LAST month, Pakistan grandly celebrated the World Teachers Day (WTD), titled ‘salaam teachers day’. WTD is a global commemoration of the adoption of the 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendations & 1997 UNESCO Recommendations on Status and Freedoms of Teachers in Higher Education.

WTD is an occasion to take stock of the situation of all teachers, their professional, social and economic conditions and to recognise them as vital catalysts for the challenges of quality of learning and education in the country.

The status of teachers is often said to be at an all time low, the least preferred profession, with poor performance in learning and access indicators. Nonetheless, teachers are expected to perform miracles in learning not just for the mainstream subjects, but also as messengers and counselors for health, population, HIV/AIDs, human rights, diversity, tolerance, life skills, rebuilders of shut down schools due to militancy, emergencies and much more.

In Pakistan, we tend to take a very public sector centric view of our education system, even though the private sector has grown by 25 per cent annually since 2000. According to the National Education Census (NEC) 2006 there were 1.4 million teachers in Pakistan across public and non-state institutions. Today public and private sector enrolment is divided officially at 64:36 ratio but realistically it is a 60:40 ratio.

In Pakistan, we need to urgently recognise that the balance of education provision is increasingly tilting towards non-state providers, due to public sector’s inability to manage both quality and quantity. This may not be such a bad trend in a diverse country of 165 million, provided the state recognises that education is a public good and that in a country with 24 per cent poverty and almost equal percentage of vulnerability, the state is responsible for ensuring support so that all its citizens have access to quality education for at least up to 10 years (14 to 15 years of age). This implies that the quality of teachers and their working conditions falls directly within the purview of state responsibility.

Teachers’ status needs to be repositioned, but this can only be done by re-profiling our education system from a public sector perspective to one where many players are formally recognised. The non state sector is an employer of almost 50 per cent of the 1.4 million teacher population. To re-profile the system I would like to present six evidence-based propositions from the recent data of National Education Census and the Higher Education Commission.

1. The engagement of almost 50 per cent teachers with the private sector (non-state) implies that the perception of public sector as the largest employer needs a course correction.

2. Almost 40 per cent educational institutions at all education levels except primary/mosque schools are owned and operated by the private sector and this sector is in predominance in Fana (65.5 per cent), ICT (55.5 per cent), Punjab (42 per cent) and AJK (35 per cent).

3. Parents are putting a premium on education by sending their girls to co-ed institutions. Over 53 per cent institutions are coeducation, including madaris across the country. Beyond primary there are fewer institutions available for transition and parents opt for coeducation. This calls for a policy which encourages gender sensitivity and inducts a more gender balanced teaching force at all levels of education.

4. Though 51.3 per cent of teachers in the country are females, in NWFP, Balochistan and Fana less than 38 per cent of teachers are females and in Fata this figure is even lower.

5. In spite of 600 major and minor disparate teacher training institutions in the public sector, the private sector is increasingly creating its own responses to a growing demand for training and continuous professional development needs to improve its performance. There are increasing numbers of schools opting for multiple outlets or chains and conservatively over 2000 institutions are recorded under such chains as a growing phenomenon. These school chains have their own comprehensive in-house training and monitoring systems. Government is also increasingly outsourcing to generate capacity through public private partnerships.

6. Provinces vary in their institutional practices of hiring teachers, with Punjab hiring only school specific, area based contract graduate teachers with a flat basic pay equivalent to BS 09-16 and other provinces hire only metric PTC teachers. The private sector is far more flexible, pragmatic and exploitative, offering different levels and packages of hiring, ranging from Rs500 to six digit numbers. In higher education, the tenure track system is tied to performance criteria and packages can be as high as Rs300, 000 or more. Para teachers, part-time and visiting faculty are another modus operandi to address academic needs undermining the quality of education due to the absence of long term stability.

The above trends reveal that there is an urgency to re-profile our attention and resources to a more dispersed sector wide architecture of education across different systems of provision. Multiple interpretations and presence of public and private service delivery options cannot be ignored. These must be fully acknowledged and supported to elevate teachers’ status across the board through a series of critical steps. These include:

• A long over-due National Teacher Policy and Comprehensive Framework is to be developed for all teachers in the country as a sub set of the National Education Policy (expected to be finalised shortly). This must take into account the data driven re-profiling and must be linked to dimensions that impinge on teacher quality. However, this must be designed without previous baggage of ‘public sector only’ lens and adjustment of defunct institutions that do not work.

• Teacher education needs to overhaul its pre-service and in-service provisions. There must be minimum benchmarks for access to programmes and national standards should be introduced in content, qualifications and incentives.

• Teacher recruitment mobility and support must be based on minimum national standards of recruitment at different levels and systems of education. Aptitude tests must be taken to ensure meritocratic hiring like other professions. Separate cadres need to be created with clear roles and career paths of teachers as managers, trainers and instructors.

• Public-private partnerships need to be encouraged for teachers’ upgradation in all sectors, with sound institutional mechanisms, which are not cumbersome and predictable.

The challenges of quality learning are multiplying in an increasingly complex and volatile society. Teachers will need to become extraordinary professionals to cope with multiple and shifting demands of today and tomorrow.

Education systems cannot function today without outcomes, and teachers’ status (competence, economic and social) will have to be enhanced through a wider inclusive approach by the state and its partners. A fast changing education landscape of public and private providers in education service delivery and training must be acknowledged.

We need only to remind ourselves of the West Pakistan’s teachers movement of the 1960s, its political economy, political teaming up for vote banks and the resultant nationalisation debacle! Let us come up with intelligent and contemporary non-adversarial solutions in the best interest of our children, youth and adults.

The writer is chairperson Idara-i-Taleem-o-Aagahi and coordinator Alliance for Education Development itacec@gmail.com

Language is important because words carry concepts, implied meanings and actions within themselves. An unadvisedly used word can hijack the debate and snowball the proceedings into entirely unintended consequences.

A good example is the hackneyed term, ‘war on terror’, which is now being used indiscriminately to refer to anything from global militancy to local crime. The problem is that ‘terror’ is an amorphous concept and comes in many forms; it is not restricted to the context within which President Bush tried to arbitrarily confine it. Secondly, the term ‘war on terror’ lays out the manner in which it advocates resistance against the spread of fear: through ‘war’, which refers to armed conflict. The word refers to the force of arms, not negotiations through diplomatic channels.

And therefore, when considered on its own merit, the term dictates a method of resistance to anyone who considers himself on the receiving end of terror. To a Palestinian, ‘terror’ can easily mean the effect of Israeli policies, in which case he is well within his rights to wage war against the aggressors. Similarly, if Iraqis were to use the banner of the ‘war on terror’ to refer to armed resistance against US presence on their soil, they would not be guilty of an error of grammatical meaning. The end effect of American policies vis-a-vis Iraq has been, after all, to sow terror amongst the population: civilian lives are conducted under the looming spectres of a steadily worsening security situation, extra-judicial law enforcement and volatile internal elements, to say nothing of fear stemming from a collapsing infrastructure.

Language is important, and leaders would do well to reflect upon this. When they talk of a zero-tolerance approach towards militancy, of continuing the war on terror within Pakistan’s borders or of enforcing the writ of the government by force, they are not only defining the parameters of the debate, they are also establishing rules of violence and armed confrontation. Millions of Pakistanis are hostage to terror-tactics and brutality because the regime has created an environment where force is the only real lexicon of negotiation.

Men taking exception to official policies are increasingly using arms and explosives to prove their point. Mad they may be, but the blame for this method of ‘debate’ must be laid upon the shoulders of successive governments that established their writ through the force of arms and kept the citizenry staring up the barrel of a gun. The government expects its opponents to eschew violence and debate their issues peacefully. In any civilised country, this is a perfectly reasonable expectation – in fact, in many parts of the world, the cut and thrust of political debate does not involve real blood-letting. But given that the current Pakistani regime was established through a coup, is it surprising that its opponents learned their tactics from the masters?

Surely it is somewhat unrealistic to expect oppositional groups, be they from Balochistan, Waziristan or a host of other troublespots, to draw the state’s attention by signing petitions when the government’s idea of the last word is aerial bombardment.

Such rash statements are exposing the country to great danger. The language of war evokes a response bound to be in the same language.

hmumtaz@dawn.com

THE minor concession to public opinion at home and abroad announced by General Musharraf last Sunday is unlikely to prove sufficient to overcome the innate weakness the present martial law suffers from or the unprecedented challenges it faces.

That the new emergency package has received much less support among the people than any previous disruption of constitutional life (however adulterated it might have been) will not be denied by any person with even a grain of integrity. The reason is worth appreciating.

All previous martial law regimes derived their justification from the failures and follies of the politicians they had overthrown, failures that affected broadly understood national interests. Their argument corresponded to public perception; large sections of the population found it difficult to defend the victims of the putsch. This explanation is valid for the events of Oct 1999 too. The outgoing regime failed to win the support of the masses for what they saw as an attack on the defence forces while the intelligentsia at least blamed it for foolhardiness or clumsiness.

The excuse offered for the coup of Nov 2007 has convinced neither the intelligentsia nor the masses. The argument this time does not correspond to public perception. Firstly, the national interest that the proclamation of emergency is claimed to have saved is visible only to the regime’s choir boys. The pre-emergency regime had as much authority to deploy the armed forces against terrorists and militants as the post-emergency regime. Indeed the armed forces had been operating for quite some time not only in Fata but also in Balochistan. Problems had arisen not because troops could not be deployed; they had arisen because of the deployment of troops and the manner in which this was done.

Secondly, and more importantly, the replacement of the corrupt and inefficient politicians with the judiciary in the script has not convinced the people; the argument does not accord with public perception. The coup-makers’ act of demolishing the institution that had invariably been upheld by them as the final arbiter of the people’s destiny, as the sole forum enjoying the power to legitimise any regime, does not make sense to ordinary citizens.

It sounds like blowing up the regime’s legitimacy plank. The national interest supposed to have been threatened by the judiciary is not visible to the common citizen. Above all, the public perception of the judiciary, especially in view of its interest in helping victims of official excess, does not qualify it for the slaughter house, except for those in services who felt humiliated (and not without some justification) by the treatment meted out to them.

However, Pakistan regimes have a long tradition of surviving by default. The political opposition does not at the moment appear to be strong enough to have its way. The political parties are still blind to the need for a single-point understanding without which they cannot hope to achieve their objective. They have also not done enough to win back the alienated masses. Some of their recent misadventures will also cost them dearly. The civil society cannot man the barricades without the backing of political parties that form its largest and strongest component. All this could enable the regime to ride the storm of its own making. But, regardless of the outcome of the agitation against the regime, it is becoming increasingly vulnerable to two adverse factors that are rooted in objective reality.

First, growing impoverishment is driving more and more people to seek political change. The hordes of the jobless have been increasing at an alarming rate and the prospects of unemployment have begun to disturb the youth. One of the loudest shouts by the crowd on the Carnage Day in Karachi was “We want jobs.”

The regime’s economic apologists have themselves confirmed time and again that inflation has been highest in food items, and that hits a huge majority of the people. Nobody has come out with figures of the economic cost of the emergency. Everything is on hold. Economic life has been paralysed and a vast majority of people do not have the safety cushion needed to stave off hunger and disease. Even the cost of throwing lawyers in prison and decimating the electronic media is unbearable for an economy whose strength is measured solely by stock market manipulation, much of it known to be dirty.

It is difficult to see how the regime can win over or even neutralise the masses that find themselves trapped in grinding poverty and who are angry at the lack of official recognition of their ordeal. The stark reality is that the extraordinarily high cost of maintaining a garrison state demands sacrifices from the people, which they can no longer make.

The second challenge the regime faces is from the rapidly growing militancy. In this regard the state is up against two huge problems. The first of these is caused by a lack of comprehension of the causes and nature of religious militancy. What is happening now is not the work of some terrorists or criminals alone. Religious militancy in Pakistan is a social phenomenon whose roots lie in the ideology that the state has promoted quite recklessly. The militants are paraphrasing the rhetoric that has for years been ringing in chambers of authority, the rhetoric of the authors of the Objectives Resolution at one end and of General Ziaul Haq at another. They have not invented the theory of the sovereignty of God that was done by the authors of the constitutions.

True, the militants pose the most serious threat to Pakistan and to peace in the region, but they cannot be overcome by force alone though it is obviously not possible to avoid use of force. Every passing day exposes the limitations of the military option. The need for matching force with negotiations and understanding is becoming clearer and clearer. It would be unfair to say that dialogue or compromise has not been tried but the essential fact is that the causes of failure of such attempts have not been analysed. And therein lies the second main problem.

It is in the nature of autocracy that has been handling Pakistan’s affairs for the past many years that it cannot resolve any matter through negotiations with parties that claim equality with it. It does not treat political parties or other elements of civil society as equal to it, and treating ‘uncouth’, illiterate and ‘backward’ tribals as equals is simply out of the question. The main reason is that absolute rule offers little scope for decision-making by consultation and consensus without which problems such as religious militancy cannot be addressed.

Pakistan’s latest misfortune is that Emergency has made absolute rule even more absolute and the state weaker than ever. That only means that in order to overcome militancy the country needs a democratic structure backed by the defence forces and not the other way round. Thus, even if the regime can somehow meet the challenge from a disjointed political opposition, the state cannot defeat the objective reality without a complete reversal of the steps taken on Nov 3.