Building schools is not enough if they lack the infrastructure or are displaced from the population they cater to.
LAHORE: The basic problem with Pakistan is that no clear long-term policy has ever been implemented to tackle the ever-increasing gap in education amongst economic classes. By gap, I refer specifically to the quality of educational provisioning and how it differs as one climbs up the socio-economic ladder.
A good place to start is Dr Tariq Rahman’s Denizens of the Alien World (2004), which breaks down the basic primary educational structure into four main categories: elitist schools, public schools, madrassas and army-managed cadet colleges. As the names suggest, the elite schools cater to the middle and upper classes, charge high fees and educate in English. Cognisant of the state’s inability to provide standard education in public schools, the army established its own low-cost cadet schools. The madrassas absorb the residual demand and take in children who are too poor to afford any of the above and/or have an inclination to acquire religious education.
The Annual Status of Education Report (2012) has expounded on these inequalities by pointing out that a high correlation is found between wealth and enrolment in private schools and also between learning levels (of Mathematics, English and Reading) and wealth. According to a Unesco estimate, the economic impact of illiteracy (both absolute and functional) on Pakistan is $5.86 billion a year. Furthermore, in developing countries, a child born to a mother who can read is 50 per cent more likely to survive past the age of five than one whose mother cannot.
The link between education and crime is also clear; estimates show that 60 to 80 per cent of under-trial prisoners have reading and writing skills below basic levels. Combine the poor quality of learning, high indirect cost in the form of lost child-labour wages and meagre private returns from state-funded public education, the result you get is a high drop-out rate at the primary level. National literacy is thus itself connected with the success of public schools.
Though the count of public schools in Pakistan may exceed over 130,000 across the four provinces, there is no guarantee whether these schools have adequate provisioning of electricity and water or whether they exist at all, i.e., ghost schools. Building schools is not enough if they lack the infrastructure or are displaced from the population they cater to.
Khawaja Ali Zubair
Published in The Express Tribune, December 30th, 2013.
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