Education: Playground politics

Private schools in Pakistan are deservedly given a lot of credit but are also on the receiving end of a lot of hate.

Private schools in Pakistan are deservedly given a lot of credit for filling in the gaps, nay canyons left by the shortcomings of the state education system. However, they are also on the receiving end of a lot of hate, often deserved, for overcharging and denying their students a number of the facilities that would make student life whole.

Extracurricular activities are largely limited to five minute performances on parents’ days, organised sports are limited to the week or so before sports day, and community service is almost nonexistent.

It is thus no surprise then that while these schools are able to groom their students to get good grades, they are often unable to groom them into well-rounded human beings.

The previous government came up with a much-debated plan to regulate private schools through a body which has since been named Peira — the Private Educational Institutions Regulatory Authority. Now Peira is not without its flaws. It was largely toothless in its initial years, headed by a political appointee whose highest educational attainment was a third division bachelor’s degree — although his ‘extracurricular’ attainments did include a close relationship with the then-ruling party.

Though the chairman and some staff were replaced after lions began using arrows as toothpicks in May, work remains sluggish for the most part. At the same time, during a meeting between the heads of a number of private schools held earlier this week to debate the implementation of the Piera Act, most of the defences presented by the schools on why they don’t need to be regulated highlighted exactly why they do.

The number of private schools in the city has almost doubled over the past six years —rising from 570 in 2007 to 967 at present. This is not in line with the increase in the city’s population, implying that many of these entrants were entering a market which needed few new entrants, all because of the profit margins the private education sector offers.

At the same time, even at the most high-end schools, teachers’ qualifications are among the things that worry parents most. Whereas most of the developed world requires degrees or diplomas relevant to both, the subject to be taught and to education in general, it is quite common to hear of subjects being taught by people with no degree relevant to the course material, or even to teaching in general. At junior level, the former is not as much of a problem as the latter, but the scale tilts to the other side as students move up grade levels , with some teachers re-educating themselves in real-time as  they teach.

Then, despite complaints from neighbours, the CDA turns a blind eye to private schools operating in residential areas, arguing that the schools provide a public service. That is a slap in the face of organisations that are genuinely providing public services. When is the last time you heard of Edhi charging people to avail their services? At best, they might ask you to cover petrol for the ambulance, and only if they know you can afford it.

Private schools are businesses, and if they are charging parents through the nose, they should be providing purpose-built buildings with all the required facilities to justify those fees.

Adding to this, one school’s representative argues that public schools should share their facilities with private ones. That would effectively mean turning them over to the private schools, because the financial clout of the private schools would soon lead to them effectively take over these ‘shared’ facilities.

What is the fault of those public school students? They are already deprived of quality education. Why deprive them of their playgrounds and sports facilities?

Meanwhile, speaking against oversight, especially over fees and hiring, the representative of one school claimed that the market is the best regulator of fees and salaries. Well, John Maynard Keynes, the father of Keynesian economics — which in turn forms a core part of the high school economics curriculum — said of regulation, “If a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.”

The public education system is broken, and our government oversight agencies have a history of underperforming — but that does not mean you do away with regulation. It means you fix what is broken and improve it.

The writer is a Senior sub-editor on the Islamabad Desk. [e-mail]

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2013.