In recent days there have been a couple of observations by the Lahore High Court that raise hopes of some reform in the schools soon. Last Friday, the Lahore High Court asked the Punjab Textbook Board to decide within a month “about making fundamental rights of the citizens”… “an essential” part of the syllabus.

Earlier this month, the court had called on the government to make laws to rationalise the school fees which have always been a subject of heated argument between parents and schools, with the government playing the role of the silent if sympathetic onlooker.

Read: Make basic rights of citizens part of syllabus, LHC tells PTB

The discussion on fees was taken a notch higher when in recent months the schools were required to tighten security around their premises in the wake of the Dec 16 terrorist attack in Peshawar. Both in public and inside the courts, the government had offered assurances that the additional costs would not be transferred to the parents.

The discussion on fees was taken a notch higher when in recent months the schools were required to tighten security around their premises.

The parents believed they had already been paying school fees that were too high and ‘unaffordable’. Others agreed except the school administrations which chose to not take part in the fee discussion for the time being. Everyone, however, knew that they would use the old method of communicating their demands the next time they prepared the fee challans for students enrolled in their institutions.

How could this go unmentioned and uncharged on the fee ledgers of schools known for making a neat profit on everything and anything that they made mandatory available to the students?

There were eventually complaints from everywhere in the country about schools adding a few hundred rupees or more to the fee demand in the name of enhanced security. But if this was expected it did not pass as unnoticed and was not considered to be routine as the standard annual increase in the fees. The visibility and scale of the exercise to enhance security at the schools had provided a broader base for the debate about the schools’ tendency to ‘overcharge’ and got it some urgent attention.

The call by the Lahore High Court in early April for laws to govern fees at privately run educational institutions has provided a kind of logical direction to the intensified discussion. Many would be hoping that it will lead to some kind of rationalising of the fee structure and will ease the pressure on parents living in perpetual fear of the clause in the school rule book that forewarns them of a regular increase in fees at the time of admission of the student.

It is not so clear whether everyone would be as keen on following the more recent Lahore High Court direction about the inclusion of a reinforcement of the basic rights through the school syllabus. Our children do bring out the believer in us. We are so resigned to fate, trusting the Creator to be extra-protective of them through the ‘formative’ period — a period that follows the process of their original creation.

Nothing else could explain the early morning scenes so densely populated by the young ones, the citizens to be, who we must now teach the basic concepts in human rights. Here is herd of them being driven in an asphyxiating-looking, dangerously driven vehicle created on the pattern of a prison van meant to transport the most dreaded inmates. There is a bunch of them being goaded by the well-meaning school guard who is yet to realise that there is a fine line between discipline and coercion.

At another early-morning site a mother appears to be more mindful of her rights and her son’s need for a good education; she slips in a few words of reprimand and authoritatively pushes the protesting son forward. Everyone, from the parents, to the dutiful traffic wardens are so determined to have this difficult part of the day out of the way as quickly as possible before they can settle down to the easier, simpler routine of the grownups — not always adhering to rules or caring too much for the rights of ‘responsible citizens of the future’.

More inclined to view the schools as places which prepare the young for employment in later life, rights do not appear to be a subject the overcharged parents are willing to spare too much time for. They would rather approach the school administrations as consumers — as those who pay a fee for a service.

The parents seem to live permanently under the grand impression that they are lacking in any other reason or right for posing questions to the teachers and school administrations. It is the concept of value for money that generates the queries, however sporadically. The higher the fees, the more frequent the questions could be from the parents.

Those who pay less must expect less and additionally they are invariably required to lace their monthly offering to the school with an expression of gratitude. But for these great institutions of learning and enterprise that have cropped up in every street these children would have been condemned to the oblivion of some public-sector institution.

And we all know what most of these government-run schools are capable of achieving: They inspire the rulers to be totally and almost exclusively committed to the building of their own islands of excellence to add to those that exist in the private sector. They have their value, but once again, it is a question of priorities and of the fundamental message conveyed to the people.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2015

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