The education emergency
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TWENTY-FIVE million Pakistani children of schoolgoing age are not currently enrolled in any educational institution. This number was released in a report developed by Alif Ailaan, an alliance that proposes to address Pakistan’s education emergency. It signifies, in numerical terms, just how little the country, its policymakers, its government officials and its people care about the task of educating the young or believe in the power of learning to deliver Pakistan from its current quagmire of ignorance.
The details of the report provide the nuts and bolts that have nailed down the coffin of education in the country. Of the 25 million deprived of learning, an unsurprising half consists of little girls, all of whom face disparities in access to learning that they are provided in their pursuit of education. If they are female and poor, there is even less hope for them.
For many boys and girls, the pursuit of education is often abandoned soon after it starts; of the children that do actually enrol in Class 1, nearly half drop out, with only some of those dropouts transferring to other schools. The dropout rate will continue to increase over the next several years of schooling, with higher grades corresponding to higher dropout rates. One major reason for dropping out, supplied by both the children themselves and their parents, is quite simply that they do not want to continue.
The report is a commendable effort. It takes pains to outline the methodology used in arriving at the numeric estimates, the absence of census surveys that makes any sort of statistical analysis challenging.
An uneducated and powerless majority is useful for an equally uneducated but powerful ruling class.
In keeping with its hope to galvanise policymakers and government administrators into actually doing something about the education catastrophe, it doles out qualified commendations: the new chief minister of Balochistan has earmarked 30pc of the province’s development budget for education; the new government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has pushed education and made it an issue of debate in the provincial assembly, etc.
None of it, the report concedes, is enough; there is currently no central institutional body that develops, controls and implements education policy in Pakistan. In terms of percentages of its GDP, the government currently spends a whopping 2pc on education. In an act of supreme benevolence, it has promised to raise this percentage to 4pc by 2018. The future of 200 million Pakistanis depends on this paltry increase.
Education, as the report points out, is something promised to the people of Pakistan in their Constitution; whose Article 25A states: “The state shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age five to 16 years in such a manner as may be determined by law.”
The report by Alif Ailaan does a comprehensive job of pointing out the structural, budgetary and policy impediments that lie at the root of the education emergency, making it essential reading for anyone who truly wishes to understand the dynamics and magnitude of the lapses. It is possible — going by the data which shows an across-the-board turning away from education by the poor and at best a meek commitment to changing this course by the rulers — to also reach some conclusions about the moral and aspirational position of education within Pakistani society.
First among these is the issue of what ordinary Pakistanis believes education will procure for them or their children. In some countries, education is the means for poverty alleviation; in Pakistan this is rarely so. The education that is provided rarely permits those who have sacrificed years in its pursuit any significant means of improving their lives.
A system built on nepotism, corruption and patron-client relationships combined with an education system based largely on rote learning rather than problem-solving produces large measures of hopelessness for those who do educate themselves.
Nor is the problem relegated only to the poor educated in government-run institutions. With the waiting rooms of offices, the queues outside embassies so replete with young people with degrees and no jobs, it is hardly surprising that others imagine education as a waste of time, unable to deliver on its promises.
The 2pc figure Pakistan currently devotes to education is an apt statement about the wave of anti-intellectualism that has the country in its grip. The educated are treated poorly in Pakistan, deans of universities are felled by armed men with impunity; others are imprisoned on trumped-up charges and many are forced to leave because their erudition poses a threat to the rest of the country.
The anger at education and more often the educated is real, palpable and deadly. Not many political leaders can boast of graduate degrees; even their basic declaration of being educated is in question in some cases. Yet, it is them and their progeny that rule the country, with the fearful educated relegated at best to the sidelines. It is no wonder, then, that the young, watching avidly, prefer to attach their devotions to other pursuits.
The education emergency is real, but it is also intentional and a choice made by the country and by definition its people. The darkness of Pakistan’s uneducated ignorance persists not just because the numbers aren’t obvious, or the policymakers are not interested, or the legislators lack political will, but because an uneducated and powerless majority is useful for an equally uneducated but powerful ruling class.
The disinterest in changing the status quo is because it works for those who know it is easy to rule the illiterate, dupe the addled and the darkened, and promote an anti-intellectual populism that serves their political agenda. If Pakistan and its 25 million children are illiterate today, it is because Pakistanis want them to be; because they choose this fate for them.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, October 29th , 2014
