“Empowerment is like obscenity; you don’t know how to define it but you
know it when you see it” – Strandberg.
When the 21st century dawned, the seeds of a new future appeared to have been planted. Power began a tentative shift from the might of armies to the strength of the intellect in countries that are home to almost 60 percent of the world’s population and are dominated by the enormous landmasses of China and Australia. Asia, more than any other place on earth, beset with challenges as expansive as its oceans where a large number of battle fronts such as population explosions and increasing economic diversities and inequalities rage on, faces the front line challenge of education.
This is not to assert that education is the proverbial magical potion designed to create an ideal world, revive frail economies and buttress crumbling social structures, only to reiterate its importance at the dawn of a new century fraught with ignorance, oppression, war, poverty and injustice. That education is being recognised as one of the basic means to foster human development leading to national growth may be attested by the prolific growth of educational institutions in the private sector in countries such as Pakistan. In choosing to invest in an individual, governments expect to reap a collective harvest that cumulates in creating the wealth of a nation. It is expected therefore that education must be the paramount goal of any government. But what if this formula leaves out roughly 50 percent of the people?
This is the challenge faced by women in Pakistan and many of its sister countries. If there is a choice, boys will get the lion’s share be it in food, education, healthcare or even love. The girl child is still considered a considerable burden and parents are reluctant to pay for better education opportunities for their girls despite some of them showing greater promise than their male siblings.
Despite holding out a great promise it is ironic that the 21st century itself has created greater contradictions and disparities in today’s realities. As the world in general becomes more literate with people and cultures pushed to cope with the information age there has been a parallel increase in economic gaps between developed and developing nations. Widening gaps between social classes and minorities within the most favoured nations continue to thwart the best efforts of educationists and economic managers alike. The resultant tensions, pressures and distrust see education itself as the great divider, as in the case of public and private sector institutions in Pakistan.
While it is always difficult to distinguish between unintended effects and unacknowledged intentions, the outcome can scarcely be denied. Pakistan’s educational morass is a direct outcome of concentrations in socially ‘sanitised’ sciences, a partisan, inaccurate history and an entirely parochial geography. To compound matters further, the nation remains divided by two major languages as mediums of instruction. The language issue is further compounded by the fact that regional languages have been largely ignored as the first language of instruction, which has resulted in breeding selectivity and social stratification. Further to this, educational planning has been characterised by pigeonholing and compartmentalisation ignoring the inevitable and welcome erosion of borders between subject areas. The lack of pedagogical policies supporting ‘teaching across the curriculum’ and a necessary exchange of ideas between the sciences and the humanities has led to a faultily skilled and narrow vision of what it means to be educated.
However, the main characteristic of change being change itself, Pakistani institutions despite their reluctance to shift from post colonial models have not been able to insulate themselves. Keeping in view the fact that in recent decades, profound changes have been witnessed in global politics and academic knowledge, which have significantly impacted the moral focus of education and commerce, there is now happily a corresponding, growing, constant, public and vocal demand for creative, liberal, revolutionary forms of educational reform.
Though the voices remain in a minority, it is significant that a small but visible shift emanating from the private sector has shouldered the responsibility of schooling girls. The Care Foundation, the Citizen’s Foundation, and Lahore Grammar Schools with their three tiered fee levels based on disparate income levels are welcome initiatives in the development of new strategies to tackle the challenges of an increasingly competitive and complex world. Hopefully, the key feature of government education, which extends control over new knowledge, will no longer be acceptable since the public senses the need for paradigm shifts.
While there is no single panacea for such complex issues, one of the factors that can and does make a quantifiable difference is an accessible, meaningful education process with its overt and significant impact on a people in general and the individual in particular. In the present case it translates into empowerment of women and in particular focuses on education of and about gender roles.
That Pakistan, like many other Asian and African countries, has an alarmingly low literacy rate is to state the obvious. In the 1981 census the total number of illiterates recorded in the age group of 15 years and above was 41 million. Considering that 45 percent of the population at present is aged less than 15 years, it can be assumed that the absolute number of illiterates in the country exceeds 50 million at which rate Pakistan probably now has 54 million adult illiterates. Add to that the fact that eight children become victims of sexual abuse every day, one in 10 higher education students is a drug addict, only 40 percent have correct information about puberty related changes and hygiene, and hardly two percent of the youth has necessary knowledge about prevention and causes of infectious diseases. Statistics as alarming as these go to show the enormity of the challenges faced by a country like Pakistan beset with numerous additional issues such as terrorism, poverty and ignorance.
To compound matters further, gender perspectives in mainstream governance literature are typically limited to an examination of the need for more women in formal political life and the development of strategies to achieve this objective. This well intentioned but severely shortsighted effort fails to consider the need for transformation of the institutions of power. This weakness becomes particularly important when an analysis of the links between improved governance and the gendered causes and consequences of women’s poverty is undertaken. At the state level, numbers alone are an insufficient condition either for the articulation of women’s gender interests, or to achieve an impact on resource allocation decisions and processes.
(To be continued)
The writer is academic advisor Lahore Grammar School and can be reached at [email protected]