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WHEN Malala Yousafzai visited Pakistan recently, many welcomed her. Some did not. People are free to have their opinions and hold on to them. Even if one group does not like or agree with the opinions of the other, as long as there is no incitement to hatred/violence or attempts to impose and/or suppress opinions of others, people have the right, guaranteed by the Constitution, to have the opinions they want to have. One group’s ‘outrage’, a commonly used term nowadays to express disagreement, is no reason for not having an opinion or for invoking the law to have it suppressed.
But when there are attempts to impose opinions or there are attempts to use institutions to propagate opinions, the role of permissible limits and regulation needs to be discussed. In this particular case, a school system announced, during the Malala visit, that they were going to observe an ‘I am not Malala’ day. Many private schools chose not to go with this particular school system but some did.
It does not matter what your opinion about Malala or Malala day is. The relevant question here is: how do we decide what private school owners are able to do in their schools? Pictures on social media, post-fact, showed young children bearing placards saying ‘I am not Malala’, etc and some teachers also doing the same and shouting slogans against Malala. What if I, as a parent and citizen, do not want my child to be a part of this protest? Should this decision rest, solely, with the school owner/principal?
If today a school system were to announce that they are going to celebrate an Osama bin Laden day or if a school or school system announces that they are going to ban spoken Urdu in their institute, to ensure their children learn better English, should they be allowed to have this space?
How do we decide what private school owners are able to do in their schools?
Private schools, generally, get very upset when there is talk of regulation. They fear poorly thought-through regulation and arbitrary and poor implementation of regulations as well. And they are, generally, very right to fear such regulation. I cannot think of an instance when the state has done an even decent job of regulating anything. Look at the recent attempts to regulate fee hikes. It has led to some very poor laws (mostly to do with price capping) and even poorer attempts at implementing them.
But having said that, there is no escaping the fact that the current state of almost no regulatory structure for private schools in this area is also not optimal.
We might have to experiment with new ways of thinking about regulation. Some things are and should remain the responsibility of the state. Creating and implementing building codes cannot be delegated to communities or groups of parents. Even if building code implementation is passed on to private parties, it will have to be companies that have expertise in engineering, etc. And it will have to be within the framework that is set up by the state.
But for others, we should experiment. Schools are not private spaces. They may be privately owned and they may be run as businesses (we have let that happen) but this is no argument to say they are within the private space of the owner. Even for factories and commercial spaces the state sets the rules for what can and what cannot happen in them. Schools are very special spaces. We have a lot of young people in them. These young people are not adults yet and so others have to bear the responsibility for a lot of decisions pertaining to them.
As they get older, the burden of responsibility can shift, but for the very young, others have to bear the responsibility of taking decisions and the responsibility to look after their interest. The state has legitimate interests in this space. Parents’ rights are paramount as well. And neither of these get suspended when children enter schools.
For issues that may be related to out-of-curriculum additions and activities, the consent of parents, through some reasonable system of representation, should be required. We have to think this through carefully as this can be a double-edged sword. If a school wants to have classes for local language (Punjabi, Pashto, etc) but parents are keen on acquisition of the English language only, should the parents be able to say no? What if this was about the national language?
Clearly, a balance between power and representation is needed. All three, parents, owners/teachers and the state, are legitimate stakeholders in this space and should have a say in matters related to what goes on in any school, private or public.
The issue is about creating the right, optimal or even working arrangement for accomplishing this and for ensuring that the interests of all three are reflected in these arrangements. Currently, there seems to be a very strong skew in favour of the state in public schools and in favour of owners/teachers in private schools. In Albert Hirschman’s terminology, we are really talking of creating avenues for an effective voice for legitimate stakeholders here.
The state has a comparative advantage when it comes to creating the larger framework and setting the broader parameters about curriculum and the legal or acceptable limits. The owners/parents are best placed to take the more nitty-gritty and everyday decisions. Parent bodies cannot be given the power to thwart the freedom and autonomy to do needed experimentation in teaching/learning, but they should have a say in determining what their children learn. How we effectively balance this can be tried through experiments in school-based governance. But clearly, we cannot leave this space in the hands of one or another stakeholder.
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, April 6th, 2018
