Pakistan’s education system is in jeopardy. This has been the case ever since Pakistan’s inception. If education was considered the backbone of development in the initial few years, by the late 70s, education had slipped way down the priority lists of political leadership. Rather than aligning the education system with the emerging global skills and academic requirements, we made it a vehicle to advance the policy of Islamisation. Coinciding with this penchant was the infiltration of the private sector into education. Though in times to come, private schools cropped up in every nook and corner, mainly in an unregulated environment, several branded schools adopted a Western-styled education system as a recipe for material success.
As for the public education sector—it hopped from the English system to the Urdu system and later to a hybrid one. Unlike the Oxford and Cambridge syllabus taught in private schools, the public sector syllabus was locally made. The administration of the education sector and the bureaucracy even had difficulty deciding upon the uniform style. On different occasions, Pant shirts were replaced with shalwar Kameez.
During the military ruler Zia-ul-Haq’s ten years tenure, the education sector was given to the government’s ally Jamaat-i-Islami. The entire focus of Jamaat was to Islamise the curriculum. When General Musharraf became the democratic President of Pakistan after the 2002 elections, Jamaat, as an ally, was once again given the education sector in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa under the banner of Muttahida Majlis–e–Amal. Again the focus was on purging the curriculum from Western education.
Surprisingly, they extract Hellen Keller’s 1933 essay from the ninth-grade book “Three Days to See,” which elucidated how she would use her vision if given the gift of sight. The essay was replaced by a story of Allama Iqbal, one of the founding visionaries of Pakistan. Lessons referencing the curb on population growth and environmental charitable entities such as Greenpeace and Save the Children were also removed. The term Jihad was also incorporated into the school lessons despite the Awami National Party’s proposal to use the term in high school in grade 11th so that the student is mature enough to understand the meanings of Jihad and violence.
As for the quality is concerned, according to the Islamabad-based Sustainable Development Policy Institute report published in 2002, the Pakistan public school textbooks were full of errors, encouraged human rights violations of religious minorities and stirred violent behaviour. The military ruler Pervez Musharraf tried to modify the curriculum with the induction of Enlightened Moderation ideology, which remained largely a mantra to convey to the US and its allies that Pakistan was shifting from an extremist society to a moderate one.
This circus went unabated until 2018, when the Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaaf government introduced Single National Curriculum (SNC). Motivated by the One Nation one-syllable ideology, the PTI forced the private schools and Madrassas to oblige with the policy by scrapping their Oxford and Cambridge-styled systems. After a long battle of resistance and alterations, a settlement was reached between the government and the private schools and Madrassa, but by then, the PTI government had gone out of power. The incoming coalition, the Pakistan Democratic Movement, pushed education down the priority list again. The SNC was bankrolled and rebranded as the National Curriculum of Pakistan.
Among the various anomalies besetting the public education sector of Pakistan, insufficient investment is one of them. Since education is a provincial subject, the federal budget hardly gives a complete picture. Nevertheless, it gives a snapshot of what to expect in provinces and the direction the country has set for itself in higher education because spending on tertiary education is the prerogative of only the federal government.
The next fiscal year 2023-24 budget has allocated a meagre of 1.7 per cent of the GDP for education. A significant portion of Rs. 76.589 billion would go into financing higher education, and the Higher Education Commission (HEC) and has been allocated Rs. 59.71 billion under the Public Sector Development Program.
According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan 2022-23, in the outgoing fiscal year, 67 per cent of students enrolled in the primary section completed their studies the rest dropped out. In the lower secondary, 47 per cent completed education, whereas 23 per cent completed upper secondary education.
Primary Education in Pakistan is eight years—from grade one to eight.
Lower Secondary Education lasts two years——from grade 9 to 10
Upper Secondary Education lasts two years—from grade 11 to 12
So the survey tells us that 33 per cent of our children never completed education—they either dropped out after class five or eight. Multiple surveys have shown that the dropout rate is higher at grade five. On the other hand, only 47 per cent completed lower education, which means 53 per cent are okay with a matriculation degree. As for those considered the cream of any society, the intelligentsia, the people who acquire higher education, a prerequisite for technological reforms, is 23 per cent. In Corollary, we are producing a mediocre society with 77 per cent of the population out of the higher education equation.
As for the World Bank assessment, the reason for this poor performance is “Low public spending on education.” The bank says it “limits Pakistan’s citizens from more actively participating in economic & social activities.”
Talking about budgetary reforms, the World Bank’s Human Capital Review suggests: “Quality education for all children in Pakistan will require a different approach and substantial financial efforts, estimated to be 5.4 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).”
What ails Pakistan’s education system? The list is exhaustive. However, some of the main reasons include outdated teaching practices; lack of quality; pedagogical material; transitioning barriers from the language spoken at home to the one used in schools, and shortage of teachers. In addition, poverty, undernutrition, lack of interest in going to schools and long distances to school have made a significant population of Pakistan paria to formal education.
The solution, according to the Human Capital Review, lies in recalibrating the education policy on the following parameters:
- Introducing a publicly-held-private partnership model, which has worked in Punjab.
- Reforming public and community schools concept—provided teacher presence is ensured and, where needed, double shifts schools are provided.
- Building multigrade classrooms— teaching students of different ages and abilities and at different grade levels together.
These changes would demand using more targeted programs, using investment wisely, minimising cost and eliminating low-target programs such as laptop distribution, which the review states have no underlying pedagogical strategy.
Bringing children to school is one side of the coin, and efficient use of public resources, quality and equity is the other side. These together enable students to acquire skills and become productive people for society and their families.
