Education first

At last, we have a national law that makes education free and compulsory. The question is: can we do better in the public education sector by making laws alone and will it make any difference to the present situation of apathy, negligence and poor governance in the field of education? I will support any measure that has even the slightest intention of bringing more children to schools and making schools true places of learning. Hence, I laud this effort by parliament to create a sense of urgency and show political commitment to public education. However, the real issue is how we go about implementing it in spirit and go beyond any law to enrol and keep all our school-going age children in the public education system.

The law will apply persuasion more than any punitive measure against parents who refuse to send children to school. That persuasion will be through the school councils. I have interviewed teachers and members of school councils in nine schools of Punjab. I believe the councils in each school can do a great deal in enrolling kids, providing missing facilities, solving teachers’ problems and making school the centre of the community’s attention. Even a single motivated leader within a community can make a big difference. An activist or a person with a sense of social obligation can mobilise the community and his absence would leave the school at the mercy of the district bureaucracy. The school council initiative of Punjab, it appears, has died down; its revival here and also activation of school councils in other provinces — not just on paper but also on the ground — will create the right atmosphere for the implementation of compulsory education law. I feel there is a need to create two-way linkages. One necessary linkage is between the local school and the nearby community that sends its children to that neighbourhood’s school. The second linkage is between the community and the district educational bureaucracy. The bureaucracy works above the community and its relationship with the absentee teachers and ghost schools is that of facilitation — not of supervision and accountability.

The district administration is the real hub of governance and service delivery. Until education is genuinely owned and effectively delivered at the district level, no other remedy is going to work. We have already a vast network of schools and even colleges. The issue is that they are not delivering according to the capacity. There are two important reasons for that. One is that for long, the public education system of the country has been in decay mainly because of the unions of teachers and political intervention. The absentee teacher is protected both by the political elements and the educational bureaucracy, which by itself is not independent of political influences at the district level.

The second reason is the general pessimism among the people about the public education system. Even the rural middle classes have started sending their kids to private schools. That is a big show of no confidence in public schools. The private schools in the same locality are functioning well even with far lesser pay for teachers than the public schools. The reason for this is not so difficult to find; it is a lack of governance and accountability in the education system. We must change this by placing public education before anything else. Our stability, social order, progress and security in broader terms rest on this.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 25^th, 2012.