Leaders with a misplaced focus

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 30^th, 2014.

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