Daily Times

Education is one of the essential mainstays of development and prosperity. It is a moral obligation of the state to ensure this fundamental right to all citizens. For centuries, human beings have been committed to education and knowledge. Socrates once said: “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” Plato once said: “By education I mean that training in excellence from youth upward, which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen and teaches him to rule, and to obey with justice. This is the only education, which deserves the name.” The first word of the Quran to be revealed was “iqra”, which means read. Another philosopher, Brigham Young, once stated: “You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.” All the great civilisations made education their first priority and reined successfully.
Since 1947, Pakistan’s education system has remained poor – to say the least. In a 1950 census, the total literacy rate of India was 20 percent and Pakistan’s was 14 percent. However, in 2012, the literacy rate of India reached 75 percent while in Pakistan it reached only 58 percent. In 1950, Iran had a lower literacy rate than Pakistan but now 90 percent of its adults are literate.
The United Nations Development Project (UNDP) reports that Pakistan’s progress in education is abysmal as it has failed to achieve all the targets set for it for 2015. The completion and survival rate seems to have deteriorated rapidly in recent years inferring that more than a quarter of the students enrolled in primary schools do not complete their education. The literacy rate of Pakistan, however, is improving slightly over the years but remains significantly short of the Millennium Development Goal’s (MDG’s) target of 88 percent by 2015. Closer inspection reveals that there are large gender and rural/urban disparities.
The 2015 Education Funding Agency (EFA) Development Index says that Pakistan is ranked at 106 out of 113 countries. According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (2013-2014), 61 percent of people in Punjab can read and write while 56 percent, 53 percent and 54 percent in Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan respectively could read and write. The current survey report (2015) published by Alif Ailan says that the quality of education generally in Pakistan is no longer heading towards development, and that the overall literacy rate is 69 percent. Sindh continues to perform very poorly in education. The total school infrastructure score that Sindh acquired was 47.19 percent.
Further reports explain that Karachi ranked 43rd in Sindh but manages to get into the top 50 districts. Hyderabad ranks in at 62. In province Sindh, Thatta is the worst performing district, mainly due to a very low retention rate. Overall, 19 out of 25 districts scored over 50 on the education scorecard; merely one (Karachi) scored over 70. Only four districts from Sindh ranked in the top half of education rankings.
According to another report, about 60 percent of schools are deprived of drinking water facilities, 40 percent of schools do not have electricity and 35 percent of schools are without any boundary walls. There are over 40,000 ghost teachers and 5,229 ghost schools in Sindh notwithstanding an allocation of Rs 145.02 billion in the budget for education.
In Sindh, for the last eight years, the PPP government has been ruling but they have done nothing to upgrade the state of education. The PPP government has not healed the woes of the people; instead, they have made things even more pathetic. The ground realities from Sindh depict the bleak picture of Sindh not only in the education sector; almost all sectors are on the verge of collapse. Political instability, institutional corruption, extremism, ethnic clashes and feudalistic approaches have paralysed the public of Sindh. These have intensively affected the education system that, instead of pupils in schools, we find donkeys, dogs, sheep, goats and buffaloes where schools should be.
I share here ground realties that I have been experiencing for the last five years while visiting the rural areas of Sindh. I asked a man once why he did not send his children to school. He said: “With an empty stomach and parched lips, how will I send my children to school? I catch fish for a living and my elder son does household chores.” This is the state of hunger and poverty in many rural areas of Sindh.
The causes of this poor and destructive education system in Sindh are numerous but I will name here a few: corruption, unwillingness of the government, teachers’ dual jobs, culture of imitation, hiring of incapable teachers and feudal system in the rural areas. The state of education in Sindh province has declined so alarmingly that both the school infrastructure and educational output have suffered. The situation of Sindh can only be blamed on failure of governance on the part of the provincial government.
Our education system, instead of producing intellectuals, scholars and researchers, is generating a mob of the illiterate, where instead of books and pens in hand, we have guns and bullets. Our schools depict a picture of tragedy. Our classrooms and learning spaces just do not exist. The education system can be made better with the inclination of the government towards education. We all need to understand the sense of individual responsibility to work for a better education system. The given funds for educational purposes should be used fairly. A school follow up mechanism should be developed and must be implemented on an honest basis.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Sindh