Education: nothing to be proud of

Kursheed herds the family buffalo along the rough mountain track leading towards a treeless area, where the animal will attempt to graze on rough, nutrient-deficient, tough grasses mixed with small shrubs. Kursheed, her shalwar kameez filthy from repeated wear, is nine years old and should, by law, be in school along with her two brothers — one older and one younger than her. Instead, her mother sees absolutely no point in educating a girl who will be married off to a cousin as soon as possible.

Kursheed’s mother, herself illiterate, says that she needs her eldest daughter at home. There are four younger girls amongst other children in the family, too, to help with chores because until her eldest son — only 11 years old at present — marries and brings home a wife, there is too much work for her to tackle alone. She doesn’t see much point in sending her son to school. The teacher is rarely there and school resources are almost non-existent. However, she sends him to school anyway because her husband, also illiterate, insists that all things considered, their son is highly unlikely to matriculate — as is the case with countless other boys in the mountain areas, who are regularly allowed to skip school.

In a country with the second lowest literacy rate in the world (only Nigeria outranks Pakistan in this), no one really cares whether or not children actually go to school. According to a variety of sources, there are somewhere between 5.1 and 9.5 million Pakistani children between the ages of five and 16 who have never seen the inside of a classroom in their short lives and, the odds are — increasingly so — that they never will. The government doesn’t give a single damn about these numbers as its meagre budgetary allocation — a mere 2.3 per cent of the Gross National Product (GNP) and just 9.9 per cent of the total budget — goes to prove.

“Ghost” schools, “ghost” teachers and teachers in many government schools, who have no education to speak of themselves, hardly give students a chance of gaining the kind of basic education needed in order to take a single, upwardly mobile step in the increasingly high-tech, highly competitive world of today. Even if teachers have some education, they do not have access to the most rudimentary teaching tools with which to teach a largely outmoded curriculum. This is especially true in rural areas where adult literacy rates are even lower. To these issues, we add the targeting of schools by the Taliban — with an emphasis on girls’ or co-educational schools — and now the targeted killing of schoolteachers. Realistically, the government’s claim of achieving a literacy rate of 60 per cent — only a four per cent increase from the supposedly current 56 per cent — by 2015 is a non-starter.

As it stands, only those children put through the exorbitantly expensive private education mill will achieve an acceptable scholastic level. Government refusal to prioritise education is — when the chips are down — responsible for the majority of ills faced by the country today. Unless things change, Pakistan will continue its slide into oblivion. Change must ensure that all children, irrespective of parental wishes, receive the education they are entitled to.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2013.