April 08, 2007

Bilal Ahmed Malik analyses the duality of the Pakistani education system.

TODAY we have not one but two Pakistans – Pakistan of the privileged and that of the deprived. It is, therefore, impossible that education should be an exception to this rule. We have two education systems: a quarter of the population consists of the destitute that are either outside or at the periphery of the economic system. Many of them are unemployed, malnourished and deprived in every respect. Similarly, there are vast sections that are outside the education system. Attempts to push them to study have failed miserably as seen by the heavy rate of drop-outs, going up to as high as 85 per cent in the case of the very poor.

Those who made faulty assumptions remained remarkably oblivious of the fact that they were helping to create a dual educational structure or system, one for the privileged and the other for the common people. Let us call the former the first stream and the latter the second stream. To be charitable, one may say that the product was unintended and it was unfortunate that assumptions and policies led to an unintended and undesirable end-product. To be more realistic, one has to go deeper into the study of the dual structure as it is related to dualistic economic and social structures as well. All kinds of dualities have been built into our society so much so that today we can honestly speak of two Pakistans as mentioned earlier. The opulence of one is matched by the squalor of the other.

No other aspect or cause of the crisis in higher education looms so large and yet is so thoroughly defended as the structural duality of the system. Probably in no other country as in Pakistan has higher education, indeed the entire system of education, been so dichotomised. There is the first stream which serves the interests of the elite. In this stream, English is the medium of instruction from school to university, some standards are maintained, competition is stiff, job opportunities are easily available for its products and last but not the least, it has been taken over by the international system of education. The other stream belongs to the non-elite class. In this stream, the language problem is unresolved, standards are low, drop-out rate is high and job opportunities are meager. The important point to note here is that no set of measures can solve the crisis in higher education unless the duality is broken.

In this structure, two streams run parallel to one another, yet both are controlled by the same organisational elite: (a) who come from well off families; (b) who study in public schools and; (c) who move easily from public schools to those institutions of higher education which insist on high standards and good social background. It is from this stream that most of our administrative cadre is recruited. To this stream also belongs the sophisticated and highly qualified technical manpower such as scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. Lately, the same stream produced the new management cadre. Although there are no surveys about the social backgrounds of our graduates and postgraduates, specific studies have confirmed that most of those in the first stream belonged to the microscopic minority which is affluent. Some bright boys from other castes and classes may have gate-crashed into the first stream by sheer force of merit or reservation of seats, but their number is very insignificant.

Duality exists in all class-based societies. In fact, why call it duality at all; it is just a two-class system. There is no doubt that were the society divided along Marxist lines, the first stream of education would include one class and the second stream the other class. However, the Pakistani society is not yet a two-class society. It is a multi-class and, numerically, the most insignificant is the working class. Each stream of education includes pupils from more than one class and, thus, it will be unrealistic to equate the two. It may be that educational duality will help develop a class system but that cannot be accepted a priori. Even in highly developed societies, the two do not overlap, and instead the education system represents hierarchies. The dominant view of Marxist sociology about the developed West is that the pupils “. . . are selected hierarchically and given different kinds of knowledge which reinforces the dominant ideologies of the ruling groups in a capitalist society and enhances the unequal structure of that society.” In other words, the education system does not mechanically follow the class model – it is hierarchical, even though it reinforces class inequalities. The Pakistani education system not only reinforces class inequalities, it also perverts, is divisive and indeed anti-national as it has produced enslaved minds.

A distinction must be drawn between functional or rational duality and the most perverse and iniquitous one. The former may be adopted as a matter of policy as is often done in the field of economics. We have, for instance, dual pricing policy in sugar and cement. Public and private sectors may compete in the same market with respect to the same commodity as they do in Italy and France. These are examples of rational duality, followed by rational policies. In education also, there may be one kind of education for humanities and another for science and technology, one for the privileged and the other to make the socially underprivileged come up to the level of the former.

In the developed countries of the West, the dualistic structures were deliberately created in the 18th and 19th centuries to suit the needs of the ruling classes. They did not pretend to do otherwise. However, they broke up educational dualism in the 20th century even when class dualism remained dominant. Indeed, the breakdown of educational duality became necessary to support the principle of equality of opportunity. Although developed, western capitalism has a highly crystallised class system, it has removed largely, if not completely, the dualism that was embedded by the old aristocracy with the help of democracy, mass education and social mobility. The assumption made by our leaders that there was nothing wrong with the initial condition, both formally and informally dualistic, and which indeed was so created deliberately, compounded the old duality with the new ones.

To understand the phenomenon of persistent educational dualism, we will probably need a full-fledged theory of the educational elite. For that, we will have to take a step back mainly to develop a comprehensive elite theory. This is not the place for such an elaborate exercise, but a brief statement of historical developments is necessary.

There arc two facets of inequality in higher education: domestic and international. The education system the British left behind was structurally designed for a limited purpose and was confined to a microscopic minority. After independence, the decision-makers exhibited some vague consciousness to change the structure in a manner as would reduce domestic inequalities. Faced with a situation of international inequalities, they had two clear choices: either largely to delink the educational system from the rest of the world or, if the link had to remain, to elaborate and expand the base of education, accelerate its growth, both in quantity and quality to reduce international inequalities.

The first was a difficult choice and the second seemed alluring. They opted for the second without realising that the concentration of economic, technological and military power, which supported the educational structure in the developed world, could not but push us towards strengthening the inequalities derived from the international educational system. The more we attempted to bridge the gap by pursuing and initiating the methods and courses of studies in the developed world, the greater became the inequalities.

Pakistanis remained attracted to a few centres of excellence of the developed world and there was a strong tendency to copy the educational system of these centres. Our best minds showed their competence and excelled in individual attainments there. But that was irrelevant to the main problem of reducing the inequalities. On the contrary, that slavish, approach, resulted in creating a dual system in education, one which was linked with the external world and the other which was dominated by the local elite. Ironically, the Pakistani power elite opted for socialism and even developed close economic and military relations with the West. The result? We also adopted the western scheme of education, which was not relevant for us and neither does it suit our social and ideological needs. Pakistani Marxists loved the West and its tinsel. Since neither domestic nor international inequalities declined, the dualistic operational structure created double centre-periphery relations or double dichotomous relations — namely dependency relationship between the institutions of higher education of the developed world as the centre, and our institutions as the periphery, and second, a few domestic institutions of higher education as the centre and the rest of the educational system as the periphery.

The most disconcerting aspect of the educational dualism is that despite opposite sides taken by ideologues about the general class and elite system of Pakistan, which represents a generalised dual system, there are no differences among their protagonists over education. Those who specifically belonged to the educational system but professed sharply opposite ideologies — say Marxism and Liberalism — together approved and rationalised dualism on grounds of one principle or another. It is baffling to note how both Marxist and Liberal scholars have converged on their views about the present system of education, while having practically nothing in common on every other issue. That partly explains the pathology, as much of Pakistani Marxism as of higher education. It is strange to find scholars of totally antagonistic persuasions accepting the common patterns of the developed countries or international agencies. One may argue that what attracts them to common centres is their technical proficiency. If this is so, then the ideology must be removed or be accepted as a path of convergence. Both are unsatisfactory explanations. What is common is not the ideology but the shared privileges and shared values of the class they come from; they come from the same social groups, classes and elite formations.

Duality in education also emanated from the confused thinking of our decision-makers. When confronted with opposite choices in a given situation or for a given level of education, they often opted for both with equal vehemence. I will cite one example only. Take the case of the appointment of our education minister. How ironic that the entire structure of the Pakistani education system is in the hands of a retired military general who is not an educationist but an ex-chief of an intelligence agency. If we have a decision maker like this, then one has doubts about the future of the Pakistani education system.

Double-think, conceptual duality, ideological confusion and elite-mass dichotomy mark the Pakistani education system. Since independence, it has been emphasised repeatedly that poverty, social inequality, development needs, etc., require that education should primarily meet these challenges and, thus, it would serve the needs of the society and not of the individual. The Pakistani education system reflects the most serious contradiction between individual and society and, thus, between theory and practice. Not that there must always be a contradiction between the two. But at times and in societies of great inequalities and exploitation, the contradiction can and does arise. This contradiction, in assumption and practice, has created an intellectual duality, besides the substantive duality of the institutional system itself. We have become a nation of double-think and double standards, one for us and the other for the rest of the society.

The writer is a researcher and a teacher

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