A report by Brussels-based International
Crisis Group (ICG) released in early October suggests
a drastic overhaul of Pakistan's education system which
it says is furthering radical and extremist tendencies
in its society. To compound matters, the political will
and commitment necessary for carrying out reforms is severely
lacking, despite many claims and announcements by senior
government functionaries to do exactly that.
Titled Pakistan: Reforming the education
sector, the report says that the one reason why jihadi
groups are gaining influence over students is because
the country's "deteriorating education system has
radicalized many young people while failing to equip them
with the skills necessary for a modern economy".
It says that reform is needed most not
in the madressahs or the private school system but in
the much-neglected government school system and that the
government as well as donors need to concentrate here.
Efforts in recent years by the present
government towards reform of public schools have "made
little headway" with spending on education as a percentage
of GDP falling in real terms over the past five years.
According to report, Pakistan has the dubious distinction
of being one of only 12 countries in the world that spend
less than two per cent of their GDP on education.
While the provinces have announced free
primary education, that seems more a cosmetic gesture
than anything else. The fact of the matter is that universal
primary education, a key goal of the government, has not
been attained and going the lack of progress on this front
will not be attained by the government's own extended
deadline. The problem, the report says, is that a failing
government schools system only adds to the growing tendency
where poor families send their children to madressahs.
The report is critical of what it says
is the failure of the Musharraf government which "appears
unwilling to confront a religious lobby that is determined
to prevent public education from adopting a more secular
outlook".
The report says that the effective education
reform in Pakistan "requires a level of political
will and commitment that has been lacking'. It says that
rhetoric has "seldom been followed by effective policy
and implementation". Then minister of education,
Zobaida Jalal, had visited the US in March 2002 to secure
support for the government's efforts to "secularize
education and address the problems posed by a booming
and unreformed madressah sector".
This caused Pakistan to receive substantial
donor funding, including $100 million from the US government
for education sector reforms. However, the report says,
despite this and "repeated government pledges to
address educational needs and enact madressah reform,
most fundamental priorities remain neglected. The education
sector is still highly politicized, tailored more to the
interests of various state and political actors than to
an objective assessment of educational requirements".
Other than lack of commitment and an obvious
disconnect between what the government says and actually
does in overhauling the public schools system, there are
several other factors behind the continuous decline.
First and foremost is that the education
department, at the federal and the provincial levels,
is seen as a major source of state employment and hence
patronage by the government. The report says that even
otherwise many officials and bureaucrats, once they get
a job in the civil bureaucracy, rise to senior policymaking
positions although they often have little interest or
training in issues related to the field or do not have
any teaching experience themselves. In such a situation,
there is every chance that the policies made by such civil
servants do not address the real issues and problems affecting
stakeholders like teachers, students and their parents.
As far as the government's devolution
plan is concerned, the report says that the benefits of
that, if any, on education reform are yet to be seen.
What the devolution has done, it says, is to create "greater
confusion and overlap of roles, so that district education
officials are unable to perform even the nominal functions
delegated to them".
In contradiction with this principle of
decentralization, the fact is that Islamabad keeps a tight
control on the content of what is taught on in the government
schools. This translates into a single monolithic syllabus
which does not adequately reflect the diverse ethnic,
social, linguistic and economic groups found in Pakistani
society. The centre also keeps a firm grip on the syllabus
and the curriculum which the report says "encourages
intolerance along regional, ethnic and sectarian lines,
to advance its [the state's] own domestic and external
agendas".
Most students who do enroll in government
schools happen to come from poor and impoverished backgrounds.
This means that the inability of successive governments
to bring about any real reforms in this part of the education
system affects mainly the poor and the underprivileged,
that section of society which is probably in desperate
need of government attention and assistance. Besides,
the government's failure to do so creates a vicious cycle:
the deterioration and rot in public schools further pushes
away the parents of prospective students, even those who
are very poor, and this feeds the rise of the madressah
phenomenon in the country, which after all, especially
from an economics point of view fill a gap in demand for
education.
The report makes the following recommendations
to the government of Pakistan:
* Public expenditure on education should
be increased to "at least four per cent" of
GDP, as recommended by Unesco. Emphasis should be laid
particularly on upgrading infrastructure in government
schools.
* Public expenditure on social sector
development should be increased. This will make government
schools more accessible to teachers and students, especially
in impoverished neighbourhoods such as urban slums and
the rural areas in general.
* The government must take prompt action
- using all legal methods possible and with the use of
the police - against extremist organizations and other
groups or individuals who seek to disrupt or prevent initiatives
taken by the government for education reform. Action should
be taken particularly when such elements try and intimidate
educational institutions enrolling girl students.
* Any initiative to improve the curriculum
of madressahs or to register them should be put on hold
until the curriculum wing of the federal ministry of education
completes a comprehensive review and reform of the syllabus
taught in government schools. It should also be ensured
that the curriculum wing "identifies and deletes
historical inaccuracies and any material encouraging religious
hatred or sectarian or ethnic bias in the national curriculum;
and limits Islamic references to courses linked to the
study of Islam, so as to respect the religious rights
of non-Muslim students".
* The government should decentralize policy-
and decision-making related to educational and curriculum
content. As part of this initiative, the national syllabus
should be abolished, as should be the various provincial
textbook boards which have a monopoly over textbook production.
The provincial education ministries should publicly advertise
competitive contracts for new textbooks and invite experts
from the private sector to come forward and submit drafts
for textbooks, within the general guidelines as determined
by the curriculum wing. In addition to this, government
schools should be allowed to have some authority to choose
the textbooks they want to teach their students instead
of relying on just one.
* The "monitoring capacity"
of the education departments at the provincial level should
be increased by hiring more staff and by providing adequate
transport. Also, allocation and release of funding should
be linked to performance indicators such as the pass percentage
at the institution, the enrolment rate, and attendance
of students as well as teachers.
* Steps should be taken to decentralize
the education bureaucracy. This can be done by strengthening
the ongoing process of devolution by asking public schools
to set up boards of governors. These boards should be
elected by parents and teachers and should have representation
from elected local officials, teachers, parents and members
of the community. These bodies should have the power to
hire and fire teachers and principals and to base such
decisions on performance.
* Teachers and administrators in government
schools should be hired on "short-term, institution-specific"
contracts. These can be renewed after a review of the
individual's on-the-job performance. The contracts should
be reviewed every year by the institution's board of governors
and not civil servants. Knowing that they do not have
a job for life and that they will be held accountable
for what they do and don't do might make some teachers
perform better.
* Parental involvement in education should
be encouraged. One way for the government to do this can
be to facilitate the formation of parent-teacher associations
(PTAs) by providing technical and financial support for
their activities and meetings. PTAs can hold public meetings
in local communities to highlight the importance of education
and help convince sceptical parents of the need to send
their children to a school.
* Heads of schools should be given the
leeway to run their institutions in accordance with the
needs and demands of the local community. For example,
they should be allowed to adjust class timings and schedules
to accommodate children who also work for part of the
day. This gives parents an incentive to send their child
to school knowing that the adjustment will not eat into
time during which the child could work (for the family
in the home, or on a field). Teachers should also be encouraged
to use teaching material other than the textbook or to
organize field trips for students. Done with a local focus,
such excursions can help acquaint students with issues
and problems related to their own community/neighbourhood.
* New schools that the government builds
should be located close to communities, especially in
rural areas. This is particularly important for new schools
for girls. If possible, funds should be set aside to provide
or subsidize transport to students and teachers commuting
to the school from remote areas.
* The number of middle schools, especially
in rural areas and urban slums, should be enough to accommodate
students leaving the primary level and entering middle
school.
* The policy announced at the end of 2003
to introduce English from class I should be followed up
by providing schools with adequate English-language teaching
materials and properly trained teachers.
The ICG report also has some recommendations
for donors and these include:
* Aid to the Pakistan government should
be made conditional, especially on meeting the recommended
ratio of education expenditure as a percentage of GDP.
* Donors should urge Islamabad to take
measures to modify the national curriculum and take out
all factual inaccuracies and content where it is deemed
to promote intolerance.
* The government should give a guarantee
that teachers trained through donor-funded training schemes
will not be transferred for at least three years.
* Donors should provide affordable English
texts of good quality to local publishers of such texts.
Other learning materials that provide students in governments
schools wider exposure to the language.
* Donors should also explore the possibility
of entering into partnerships with local organizations
and NGOs that have a proven track record of providing
quality education. The report cites the work of The Citizens'
Foundation in this regard.
The report's executive summary concludes
on a bleak note. It says: "Fifty-seven years after
independence, Pakistan lacks an equitable education system,
and the literacy rate is one of the lowest in the world.
Despite an assortment of declared strategies for providing
education and removing inequalities, Pakistan's education
indicators remain deplorable, including low public spending,
literacy and enrolment levels, high dropout levels, acute
regional and gender disparities, and budgetary inequities.
