand is: “The legal framework must define how equity will be ensured for all children alike.”

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-Dawn
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State of school education in Pakistan
April 21, 2012
By: Inayatullah

Earlier this month, an important regional seminar was held in Lahore to address issues of equity and quality in school education. It was organised by ITA, Idara-e-Taleem-o-Agahi and South Asia Forum for Education Development in collaboration with Education Testing Service USA, DFID, UKAID and Open Society Foundation as a follow-up of the Salzburg meetings.

Following the example of Prathom and ASER Centre (Annual Status of Education Report) in India, ITA has been carrying out annual surveys of school education in Pakistan.

The inaugural session of the seminar was addressed by Rukmini Banerji, Director ASER Centre India. She spoke about the ASER experience in India. She said that 97 percent (gross) of children aged 6 to 14 are enrolled in schools, but 50 percent of them in grade 5 cannot read grade 2 level texts. The data for arithmetic is equally depressing. The challenge in India, according to her, is how to effectively improve learning outcomes.

In Pakistan, the conditions are no better, if not worse. The net enrolment at the primary level is around 60 percent. Attendance of teachers and students in schools leaves much to be desired. According to the Pakistan Task Force report released last year, on a given day 15 to 20 percent of public sector teachers are found absent leaving children for one day a week, without teaching. It is estimated that out of 365 days of the year in Pakistan, public schools teaching takes place only on 120 days or so – the rest of the days, the schools are either closed or remain busy in other activities; teachers have to attend to such non-teaching duties as election related assignments.

In Pakistan today, about eight million children are out of school at the primary level and according to an estimate, the number of 5-16 years old out of school is 20 million. And 40 percent of those who do join school at the age of 5, dropout during the first two years.

In a paper presented at the ASER seminar, Dr Faisal Bari and Ms Nargis Sultana drew attention to the fragmentation of education in Pakistan. To quote: “Our education system is divided on lines of geography, class, income/wealth, medium of instruction, cost, syllabi, curricula and gender and these differences manifest themselves in differentials in access, dropouts and in the quality of education that is imparted. And existing differences in educational provision will, inevitably, create even bigger differences in the future. If our objective is to educate all children, and at least to a minimum standard, so that they can have some equality of opportunity, or at least a bigger set of opportunities available to each of them, we need to challenge the existing differences and divisions.”

Ms Banerji in her talk mentioned some remedial steps to improve learning outcomes. These included organising summer camps for laggard students, regrouping of students in the classes and reviewing the text books which she found a little too difficult to read and comprehend. She also recommended child-friendly practices in the classrooms and outside. And better teacher-training programmes.

India has already promulgated a Right to Education Legislation and after the 18th Amendment, Pakistan has yet to do so. Some of the recommendations made on the basis of the ASER India findings 2011 are:

i India has made impressive progress in enrolment. Now is the time to turn from inputs and access, and focus on the challenge of how to improve quality.

i Learning outcomes must move to centre stage.

i Large-scale corrective action to build the basic skills of reading arithmetic is urgently required.

i There are real challenges in Indian classrooms. These include diverse age groups, wide variations in ability and multiple classes sitting together. Teachers need to be equipped in a practical way to be able to teach effectively under these circumstances.

Dr Iffat Shah, who summed up the findings of the Lahore ASER seminar, made in this connection, a few thought-provoking observations: “Teacher quality is fundamentally important to student learning – although we do need to remember that the teacher is not the only factor that affects learning. Teacher quality seems to be most frequently measured in terms of academic credentials. But there is little or no evidence that higher credentials or pre-service training lead to better quality of teaching. We also heard some evidence suggesting that teachers are struggling and demotivated. However, there is some evidence that school-based professional development can prepare better teachers, as assessed by their students’ learning. We need to know far more about teacher educators and teacher education colleges. A variety of models of teacher education was presented. It will be important to assess the impact of these teacher training or professional development programmes on teacher practice and student outcomes. If there is no positive effect on teaching quality and student learning, then it will be a wasted effort. It was claimed that finding out about impact may be expensive, but I submit that not knowing will be far more expensive.”

More wise words came from Zubaida Mustafa, Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, Ahsan Iqbal, Kasim Kasuri and Ali Moeen Nawazish. Hoodbhoy emphasised a thorough review of the existing out-dated educational system. He was critical of the exam-based learning, which rests on memorising and not “internalising” knowledge. Kasuri said that schools were not relying on real life skills, and that teacher training only improved “professional practices”, but failed to improve the learning outcome of a child. There was need for relating it to school-based monitoring. Ahsan Iqbal remarked that the problem lay with the insensitivity of the ruling elite towards education. Quality teachers were needed to impart knowledge relevant to changing global requirements. He pleaded for enhanced allocations for education and standard curriculum designed by the federal government. Zubaida Mustafa dilated on the plight of the poor children and observed that when children are undernourished and stunted, and have not been exposed to a healthy and positive social environment that encourages mental and cognitive stimulation, they will not have the capacity to benefit optimally from good pedagogy and excellent textbooks. She advocated stringent social controls on the private sector, not by pulling them back, but by encouraging them to take the weaker section of the society along with them.

The Education For All targets and the Millennium Development Goals to which Pakistan is committed will remain a distant dream, unless education is given the highest priority and urgent steps are taken to upgrade and modernise it.

There is much to learn by our governments and the private sector from the wisdom spelt out in the ASER’s seminar briefly highlighted in this column.

As far back as 1947, in his message to the All Pakistan Education Conference, Quaid-i-Azam had warned: “The future of our state will and must greatly depend on the type of the education and the way in which we bring up our children as the future servants of Pakistan.” We still are waiting for the emergence of political will from our rulers in this benighted country.

The writer is an ex-federal secretary and ambassador, and political and international relations analyst.

Email: pacade@brain.net.pk
-The Nation
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Deteriorating higher education standards in Pakistan

Ehsan-ur-Rehman


The number of students going abroad for higher education has steadily gone down since 9/11 for various reasons.

And, on the other hand, the overall standard of higher education has also deteriorated in this period, according to a research report recently prepared by the Quality Standard World University Rankings for the year 2011. The situation compels every patriotic Pakistani to raise the question: where are we heading for in the field of higher education?

In the past, main destinations for higher education Pakistani students used to be the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. During the past three or four years, students proceeding to the UK faced various hurdles. In 2009, there was a backlog of 14,000 visa applications in Pakistan, which caused havoc among students who were due to start courses at Oxford, Cambridge and dozens of other UK universities, a Guardian report said.

There were also reports that 200,000 Pakistani passports were held at the British High Commission. However, the British authorities termed the reports "utterly bizarre".

According to another report, the number of Pakistani students in the US dropped from over 8,500 in 2001 to about 5,000 in 2012. The Australian visa refusal rate for Pakistani students was 30.8 per cent for the year 2010-11.
However, the US authorities find other reasons behind the drop in the number of Pakistani students going to their country.

An official told the media in Islamabad that it was a myth that fewer Pakistani students went to university in America because of more post-9/11 visa denials. It simply happened because more higher education institutions opened at home.

Shazia Khan, who deals with the Fulbright Outreach Programme, said: "In the last 10 years, there has been an increase in the number of higher education institutes in Pakistan. This encourages many students to study in the country and not apply abroad." She claimed that the US had always been eager to increase opportunities for Pakistani students.

Even if we accept the logic offered by the US official for the drop in the number of Pakistani students going abroad, we have no reason to claim that the standard of higher education is improving. The Quality Standard World University Rankings for the year 2011 said that Pakistani universities failed to make it into the world ranking of top 200 universities. The University of Cambridge retained its honour for being the best university in the world. But the fact that no university in Pakistan has succeeded to find a place among the world's superior educational institutions speaks volumes about the deteriorating standard of education in the country.

The ranking shows that top 16 positions in the world ranking had been grabbed by the varsities in the USA and the UK. University of Cambridge, UK, and Harvard University, US, are number one and two as in the previous year.
On the whole, the United States and the United Kingdom dominated the list with 54 and 30 universities, respectively, out of the 200 listed universities.

In the list of the top 10, there are six American and four British universities. King Saud University of Saudi Arabia is the only university from the Muslim world which has managed to find a place among the universities, though it too is at the 200th position. Last year, it was ranked 221. The list includes universities from France, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brazil, Singapore, South Africa, China, Japan, Canada etc., as well as the UK and the USA, but this year again, no Pakistani institution of higher learning was deemed good enough to be included on the list of QS World University Rankings. The sorry state of affair also shows the priorities of Pakistan's ruling elite, who have no interest in upgrading the standard of education in the country.

The QS World University Rankings evaluates six key aspects of university activity using the most recent data available at the time of publication. The six aspects include: academic reputation, citations per faculty (research quality), faculty student ratio (teaching quality), employer reputation (graduate employability), number of international faculty and number of international students.

And it is really sad to note that no Pakistani university comes up to the standards set by the evaluating authority.

The standard of higher education started going down with devolution of education to provinces and proposed dissolution of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. When the HEC was established under Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman in 2002, during General Pervez Musharraf’s government, higher education made progress for many years. Its funding was increased manifold and it did well in improving the standard of education in the country.

However, after the general elections in 2008, and formation of the PPP-led government at the Centre, the HEC faced setbacks in the form of cuts in its funding in the following years.

Critics say that the first attack was launched against the Higher Education Commission by the federal government to put pressure on the HEC to grab its funds for corrupt purposes and to safeguard the parliamentary fake degrees, which were to be uncovered by the HEC. The warped logic given by the PPP then was that since the 18th Amendment had been passed, there was no reason for the HEC to exist and it must be devolved to the provinces.
No person with a democratic mindset could oppose provincial autonomy, but there are some subjects which must stay with the federation and education, especially higher education, is one of them. The 18th Amendment also indicated that the HEC would fall under the Federal Legislative List and not the concurrent list, and thus it was not supposed to be devolved to the provinces.

There have been various concerned people who have advocated keeping the HEC as a federal subject.

According to an account by Marvi Memon, a PML-N leader and former MNA, On April 11, 2011, a resolution was presented to the National Assembly, which was worded as follows:-

1) We do not appreciate government ministers misleading the public that they have devolved HEC to provinces; whereas, in fact,

o They can't do so under the 18th Amendment, since the parliamentarians have signed 18th Amendment to have the HEC functions fall under the Federal Legislative List Part 1 clause 16, 17, 32 and Part 2 clause 6, 7, 11, 12 and 13.

o The government has not devolved the HEC since as per Cabinet decision March 28, 2011. Four functions, namely external examination, education in the capital, welfare of Pakistani students abroad and international exchange of students and teachers, have been given to federal control, namely the commission for standards for higher education, new division for ICT, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, IPC respectively.

2) We do not appreciate government ministers confusing the public about the different legal status of education and higher education.

3) We wish to abide by the 18th Amendment and devolve education to the provinces and not devolve and dissolve HEC.

4) We understand that HEC is being dissolved due to a political vendetta against it for its role in the parliamentarians' fake degree cases.

5) We do not appreciate the doublespeak of government ministers on the floor of the Senate and National Assembly on whether HEC is devolved or not.

6) We want the PM to give verbal assurance on the floor of the House and written instructions to his Cabinet that HEC functionalities will not be changed, failing which we reserve the right to take further action against the government.

However, the resolution presenters didn't receive any positive response from the treasury. Later on, a writ petition was filed with the Supreme Court, which gave a judgment in favour of the 18th Amendment and ordered the HEC to continue its role in its federal capacity.

But one year later, a private member’s bill, called the HEC Amendment Bill, was introduced in the National Assembly in the second week of April 2012, to take financial powers away from the HEC. There appears to be only one purpose of the bill and that is the control of Rs. 44 billion of funds proposed for the HEC for FY 2012-13.

In the face such circumstances, it is quite understandable why the country has failed to improve the standard of higher education and why Pakistan could not secure a place among the top 200 universities of the world. If the country is to make progress in higher education and, ultimately, in all spheres of life, the incumbent and all incoming governments will have to avoid politicising this very important sector and allocate funds keeping in view its needs.

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How to reach literacy and education for all
April 26, 2012
By: Atle Hetland

It is criminal negligence that Pakistan does not provide education for all,” said Senator S.M. Zafar, the Chancellor of Hamdard University, at this year’s graduation ceremony in Islamabad on Tuesday. He said he was not proud of all the changes made to the Constitution of Pakistan, prepared by a committee he had been a member of. But he said that he was, indeed, proud of having formulated the text that was eventually accepted by Parliament, stating that education shall be free and compulsory from the age of five to sixteen for all children.

It is a major achievement to have formulated the state’s responsibility more precisely than before. It was already in the Constitution that education should be provided up to secondary level – as soon as possible. And then, alas, it has thus far not been possible. Senator Zafar’s more precise formulation with the insertion of Article 25(A) of the Constitution of Pakistan will take the country far. Yet, we have to ascertain follow-up, so that it does not just become a sleeping paragraph. Laws, rules and regulations must be formulated, with sanctions if the state does not fulfil its commitments, if parents do not send their children to school, and if others violate the law. Furthermore, we should note that there are many persons, groups and institutions that are against education for all, even many of those who say they are for it, because that is politically correct.

Last week, I claimed in my article that Pakistan does not have ‘education for all’ because old and stubborn rich men don’t want it (excluding Senator Zafar); they are men who are afraid of losing power to men and women from the lower classes. Sometimes rich women side with rich men because they too want status quo; they don’t want to lose being rich and idle, and have a say in seminars and meetings where they have power just because of their status, not because of the strength of their opinions or for democratic reasons.

There is much to do in the education sector in Pakistan. Let me for a while focus on one area that is often overlooked, notably literacy and other adult education. Less than 20 percent of women are literate, some recent statistics claimed. Even if that figure is too low, it is perhaps near the reality of ‘functional literacy’, because literacy is more than just knowing to write one’s name, which is a common definition. It is more accurate to say that a literate person above 10 years of age should be able to read and write a simple everyday text relatively effortlessly. The average literacy rate in Pakistan is about 50 percent. For men, it is up to 70 percent; for women about 35 to 40, in some areas, single digits only. Miniscule amounts and shares of the government budgets go to literacy and adult education in Pakistan as in other developing countries; rarely more than one percent of budgets.

In the “old days”, when I was young, some socialist-oriented countries took functional literacy seriously, such as Cuba, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau and several others. Why have we not borrowed the positive experiences from these countries? Why don’t we learn from Cuba where about 40 percent of the government budget goes to education and health? I believe it is important that Pakistan in future learn from the experiences of other countries, not least countries in the south.

In primary education, too, Pakistan performs poorly, especially for girls and older boys. The basic education cycle is short, only five or six years, with children beginning school from the tender age of five, sometimes even earlier. Many drop out before the cycle has been completed, but even if they complete, they are often too young to be able to comprehend many of the concepts taught. Very few can go on to secondary school, and indeed only the select few are given an opportunity to go to college and university.

I should hasten to add that I believe that the ‘informal apprenticeship’ that Pakistan still has in many vocations and trades, such as for electricians, carpenters, masons and so on, and for assistants in shops and businesses, is good. It is good for learning the jobs, but it is not good enough for innovation, because then more systematic training and theory should be added.

I also believe that Pakistan is doing quite well in higher education, at least in many institutions and specific departments. I believe that the Higher Education Commission, or HEC, plays an important role. Yet, I also believe that the mindset for academic work among college and university teachers lag behind, with or without PhD degrees. Students are, perhaps. often more clever than their teachers, but they too are in need of advice to unleash their creative capacity and alternative thinking. But this is a topic for another article. Let me here instead praise the HEC and the country’s Vice Chancellors, who recently met, demanding increased education budgets. They asked for 4 percent of GDP to be spent on education, a figure that is in line with Unesco’s recommendations. I was particularly glad to see that they considered the whole education sector this time, not only the sub-sector of higher education. I believe that the Vice Chancellors and Rectors made an important point, one reason being that the universities will get better students if the primary and secondary education has also been good.

But can Pakistan afford to invest more in education at this particular time?

Yes, I believe it can, and it will soon give results in growth and development. It is also possible to reduce expenditure in other fields, such as the military and related fields with the war on terror being a particular drain on the country; foreign assistance is always less than the actual expenses. Education planners claim that there is internal wastage in any education system. Hence, some savings can be made through greater internal efficiency and reallocation within the education sector. Yet, most money must be fresh.

When I worked with education in Africa earlier, in particular in Kenya, I thought that the government’s education system should be for all students, and that private schools should also have to follow a common core curriculum, and that they should have to take a certain percentage of non-fee paying students, at least one-third. The school day can be made short and learning content more limited than today. In rural areas, the school year should also be adjusted to planting and harvesting seasons so that children can help and learn in their own environment. In the cities, it is possible to have two shifts so as to utilise buildings and other facilities better. Furthermore, after school, it is possible for NGOs and CBOs, including the mosque, religious and cultural organisation, etc, to organise systematic learning sessions. It is important that education is integrated in the local community. Sometimes, the modern school, also the government school, may be seen as “an outsider”.

If the school day is relatively short in the government school, reducing unit costs, there is plenty of opportunity for NGOs, CBOs and all kinds of local groups, companies and so on to be involved in education activities. There should be some government inspection of these activities, too, but it should mainly be an invitation and offer to non-governmental and private partners. I believe that a “double system” of this kind, notably with the government running the core system and the rest being added by private stakeholders, would make education a focal and integrated activity of daily life in all local communities. It would be a continuous awareness campaign and debate about education for all. And it would mean that the government’s purse would not be overstretched. Well, the unit cost and quality in government schools must also grow to keep up with international competition and standards.

Being realistic, the Government of Pakistan will take its time to increase its education expenditure; for more than six decades, too little has been invested in education. It is not going to change overnight, although it is likely to improve, with the new Article 25(A) in the Constitution being essential. Yet, we also have to consider alternative ways of fast improvement of education, the most essential sector of Pakistan’s society, along with other social services and common infrastructure, such as electricity, water and communication.

n The writer is a senior Norwegian social scientist based in Islamabad. He has served as United Nations specialist in the United States, as well as various countries in Africa and Asia. He has also spent a decade dealing with the Afghan refugee crisis and university education in Pakistan.

Email: atlehetland@yahoo.com
-The Nation
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