An existential battle

Mere threat of attacks by Taliban was enough to prompt the closure of all schools in Punjab for three days

It is no exaggeration to say that the battle to educate the children of Pakistan — and their parents because there is almost as much work to do there — goes to the heart of its very existence as a modern state. There are innumerable systemic ailments that beset the national body, but the most damaging in the long term is the failure to get to grips with adequately educating a burgeoning population. Historically, education has never received either the attention or the budgetary allocations that would see it prosper, and the nation along with it. Underfunded and undervalued, generation after generation of children has been indifferently served. Dissatisfaction with state education has led to the mushrooming of the private sector which has grown in parallel with the middle class. Where parents can afford, a choice few would opt to send their child to a state school, and those that do, know that their children are getting a poor second-best.

With the state failing to adequately discharge its duty, a duty enshrined in the Constitution, other non-state actors have entered in the last 15 years — those that would actively seek to discourage education and are not afraid to destroy schools and colleges across the country and kill and maim children in pursuit of their goals. Extremist groups view education as a threat and will do all in their very considerable power to break the desire of the people to seek betterment for their children.

The state education system in Pakistan may be in large parts broken or indeed absent, but it is not beyond fixing, and the current dispensation is making some attempts to redress historical wrongs. There is alongside this an emerging understanding that the provision of security for schools, whilst a duty of the state is not one it can wholly fulfill, at least to the point at which every parent can send their child to school without fear. It is simply unrealistic to expect the army to deploy to every school in the land, or for local and provincial law-enforcement agencies to guard every gate and entrance to the hundreds of thousands of government schools.

This was to the forefront of the mind of the prime minister when he visited the first Montessori section in a public school in Islamabad on February 19. He called for “escalated” security provisions at every school, saying that raising walls and topping with razor wire was insufficient given the level of threat presented by extremist groups to education as a whole. The establishment of Montessori sections is part of the prime minister’s education reform programme under which 422 schools and colleges that are administered by the Federal Directorate of Education will be upgraded. Splendid as this may be, it is but a drop in the ocean of unfulfilled need, and the extremists recently gave a powerful demonstration of their reach.

The mere threat of attacks by the Taliban was enough to prompt the closure of all public and private schools in Punjab for three days in January; the army also closed its own schools. In the event no school was attacked, but untold thousands of children lost days of education and more importantly from the Taliban perspective, a sense of fear was engendered in parents. It is that fear that undermines confidence and erodes often fragile commitments to education by parents who may be food-insecure and in grinding poverty. Girls are most likely to lose out in the education lottery, and the cohort of educated children that would take Pakistan forward into the knowledge economy in 15 years’ time is not being grown.

Taking back both the education agenda as well as the narrative from the extremists is a mighty challenge. Seen globally, Pakistan suffered the greatest number of fatalities caused by attacks on education between 1970 and 2014. Over a dozen terrorist groups have committed these crimes, with the TTP the biggest killer of our children. The battle is going to be long and hard, but we cannot afford to lose it.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st, 2016.

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