Daily Times

We commit a big fallacy when we assume that our educational accomplishments are our individual achievements. We like to believe that we were born with certain innate talents. The fact of the matter is that our innate talents aren’t all that different. Some people are born with genes that make them grow as tall as six feet, while others may remain a couple of inches shorter. These are all just minor differences of genetics.

The difference of innate intelligence amongst people belonging to different social groups is quite similar. It’s the environment, family, culture, and educational institutions that determine our cognitive abilities and critical faculties.

In this regard, capitalism works like an outdated monarchy: a person born in a rich and an educated family is born with privilege; he or she has access to all modes of learning: parental guidance, best educational institutions, books, libraries and internet; peer pressure also serves as a motivation to learn, and intellectual discussions and debates with well-informed teachers, family members and close friends further hone cognitive abilities.

A poor peasant household, on the other hand, lacks the wherewithal to educate their children. Thus, when the neoliberals blame the jahils (the uneducated) for their jahalat (illiteracy), they are actually blaming the poor for their poverty, or the victims for their misfortunes. Instead they ought to blame the structural injustices and the capitalist system which engenders social stratification and breeds conditions conducive for jahalat.

The poor folk who admit their children in seminaries, in a way, outsource the upbringing of their children; because, for all practical purposes, such children are raised by clerics

The foregoing observations hold for a social context, like that of the third world, marked by a stratified educational system where there are different set of institutions for the elite and the masses.

The public schools in much of the developed world provide quality education to all citizens, irrespective of their social class. In United Kingdom, the budgetary allocation for public education is $150 billion for a population of 65 million. By comparison, the entire education budget of Pakistan roughly adds up to $5 billion for a population of more than 200 million. Thus, the equality of opportunity, which is directly linked to the equality of education, has been ensured in the developed world, but not in the third world.

In Pakistan, we have four distinct types of educational institutions:

Firstly: there are the elite English-medium schools that offer O/A Levels and Junior/Senior Cambridge courses. The quality of education in such institutions is quite good, but their tuition fee and other expenses are so exorbitant that only the upper middle class can admit their children in such schools.

Secondly: there are Urdu-medium public and private sector schools that cater to the educational needs of the children of the middle and lower middle classes. Such institutions are often misrepresented as ‘English-medium’, because the textbooks are in English language, but the lingua franca in such schools is generally Urdu; and their quality of education is average, at best.

Thirdly: government schools run by the provincial education departments. The tuition fee in such schools is quite nominal and so is the standard of education that they impart. Such institutions cater to the educational needs of the children of the poorest classes.

Fourthly: there are religious seminaries, or madaris, that are funded by Islamic charities and endowments, and that impart religious education to the children of the poorest of the poor. These petrodollars-funded madaris offer the kind of incentives that are lacking even in government schools, like free boarding and lodging, meals for poor students, free of cost books and stationery; and some generously-funded seminaries even give monthly stipends to their students.

The poor folk who admit their children in seminaries, in a way, outsource the upbringing of their children; because, for all practical purposes, such children are raised by clerics.

Those of us who can’t read and write can meet ends with help from traditional social networks in villages, but that is not easy in modern cities. And those who can’t do basic maths cannot succeed in business. Similarly, if you want to register a property or a vehicle to your name, and you don’t know the law and the understanding of the system, you can run into a lot of trouble.

Therefore, education is imperative for survival in today’s complex world. Biological evolution is based on the cardinal principle of natural selection and the survival of the fittest; thus, fitness to the environment is the only law that ensures our survival. But that fitness is bestowed upon us by nature; and like I have argued earlier, that in today’s complex, a man-made world, every newborn child is unfit until he gets proper education.

More to the point, the lack of fitness of an individual (or a social group) is not their fault; it is the fault of the society as a whole. If you are fortunate enough to have been born in a rich or an upper middle class family, by default you will be equipped with all the necessary tools that are required for survival and progress; but if you have not been properly educated to understand and deal with complex modern societies, then you will remain an unfit peasant.

Finally, and in a nutshell, equality of opportunity, which is the fundamental axiom of the modern egalitarian worldview, is directly linked to the equality of education, or at least, the equality of educational opportunities.

In the capitalist neoliberal societies of the third world, however, only the children of the upper classes get proper education needed for upward social mobility, while the children of the masses get education, if at all, which is barely sufficient for clerical or technical jobs. Such an education does not enable the individual to realise the optimal potential of his or her cognitive abilities and critical faculties.

The writer is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism

Published in Daily Times, October 5^th 2017.