There have always been “two Pakistans”. One “Pakistan” is reserved for the miniscule English-speaking elites who are educated in expensive private schools and colleges and who go on to govern the country and manage its institutions. The other “Pakistan” is populated by the unwashed, illiterate “masses” who slave away for these elites from dawn to dusk. This system of educational “apartheid” continues to eat into the fabric of our nationhood. What can be done about it?
Pakistan’s paradox is that it is a middle-income country with a literacy rate of only 30 per cent. Comparable countries like Turkey, Thailand and Indonesia boast literacy rates of over 80 per cent.
One reason is that Pakistan spends next to nothing on educating its people. Until the 1970s only 1 per cent of GNP was consumed for educational purposes. This is up to 2 per cent of GNP now. Still, all save one of the 28 Asia-Pacific countries spend much more per capita, many over 4 per cent of their GNP.
Education has also occupied a low position in every government’s priority list. Typically, about 7 per cent of the country’s combined federal and provincial budgets is earmarked for it every year and much of it is misappropriated. The UNESCO benchmark for countries in the same income bracket like Pakistan is 20 per cent of budgetary outlays.
The problem is partly due to the nature of the Pakistani economy. Over 70 per cent of the country’s 130 million people live in the rural areas and agriculture accounts for over 60 per cent of GNP. Land ownership is highly skewed. Big landlords dominate the two largest provinces, Punjab and Sindh. They also control parliaments and run governments. Largely uneducated themselves, they have a vested interest in keeping their peasants illiterate, unorganised and dependent.
The result is that only 40 per cent of Pakistani children between 5-9 years are enrolled in schools. Half of them drop out in the first five years and only one in four complete matriculation. Female literacy in such a traditional, even reactionary, environment is abysmally low — the national average in the rural areas is 4 per cent. It is rock bottom in the largely tribal societies of Balochistan and Frontier provinces. With an annual population growth rate of over 3 per cent, there are 32 million more unschooled Pakistanis today than there were a decade ago. In Thailand, Indonesia and Turkey nearly 90 per cent of the children go to school.
Several other factors account for this bleak situation. History is one of them. For two centuries, the British Raj remained largely indifferent to the educational needs of its subjects. Emphasis was placed on the liberal arts in order to create an Anglicized, elite corps of administrators for the colony. But the Muslims of India didn’t help their cause either. Unlike secular, middle-class Hindus who adapted to the new social environment and became upwardly mobile, the Muslims tended to resist the new cultural values and institutions introduced by the British. Modern, rational philosophy came into conflict with the heavy theological content of traditional Islamic curricula.
When the sub-continent was partitioned, Pakistan got a raw deal. The bulk of assets, financial resources, skilled manpower and educational and commercial institutions fell to India’s lot. Most schools and colleges were ramshackle outfits strapped for funds. The situation became particularly grim after tens of thousands of Hindu teachers migrated to India in 1947.
A war with India over Kashmir in 1948 forced a new set of priorities on the leaders of the nation. Education was not one of them. The military began to hog the budgets and the social sector was all but forgotten. The militarisation of Pakistan gathered pace in the early 1950s and two more wars with India reinforced this trend. In 1974 prime minister Z A Bhutto launched a nuclear programme, vowing to “eat grass”, if necessary, to keep it going. We have never looked back.
Educational “policies” were launched with much fanfare in 1947, 1969, 1972, 1979 and 1992 but shelved when governments abruptly fell from power. Pakistan has been plagued with acute political instability. From 1947 to 1958, six prime ministers fell from grace. In the last seven years, another six have come and gone, four alone in 1993. When there was a modicum of stability, as under army rule from 1958 to 1972 and again from 1977 to 1988, the generals concentrated on making war with India (1965 and 1971) or trying to liberate Afghanistan from the yoke of Soviet communism (1979-88). Given such fitful starts and political adventures, educational policy has come to suffer from lack of planning, coherence and continuity.
Under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s socialist regime (1973-77), all educational institutions, including schools, were nationalised. The quantity and quality of learning rapidly declined and the economy went into a slump. Then the country did a U-turn under General Zia ul Haq: the education system was privatised but this time a heavy dose of “Islamisation” was injected into the curriculum. This has proved disastrous.
Any material thought “repugnant to the teachings of Islam” was censored from some 551 primary and secondary school textbooks. New Islamic subjects were introduced and made compulsory in schools. The curriculum for “Pakistan Studies” was thoroughly revised — henceforth Pakistanis were taught to think of themselves as citizens of the Middle-East and told to forget their South Asian heritage. Arabic was made compulsory for classes V1 to V111. A degree from a mosque school was now equivalent to a Masters degree in Islamiyat or Arabic from a university. Exercises were carried out to “Islamise” school mathematics by introducing Arabic terminology and insisting that text should flow from right to left. Overnight, education found itself lost in a fog of sham “Islamisation”.
When Ms Benazir Bhutto came to power in 1988, she promised to inject more money into education and overhaul the system. But her 20 month period in office was marked by such instability that none of her schemes took off. Under Nawaz Sharif, however, another attempt was made to “revitalise” the education system. By this, Mr Sharif’s new Education Policy meant “to pursue Zia’s Islamisation initiatives with increased avidity”. However, after spending two years deliberating over the appropriate dose of Islamisation required, the education minister gave up. The matter was handed over to a special parliamentary commission for consideration. The commission spent six months thinking about it and couldn’t come up with any ideas.
Now Ms Bhutto’s government is busy dusting Mr Sharif’s Education Report and hoping to salvage some of its prescriptions. The PPP’s election manifesto spoke of spending at least 4 per cent of GNP on education by the time Ms Bhutto’s term ended in 1998. This figure has already been revised to 3 per cent by the end of the decade.
Even this may prove impossible to achieve. Currently, Pakistan has about 124,000 primary schools (including ‘mosque schools’, ‘shelterless’ and one room structures) with an enrollment of about 11.5 million “pupils”. By the end of this century the population of the 5-9 age group will be about 22 million. Merely to achieve universal primary education, an additional 107,000 schools and 265,000 teachers will be needed. This will require an outlay of tens of billions of rupees. A doubling of the facilities for secondary, vocational and higher education, which is the minimum required within the next decade, will mean additional tens of billions.
Where are we going to get such vast sums of money? With defence expenditures gobbling up nearly 40 per cent of annual budgets, followed by debt servicing at 35 per cent, there is precious little left over for the social sector, including education. Thus the private sector must be harnessed to help achieve our goals. But businessmen refuse to pay taxes or repay loans. They expect investment in education to yield the same sort of profit margins as ghee or cement, which is preposterous.
Where teachers are concerned, no one wants to go and teach in the rural areas. “Islamic ideology” also remains as elusive and confusing as ever. And both the PPP and PML are dominated by ‘feudals’ who have a vested interest in the status quo.
Ms Bhutto’s objective — of spending up to 3 per cent of GNP on education by the end of this century — is laudable. The ambitious education policy prepared by Mr Sharif’s government had hoped to hit a target of 2.5 per cent of GNP by the year 2002. How Ms Bhutto proposes to do better than that, however, remains unclear. At best, her government can marginally increase federal and provincial budgetary outlays on education, and that too only if can squeeze substantially larger revenues from the rich and greedy, which remains doubtful. But that would still amount to only a drop in the ocean of needs. Unless the private sector makes a substantial contribution, all hope is lost.
Many educational schemes involving private sector participation can be envisaged. While attempts are made to encourage such a package, the government should put its own house in order. One priority would be to reserve a slice of subsidised institutions of higher and vocational education for meritorious children of the middle-classes and privatise all the other colleges and universities which are a drain on the exchequer. Another would be to make primary education compulsory and free, especially in the rural areas.
A third objective should be to end, once and for all, any ambiguity surrounding the status of the English language. It should be made a compulsory second language from secondary school and upwards. It is ridiculous to harp about its colonial connotations in this day and age. The fact is that without English, which is the paramount language of trade and commerce, there can be no upward mobility. A policy of denying English to the middle-classes, wittingly or otherwise, by emphasising Urdu at its expense is designed only to increase the gulf between the rulers and the ruled and sustain the idea of the “two Pakistans”.
A fourth initiative should be undertaken to end the confusion about the role of “Islamic ideology” in state and society. We have been continually obliged to revise our textbooks to suit the ideological whims and fancies of illegitimate or insecure rulers. Such hypocrisy should come to an end now that we have a legitimate, democratic and stable government in power. “Mullahcracy” has only served to cripple our education system without rearming us in any moral sense.
Unfortunately, in Pakistan’s highly status conscious society, education is still viewed only as a means to an end, “a screening device for limited job opportunities”. This is a pernicious, self-defeating philosophy. If it persists, the educated elites will shrink over time and the country will be faced with a tidal wave of illiterate and unemployed Pakistanis. This is a frightening scenario which only the ignorant mullahs can relish.