Daily Times

The qualification of just 2.9 percent candidates in the written portion of the top bureaucracy CSS exam paints a dismal picture of rapidly falling standards of education in Pakistan. However, such poor performance of the candidates was one day likely in view of the orphaned state of education in the country. The alarms of educational decline in the country have been ringing repeatedly in the form of national and international organisation reports, but with cotton sealed ears and blindfolded eyes, the education authorities and the rulers could not hear the danger alarms and read the fatal reports.

A 2010 study undertaken by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) revealed some 25 million children between the ages of five and 16 are out of school in Pakistan. The report was archived as if unseen. Recently, the same agency rang the alarm bell by putting Pakistan’s illiteracy ratio at 79 percent and the literacy rate at just 21 percent.

UNESCO’s prescribed four percent GDP allocation to this sector but this is proudly being defied by the brave Pakistani rulers by investing less than two percent of the GDP. It is sad that, as things stand today, Pakistan may not be able to meet its target for education for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 and may miss the goal of universal primary education as sought in the Dakar Declaration 2000, to which Pakistan is a signatory.

The world’s countries have strenuously been competing in the space race to take the lead from one another to station more satellites in space and make their early presence felt on planets like Mars. However, that kind of race we can see only in Hollywood movies and on the Discovery channel. Is it not strange how our political parties are quickly reactive in banning Indian movies in Pakistani cinemas and other wheels of the state also swing into action, but regarding education they are complacent, calm and composed as if we have achieved cent percent education and have started topping the Organisation of Economic Development’s Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) exam?

The former Chief Justice (CJ) of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, observed on February 11 this year: “There are animals kept in schools and the buildings have been turned into stables; this is what we are doing to our children when education is a constitutional right.” He constituted teams of civil and sessions judges for raids to observe education, especially in Sindh. During these raids that lasted around four months, the smiles on the faces of our education-deprived children flashed and the beauty of educational institutes was revived with teachers being regular and punctual out of fear of being sacked. This all proved transient with the end of the education monitoring period.

Sindh still has hundreds of ghost and closed schools, innumerable schools forcibly converted into police stations and thousands of villages without female educational institutions. Recently, the provincial Sindh education department submitted a report before the Sindh High Court, which stated that around 4,540 schools in Sindh were not functioning properly and that the number of ghost schools was about 2,181. Balochistan’s educational landscape is more pathetic than that in Sindh. Out of a total 3.6 million children, just 1.3 million have access to education there. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa condition is no different as is apparent from the destroyed schools there where around 28,000 parents have refused polio vaccination to their children out of their being ignorant of the crippling effects of the disease.

For educational improvement the key factors are textbooks, teachers and testing. Suppose, one day, all Pakistanis have access to education; this means we have just resolved only the issue of teachers but the textbooks and testing issues will still be a daunting challenge. Getting any of these three interconnected things wrong will leave our young people further behind. Our textbooks are badly flawed because they are almost copy pasted from the internet along with other countries’ syllabi in incomprehensible, tough English with no clear definitions, rules and examples. This is the reason why we are educated just by name — to up the literacy rate to 50 percent — but UNESCO puts us at 21 percent literacy rate due to our falling standards of education.

This has raised a ray of hope in Sindh, with the Sindh education department minister’s and secretary education’s recent announcement of opening all closed schools, eliminating ghost schools and punishing truant teachers along with officers involved in the sad state of education in Sindh. The display of postings, transfers, show cause notices and suspension orders of teaching and non-teaching staff by the secretary education on the Sindh education department website seems the first sincere effort to save Sindh’s education.

However, we still have more than three decades old textbooks — there are no recently revised publications. In first year, in the English textbook by the Sindh Textbook Board, the miracles of radio and the experiment of airplane lessons are still being taught even in this contemporary cyber and drone technology age. This portrays a picture of educational stagnation in Pakistan.

The writer is a blogger and freelance columnist