Daily Times

Pakistan faces major challenges of income, gender, health and educational inequalities in extreme forms. Over 25 million school-age children are estimated to be out of school; more than 3.7 million of our labour force is unemployed; and about half of total population is victim of food insecurity. Since quality of life is directly linked to the social profile of the country, no aspect of life merits urgent attention and greater investment of resources than improvement in the quality of education. Educating the masses can broaden their vision, make them tolerant and produce skilled work force, which will help increase national income and revenue, enabling the government to allocate more funds for social sector development. In the 2016-2017 budgets, the combined federal and provincial allocations for education are almost Rs 710 billion. This constitutes 2.3 percent of the GDP, a low amount when compared to other countries in the region except Bangladesh.

India spends 3.8 percent of the GDP on education, Bhutan five percent, Maldives over six percent, Bangladesh 2.2 percent, Sri Lanka about 2.5 percent and Nepal 4.7 percent. Pakistan failed to achieve any of the Millennium Development Goals. Sindh and Balochistan are home to the highest proportion of out-of-school children. As many as 66 percent of children in Balochistan and 51 percent in Sindh are out of school, followed by Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with 47 percent and 34 percent out-of-school children respectively. In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), 62 percent are out of school, while in Gilgit-Baltistan 48 percent, and 43 percent in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. According to the 2013 United Nations report, Pakistan ranked 146 out of 187 countries by spending 0.8 percent of GDP on education and 1.8 percent on health.

However, a mere sizeable allocation for education in the budget would not produce engineers, scientists and intelligent workforce. Among other measures, qualified and trained teachers would have to be appointed in educational institutions. At the present, most schools in Pakistan’s rural areas do not have buildings, and students have to take lessons while sitting under trees or in the open. In cities, many schools are without qualified science and IT teachers and laboratories. The schooling of the nation’s children is the essential base of the educational pyramid in this century of knowledge-based polities and knowledge-driven economies, and even advanced nations try to give a further uplift to their already very strong schooling systems. In Pakistan, schooling is just an orphan, at once neglected and ignored. At best, it gets lip service, and at worst, it gets a slice of idiotic populism.

While schooling in private sector has plainly become a commercial proposition, the state-run system has run into intractable rot. As nation’s huge children populace coming from poor and lower middle classes attends government schools, it merits serious attention. Unfortunately, educating the citizenry has not been the pursuit of any government since our independence. The worst hit is the schooling, which in any educational pyramid makes up the base. In the 1990s, the crumbling public sector education system deteriorated further, as an unregulated growth of private sector education led to a system of education apartheid sending the majority of the poor to perpetual ignorance and impoverishment. The poor had no choice but to send their kids to madrassas because they could not afford to pay exorbitant private schools’ fees. It is true that even the most developed countries with top-class educational systems have fanatical fringes.

But their mainstreams stay uninfluenced, robust, decisive and domineering, largely because of the mass of their citizenry being educated with a broad outlook and worldview. The main reason why our mainstream is under such a grave assailment of extremism is arguably the raw deal that education has got from the state throughout. In Pakistan, the decade of 1990s had witnessed some programmes aimed at improving the key social sectors, but mismanagement by a callous leadership brought a resourceful country like Pakistan to the level of one of the least developed countries of the world. Despite spending billions of rupees under the Social Action Programme, the improvement in social indicators remained unimpressive. The rulers did not realise that educated and healthy work force plays an important role in the development of a country and prosperity of its people. Government claims the literacy rate of 57 percent, and the benchmark is that a person who can sign or write his name is considered as literate. The present state of education and less than 30 percent literacy rate in Pakistan is the most glaring reflection of the backwardness of our people and society. In fact, the nation is reaping the fruits of a folly. Had we been not so negligent of education, we would not have seen the spectre of extremism. When the state is so negligent about schooling, what more could you expect from it for keeping the polity as a predominantly moderate and tolerant entity? The problem is that despite unprecedented increase in population, the ratio of students attending government primary schools has been declining. There is need to learn from the experience of Bangladesh and India where poor people were provided incentives to send their children to government schools.

Western countries especially Germany had established a solid education system, as a result Germany till recently was the third largest economy of the world. After the end of First World War, the Weimar Republic developed a free elementary school called the Grundschule, and since then every government focused on the degree level and higher education. It was because of solid foundation for education laid by them that Germany achieved tremendous success in the field of science and technology. No wonder, Germany having been destroyed in the Second World War was able to quickly rebuild its economy only because their earlier governments had laid a solid foundation for education system.

It goes without saying that education is the prime factor in economic and social wellbeing of any nation. It is a strategic tool in nation building through skill development and vision enhancement, and it also directly contributes towards economic growth.

The writer is a freelance columnist. He can be reached at mjamil1938@hotmail.com