Leaders with a misplaced focus

We are a country with an inability to focus on our most important issues, and everyone is guilty as charged.


Madiha Afzal May 29, 2014
The writer is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She tweets @MadihaAfzal.

Metro buses and trains. Laptop schemes and e-learning. Opposition party rallies a year into an elected government’s term. Vicious media wars. Talk shows and news channels unwilling to focus on murders of members of religious minorities. A government silent on a counter-narrative to increasingly emboldened militants. A nation that does not acknowledge the internal factors that led to its current security situation. An entire citizenry, save for a brave few, diverting their eyes from an existential security threat as long as the small island around them is safe.

We are a country with an inability to focus on our most important issues, and everyone is guilty as charged.

But the naysayers will say: the media reports what gets the highest ratings, and politicians do what wins them greater support; it is ultimately our (uneducated) populace that is to blame for those at the top not focusing on the right things. Our citizens love motorways and large bus projects, big speeches and hawkish political analyses, their argument goes. Protecting minority rights or preserving heritage sites: not as much.

Let’s further drill down into education for today. Not enough funds are allocated to it. And the money that is spent on it is not targeted towards the essentials. The issues with education, and the outcomes, vary greatly across provinces. Enrolment rates, for example, are much lower in rural Sindh relative to Punjab and the safe rural districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa across age groups. At least for the early years of schooling, the solution to this is hardly rocket science: one, build enough public schools (or subsidise enough private schools) to serve all children; two, ease family budget constraints through scholarships or stipends so that the poorest can afford to send their children to school. But the Sindh government, which most needs to do this, seems to be in a stupor, barely functional.

In Punjab, the issue is of misplaced focus within the sector, for funds allocated to projects other than increasing access. For a set of illustrative examples, consider the provincial government’s repeated policy of distributing laptops to groups of students, and most recently, building a new web portal for interactive learning for math and science subjects for grades six to 10. All this while our textbooks remain abysmal — riddled with errors, repetitive, low on knowledge — and few students having mastered any of the basics. Not to mention the biases and hate they engender against our neighbour.

The Punjab government also seems oblivious to the fact that power outages and lack of internet access render its technology-based education schemes useless for many, especially the very poor. At the end of the day, these schemes are like gourmet icing on a completely stale cupcake: not edible unless the fundamentals (or the cupcake, if you will) are altered. Moreover, the textbooks used in schools should make our students analytical, global citizens, instead of narrow-minded bigots.

To date, efforts to improve examinations have been largely superficial. The last curriculum reform dictated an increased focus on ‘objective’ questions that still reward rote learning and also encourage cheating. And as I’ve previously written, the post-2006 curriculum reform textbooks also leave a great deal to be desired.

Laptops and websites may be more tangible and visible to voters than conceptual and critical learning in classrooms and improved examination questions — no doubt partly accounting for Shahbaz Sharif’s penchant for them. This partly reflects the classic Principal-Agent Problem for voters and politicians: it explains why visible infrastructure projects are popular the world over relative to less visible long-term policy changes.

I have focused on one example here — but the list of examples of the current leadership focusing on non-essential issues in education, at the expense of real reform, is long: introduction of Arabic as a compulsory subject, gagging private schools which taught comparative religion in addition to Islamiyat, switching from Urdu to English medium instruction for all schools, then reverting the decision and so on.

Why is our current leadership unable to figure out what to prioritise and what to not? Partly because of the visibility reasons given above, and partly, I fear, because they just don’t get it: perhaps, because they were not taught critical thinking in schools to begin with. And the cycle continues.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 30th, 2014.

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COMMENTS (9)

Hedgefunder | 10 years ago | Reply

Is anyone listening or do they really care ? This Nation has a population that calls itself patriotic, yet refuses to pay Taxes, Utility Bills, or Repay Bank Loans as norm ! This form of nationalism can only lead one way, and that is South !

Rex Minor | 10 years ago | Reply

The author has wrtten a nice article and said a lot, what we call 'Motherhood' which every one is aware of and is able to lament on, and even identify the areas for public debates. However, is it not important to consider also the related factors which is preventing the Country to march along with others in the 21st century. Its institutions were set up with a system to stregnthen occupation. These institutions, madam are more or less intact and rule the Psyche of the people while the Occupiers have left. Pakistan is at par with the Egyptians, both inclined to accept authoritative Governments of the military or military suported and this I am afraid is the key hurdle to overcome, until the time that the military themselves realise it and back down.

Rex Minor

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