A YOUNG person hailing from a village in Sargodha complained that though there was a school in his village, no government teacher stayed there for long or did not go there every day. He claimed that his dropping out of school in Class VIII, his inability to go beyond basic literacy, and now his failure to get a good job had a lot to do with the barely functional school he had to go.

Asif sends his daughters to the public primary school in the village. He wants his girls to grow up to be doctors and teachers. But he fears, with the quality of education they are getting, they will probably not be able to go beyond Matriculation.

Ali, a driver in an urban household, considers the local government schools to be useless and often complains that he pays a lot for his children’s schooling at a local private school, and yet his children are getting very poor quality education. The difference between what his children and what his employer’s children are learning is significant and is widening rapidly over time.

The state and society have been indifferent to the plight of the majority of our children.

Young female participants of a focus group in a village that was only a couple of kilometres from a city complained that the lack of a secure means of transport had led to most of them dropping out after Matriculation. They were now sitting at home and doing nothing while many of them had dreamt of pursuing interesting careers.

Article 25A, making education a basic right for children aged five to 16 years, was part of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. The Amendment was enacted four years ago.

But to date, there has been no progress on ensuring that all children of schoolgoing age get enrolled. Even for children who are in school, learning levels across the spectrum and barring only the small fraction of high-fee elite private schools are quite poor.

The Annual Status of Education 2014 report was launched earlier this month. It documents how most children in Class V cannot read, and do mathematics at the level we expect of children in Class III or IV. And there is a percentage, though small, of children even in Class VIII or IX who do not have basic literacy/numeracy skills.

There are a number of ways of looking at the situation.

One could talk of how important education of these children is for them and their respective families and how important it is for the country and its growth and what it would mean for Pakistan to have a very large number of uneducated or barely educated youth to take care of over the next few decades; all these perspectives are important.

However, I want to invoke the notion of rights, justice and fairness to argue how unjust the current situation is and how insensitive the state and society have been to the plight of the majority of children, supposedly our future.

Urdu has two words for justice: insaaf and adl. Insaf comes from nisf (half) and invokes notions of equality in justice, while adl invokes the context of delivery of justice.

Underneath both notions is the concept of rights: what is owed to others. Amartya Sen in The Idea of Justice has powerfully argued for the position that even though we might not have completely just institutions across society, wherever we see injustice, we have to start reducing it, in terms of the increasing capabilities of people, to at least move, all the time, in the direction of greater justice.

While 25 million (by one estimate) children of schoolgoing age are out of schools, millions of others drop out before finishing Matriculation, and the overwhelming majority of enrolled students have access to only poor quality education — one that will not allow them to be able to explore their potential — does the situation square with any notion of justice or fairness that we can conceivably think of?

Our Constitution structures the rights and responsibilities of citizens. The basic rights section of the Constitution should have the ability to trump other considerations and make the provision of basic rights lexicographically important and binding. State institutions are bound to carry out their responsibilities in light of the Constitution. The courts are the custodians of the Constitution. But, despite all the talk of an independent judiciary, a free media and a working democracy, four years after the inclusion of 25A, we are still no closer to giving all children access to quality education.

The government still spends only about 2pc of GDP on education. Every year successive governments have made promises to increase the budget spent on education, but there has been, literally, no progress, on this count. Provincial governments have increased the percentage of their budgets that they spend on education in recent years, but the increases, even if they were to continue at the same rate indefinitely, will not be enough to educate all our children.

If it was not for rapidly increasing enrolments in the private, for-fee sector, enrolment rates, across Pakistan, would have declined. Even today, with all the rhetoric of success, the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement 2012-13 data shows that only some 3pc girls in rural Balochistan and 7pc girls in rural Sindh are enrolled in secondary schools.

What do we say to the young people mentioned at the beginning or their parents or the parents of the millions that are not getting educated? Right now both the state and society seem to be telling them to fend for themselves. We seem to be saying to our children that we do not care about them and about our future and we do not care about the demands of justice and fairness. Is that how a naya or roshan Pakistan is going to come about?

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at LUMS, Lahore.

Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play