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BY the time today’s newspaper gets delivered and read, a handful of angry parents would have assembled at Liberty roundabout to hold a protest against fee hikes by private schools in Lahore. In the same vein, over the past few weeks, parents of children attending a few schools in Karachi have been running a car sticker campaign on a similar theme.
The grievances are fairly straightforward, summarised best by the protest hashtag, #ParentsAreNotATMs. Parents argue that the annual, often exponential, increments in tuition fees and accompanying school charges are ad hoc, devoid of any justifiable premise (such as inflationary pressures and costs of operation), and solely done to increase revenue and thus total profits.
Looking at some of the publicly available figures, the fee hike claims appear to be true. For the past three years in Pakistan, inflation’s plummeted, yet several schools have raised fees across all grades by 35pc to 40pc. One branch of a popular, well-established private school network now charges its ‘A’ level students (Grades 12 and 13) Rs29,000 for one month of education. That’s thrice what the same school was charging in 2005. The sums are even more ludicrous for primary and pre-school education.
The upper-middle and upper classes can’t be absolved of their role in creating an extortion-like situation.
Before proceeding further, it’s worth distinguishing the type of school being referred to here. The vast majority of private schools, and with the greatest number of kids attending, are low-cost and mid-cost schools. Nearly all of these follow the BISE curriculum taught in government schools, and prepare children for matric exams. They’re found in both rural and urban areas, and by some estimates, provide education to over 30pc of all students enrolled in Punjab.
The category responsible for the present parent-led ruckus is what are normally called elite private schools. These institutions sell English-medium education, geared towards preparing students for the CIE syllabus. Formerly a metropolitan phenomenon, some of the older chains have followed population growth and wealth concentration patterns and opened up shop in cities previously considered ‘secondary’ or ‘tertiary’ settlements. At their lowest, these schools charge around Rs6,000-7000 per month (usually in smaller cities), while at the top, the figure can be as high as Rs55,000-60,000 per month.
The dominant elite private school chains emerged in the late 1970s, as a response to — in their own words — “the declining quality of education in public schools following Bhutto’s nationalisation in 1972”. Whether only a handful of years were enough to gauge a demonstrable decline in education standards is debatable; nevertheless, Ziaul Haq’s regime granted permission for private investment in the sector. The mushrooming eventually happened as the upper-middle, and upper class grew in numbers over the next two decades.
For most people observing the issue, it’s easy to sympathise with the parents. A vast number of them actually work hard and pay a high premium to buy quality education for their children, in the hope of improving their life chances. Historically, however, the upper-middle and upper classes can’t be absolved of their role in creating this extortion-like situation.
For starters, the ‘tuition’ culture has been rampant for the past 15 years, and no concerted efforts have been made to question its emergence or consolidation. Parents seldom ever ponder on the meaning of a good education, and only occasionally take an interest in what the child is learning. Coupled with a blind belief in the natural superiority of the imported British educational system (with no attention to how it’s taught in real life), parents have inculcated a sense of permanent immunity, and created a credential monopoly for a handful of school owners.
An accompanying reason, perhaps equally important, has been the rabid hunt for social ‘elite-ness’, driven by aspiration. There are only a handful of schools in Pakistan that can claim elite status as part of their historical character. These have been around for over a century, have a history of educating children of the elite, and can cater to only a fraction of those willing to pay for ‘elite-ness’. Other schools and school networks, relatively new to the field, have only one way of selling the social character that many parents secretly and publicly crave. By self-selecting their clientele on the ability to pay.
Aspiration for their kids to study with the ‘right’ kind of children, shunning cultural (and naturally socio-economic) diversity lies squarely at the root of the current pricing structure in elite private schools. The need felt by many elite households to insulate themselves from the ‘riff-raff, and to immerse their children in similarly insulated networks, has captured the entrepreneurial attention of private school owners.
Operating under a commercial logic, high-cost private schools in Pakistan attempt to sell some combination of an ‘O’/‘A’ level education coupled with a student body drawn from the upper-middle and upper class. As the number of people who can pay a certain amount grows, to retain exclusivity, fee increases kick in, to ensure the maintenance of a status monopoly. While this eliminates a certain category of households, it also squeezes the aspirational lot who want both aspects of an elite private school.
The situation for the protesters looks fairly bleak. Parents can’t take their kids out in protest, as demand for education of this kind is inelastic, and supply is limited. Hence, barring an extraordinary intervention by the government, or long-term cultural change amongst parents on the issue of education, elite private schools will probably continue to enjoy their credential and status monopolies.
The writer teaches politics at LUMS.
Twitter: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, September 14th, 2015
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