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THE pushback against the country’s terrible security situation has to address madressah reform. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told the National Assembly in May that approximately 20,000 religious seminaries exist in the country, of which “only” about 3pc or 4pc assist miscreants or directly facilitate terrorism.
The headlines of the past few days alone have spoken of madressahs being geo-tagged — a fancy way of saying their locations have been identified and they’ve been put on a map. On Thursday, the military asked the government to come down hard on terror financing, a project which must involve checking out the sources from which madressahs are receiving funds and which may then be dictating a certain agenda. The argument continues of madressah curriculum reform, the issue of mainstreaming and modernising them, and so on.
Yet the central aspect of the matter is simply not being discussed. Perhaps the challenge is so daunting that even now, after tens of thousands of lives have been laid waste, the state and its functionaries balk.
Religious seminaries offer what Pakistan’s millions see as perks.
Whatever else it may or may not be, the entrenchment of the religious seminary network in the country is a crisis of education, a simple equation of demand and supply. So why aren’t any moves being made to fix the country’s badly broken public-sector education system, especially at the primary and secondary levels?
Why would a family send a child to a madressah? At root, because they have been unable to get access to or admission in a school that is affordable and also offers a reasonable quality of education.
Further, madressahs offer what this country’s millions of abjectly poor have no alternative but to consider as perks: a roof over the head of the child, a couple of meals a day, basic literacy, and — given the status afforded to religion and religious education — some degree of social standing.
The mediaevalism that dogs girls’ education in Pakistan does not extend to boys. Whereas in some quarters boys aren’t sent to school because they are more valuable as the earners of wages, even if they amount to a pittance, in the majority of cases, if given the choice most families would want their sons to be educated to some degree, especially if that meant the chance of greater earning capacity in the future.
Government schools are generally affordable by most. However, the issues are manifold. First, government schools offer, on the one hand, an abysmal quality of education. Report after report has documented teachers’ lack of capacity and their inclination towards corporal punishment, glaring gaps in the curriculum, outdated pedagogical methods and, especially in the rural areas, the lack of even basic infrastructure such as a building with toilets.
Back in 2011, the report Education Emergency undertook surveys (encompassing both private- and public-sector school students) which found that only 35pc of schoolchildren aged between six and 16 could read a story, while half could not read a sentence.
On the other hand, where government schools are functional, especially in the bigger cities and in densely populated areas, the pressure of numbers on them is massive. For every one child that manages to get admission, there are many, many others that don’t.
Consider this anecdote: a family that had moved to Islamabad to work as domestic staff for some well-off people wanted their son enrolled in the nearby government primary school. This was in one of the elite sectors, where few, if any, of the families owning or renting houses would consider a public-sector school for their own progeny. Such was the wait list, though, that the employers eventually had to contact a federal secretary for sifarish.
In the rural areas, the problem is the opposite; very often, there simply isn’t a public school close enough to become a viable choice. The sheer number of miles between the pupil and the school, and the quality, safety and frequency of the transport available prove prohibitive for too many.
In the villages dotting the Murree area, where children go to school (girls and boys both) it used to be that early mornings were characterised by crowds of fresh-faced youngsters waiting at the bus stops to get to school (one school serves a cluster of villages).
Now, those crowds have thinned out, even though the population in the area has grown; the number of government schools has not increased commensurately. People who live in the villages there say that amongst the more financially strained families, there is a growing inclination to send boys to the madressahs that have started cropping up.
The state keeps pushing education as the answer to an endless cycle of poverty — as it should. But unless the quality and numbers of government schools are drastically improved, people’s need for madressahs will keep them in business, and fodder for the mischief-makers’ cannons will keep being produced.
The writer is a member of staff.
Published in Dawn, September 14th, 2015
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