Linguistic failure

English dropped from rural school primary curriculum to be learnt, only when and if qualified teacher is available.

The abysmal standard of rural primary school education may, in part, be just one of the numerous reasons why approximately 87 per cent of children drop out of school before even managing to learn how to read and write — in any language — and thus places the country second only to Nigeria in the global illiteracy stakes.

It is further estimated that, despite the government mandate of providing free, quality education to all children by law, only about 66 per cent of children ever see the inside of a school, way below the global average of 90 per cent, let alone actually learn anything. If a local primary school in Bhurban is anything to judge by, one can fully understand why children, aside from parental non-interest, fail to attend school even if they are free to do so.

Of the estimated 163,000 primary schools in Pakistan, this one actually has two female teachers who, at this time of the year and as long as bright sunshine rules the day, ‘teach’ their charges out in the open air on the raised platform of what is left of the foundation of a planned Benazir Bhutto-era school. The school may, or may not, have included a provision for heating. The existing primary school, a tiny, unheated, very dark affair which someone has attempted to brighten up with whitewash and a few exterior drawings, claims to have 153 pupils on its roll but the real figure is more likely to be one-third of this: at the most.

Unlike primary schools in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, which few girls are permitted to attend, this little school has predominantly girl students. As I walked past, the children called out greetings and practiced the peace signs I taught them some time ago, the teachers called me to wait and came to ask where I was going and what was in the baskets hung on my arms. “Pine cones in one and rose hips in the other,” I replied. “I am just walking a bit further to where there are more rose hips ready to harvest.”

‘’We’ll come too,’’ they said in unison without giving a moment’s consideration for their pupils. “Explain what is rosehips and what is they for,” they said, in poor English.

“Which one of you teaches English?” I asked, curious to know.

“I does,” responded one who has been a teacher for 15 years. “But English is a problem. It is too difficult.”

Her incorrect usage of language was a clear pointer as to why the few children who go on to secondary school fail to matriculate — their English is almost non-existent: it demonstrates the complete lack of interest shown by the ministry of education when allotting jobs to teachers and must either be changed, or, English dropped from the rural school primary curriculum to be learnt, only when and if a qualified teacher is available at a later stage.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 11^th, 2013.

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