Articles from parvaiz Hood Boy

SCAMS and scandals shock no one in Pakistan. Why should they? The corrupt are never
punished except if they cross swords with those behind the scenes. With this dismal
truth before me, I pen here an unusual story that would grab headlines in another
country. To be named below are several persons who would have ended up behind bars
in any country where there is rule of law. Several others — whether complicit or
negligent — would be shamed, reviled and removed from their current official positions.
Knowing that nothing will happen here in Pakistan, this is still a story I must tell.

Briefly: between 2003 and 2013 dozens of European mathematics professors were flown
into Pakistan at government expense. They came under the Higher Education
Commission’s so- called Foreign Faculty Hiring Programme (FFHP). A big budgetary
chunk went to the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences (AS-SMS), an affiliate
of Government College-University in Lahore. SMS received Rs638 million from HEC for
salaries and airfare.

The imported professors were listed as full-time SMS faculty with Western-level salaries
convertible to euros and dollars. Some were paid for as long as eight years. They were
supposed to teach students all year round, supervise their research, and add to overall
national prestige by publishing high-level mathematics research using their Pakistani
institutional address, ie that of SMS.

This did not happen. Some foreign professors visited Lahore for just four to five months
of the year, others for half this time, and still others for at most four to six weeks. Still,
apart from those on short-term appointments, year after year all were paid a full
12-month salary. When later asked, some said Lahore was too hot while others said it
was too dangerous.

Ghost teachers in Pakistani rural schools are common enough

but few know of our ghost mathematicians.
Research publications of the foreign professors did not carry SMS’s name although they
were formally full time SMS employees. Clearly several were making brief junkets to
Pakistan while actually employed elsewhere. How the ghost professors managed to
supervise one hundred PhD theses at SMS is a mystery. The quality of these graduates is
for the reader to guess.

An investigative report can be found on the SMS website. Such detailed investigations
are unknown in Pakistan’s academic history. Spread over 456 pages (including email
correspondence with relevant foreign professors) it was patiently put together over two
years by an officially constituted committee of three individuals presently employed at
SMS: Prof Amer Iqbal (convener), Prof Fiazud-in-Zaman, and Muhammad Imran Khan
(administrative and finance officer). They deserve our highest respect for the risk they
took.

Bullet points gleaned from this report follow:

• FFHP was launched by HEC in 2003. On the HEC side the officials responsible for this
programme and disbursement of funds to SMS were: Dr Atta-ur-Rahman (then HEC
chairman), Dr Sohail Naqvi (then HEC executive director), and Wasim Hashmi Syed
(then FFHP project director). Presently Dr Rahman heads another major government
education initiative in the PTI government. Shall we hope that another disaster will be
averted?

• From 2003 to 2013 the SMS officials directly responsible for the disbursement of funds
received from HEC under FFHP were Dr A.D.R. Choudary (director general, 2003-2014)
and Ejaz Malik (director of finance & administration, 2003-2014). The committee
repeatedly sought to contact both but received no replies. They are said to have left
Pakistan.
• Fifty-eight foreign professors were hired at SMS under the FFHP programme with
durations ranging from a few months up to almost eight years. These professors were
paid monthly salaries which were deposited into their accounts opened in a local bank
with the help of SMS staff. It is not certain whether the professors themselves withdrew
the money or someone else pocketed it.

• When the committee wrote to 38 foreign professors formerly at SMS asking them to
verify their salary payments, just 13 replied. Official records show each receiving
payments between $150,000 to $300,000. The reader, by browsing through the email
correspondence, can sense that some professors were genuinely confused and had
forgotten details from many years earlier. Several said that they received far less than the
alleged amount. Others recall being asked to sign blank sheets of paper by the SMS staff.

• The committee also inspected the research publications of foreign professors employed
by SMS between 2003 and 2013 and found that these individuals showed their affiliation
only to foreign institutions and not to SMS. It noted that “this [is] rather odd since if
someone was employed at SMS for five or six years it is natural to expect that they will
show SMS as their affiliation in their research papers”. Stated differently: why on earth
was Pakistan paying them?

Hiring foreign professors to teach in Pakistan once seemed an excellent idea. In 2003
when Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman asked me to create and head a FFHP committee for hiring
physicists from abroad, I gladly accepted. Subsequently I requested Prof Riazuddin (died
2013), who was Pakistan’s finest physicist after Abdus Salam, as well as Prof Asghar
Qadir, a distinguished physicist, to join the committee.
Dr Riazuddin, Dr Qadir and I spent many hours in many meetings poring over faculty
applications and making recommendations for appointing the best applicants. We were
hopeful that infusing foreign expertise would put new life into otherwise intellectually
barren institutions across Pakistan. But after a full year’s work we found ourselves
sidelined. Decisions were made and appointments were made against the committee’s
advice — and often without its knowledge. Thereafter we sent in our collective
resignation to Dr Rahman. Other factors seemed to be at work and we did not want our
reputations sullied.

Pakistan already has the distinction of having thousands of ghost schools in its rural
areas. Now it has set a world record by having hosted a ghost faculty programme for a
full 10 years — and that too in high-level mathematics at one of its oldest institutions.
One hears of other scams in higher education but none as brazen. Either no one knew
about this one or, more likely, many knew but none spoke up. All this happened right

under the HEC’s nose. One does not feel optimistic.

HEC: seize the corona moment

THIS essay concerns those Pakistani colleges and universities currently

operating under the regimen of online learning. I suggest that professors
and vice chancellors not read it else the hard truths might enrage some. My
goal is to open a discussion with those who actually care about the future of
this country and its higher education system. This particularly includes the
rare professor who actually deserves being professor.
The world — and Pakistan — is in lockdown mode with all education
institutions shuttered down. What happens when they reopen? Shall it be
life as usual? Most likely, yes. But from the heap of social disruption and
economic ruination one can hope for some betterment. For this we shall
need ruthless self-examination.

Fact one: The global marketplace assesses degree holders from Pakistani
universities as possessing distinctly inferior problem-solving skills and
knowledge. Whether in Europe or the US, few Pakistanis work in high-tech
fields such as engineering, computer science, machine learning,
biotechnology, genetic research, etc. Western academia — both in liberal
arts as well as sciences — has many Indians but few Pakistanis. While
Pakistani doctors in the US and UK form a large wealthy group, they simply
practise medicine and only rarely innovate.

Fact two: College and university graduates, as well as professors, seriously

lack the ability to reason and analyse. Few can express themselves in either
grammatically correct Urdu or English without suddenly and arbitrarily
switching languages. Book reading is close to extinction.

What is called online learning can be worth its name

if and only if there’s absolute transparency.
This is a deeply dismal situation. Forget for now some five to six high end
private, high-priced universities. All else is a dull grey sea of mediocrity
where the level of academic incompetence is mind-boggling. For example,
just walk through education marketplaces in Karachi, Lahore and
Islamabad. Here, coaching centres for ‘O’- and ‘A’-level schools abound.
Middle-rich, rich and super-rich parents desperately search out tutors who
reputedly produce top exam grades, needed for sending off their progeny to
some overseas university. They pay whatever the market demands.

The highest prices are fetched by well-reputed teachers of science subjects

— math, physics, chemistry and computer science. Some rake in Rs10 lakh
monthly; one that I met in early January this year said he made four times
that. Some ‘super coaches’ accept only dollar payments, demanding that
these be wads of crisp new $100 notes.

With such astronomical earnings, you might expect coaching centres to be

largely staffed by university professors. They not only hold science PhD
degrees but also have their names on dozens of so-called ‘research papers’
that supposedly make them masters of their respective subjects. So why are
tuition centres nearly empty of moonlighting university professors?

The answer: although ‘O’- and ‘A’- level questions are straightforward tests
of subject comprehension, they still demand some critical reasoning. But
their PhDs notwithstanding, many of those weaned upon blind
memorisation never learned to study otherwise. Hence science exams
meant for British high schools are too tricky for them.
With this in the backdrop, enter Mr Corona. After he walked on stage,
online learning became the sole option. Their incomes endangered, private
universities jumped quickly into the act. Some contacted a majority of their
students and declared success. Elsewhere little has happened. Based upon
the spotty information sent by colleagues and my former students across
Pakistan — just a fraction of some 250-plus universities (and a still smaller
number of 2,000-plus colleges) have gone online. Other universities are
preparing; yet others are clueless.

Limited internet access is a valid reason for slowness, but this is readily
fixable. Imagine cutting the defence budget by one per cent. The $90
million thus released could quickly cover every part of Pakistan with fast 4G
internet — and even leave some spare change to start the development of
5G.

But the truly Herculean challenge is to ensure that Pakistan’s online

teaching standards — both pedagogy and assessment — match
international ones. Glancing through materials sent confidentially by
colleagues and students from five different institutions I see just how
difficult this will be. Here’s the evidence — still fragmentary — gleaned over
six weeks:
Roughly 15pc to 20pc of materials received range from good to fair with
some professors taking extraordinary pains to create coherent,
self-contained video lectures supplemented with free online resources such
as those of the well-reputed Khan Academy. The remaining 80pc from local
professors deserves the rubbish bin. Some have simply used smartphones
to photograph their barely legible and yellowed student-day lecture notes.
Others have posted trivial quiz questions whose answers are just a
mouse-click away.

The solution to better teaching quality doesn’t lie in creating more rules or
making some centralised monitoring bureaucratic apparatus whether at the
level of government or of individual universities. While some small benefits
might accrue, the very purpose of a university — creative ways of teaching,
academic freedom and encouragement of critical reasoning — could be
endangered.

In Pakistan’s peculiar circumstances, the best that can be presently done is

to require complete and total transparency. With 21st-century technology,
this is perfectly possible. So let there be a freely accessible central
repository where every professor is required to deposit all his/her recorded
lectures, videos, notes, research papers and seminars.

Transparency is admittedly not a panacea but it will have the salutary effect
of contrasting good teaching practices with bad ones and setting a realistic
scale for assessing teacher performance. Still more importantly, one will be
able to see how well or badly students respond to particular modes of
instruction.
This is exactly where the Higher Education Commission needs to step in.
Apart from forcing every university to archive its teaching materials and
make them freely accessible, it should also monitor that this policy is
adhered to. The professor community is sure to resist this tooth and nail.
Can the HEC risk provoking their ire? If it can, then our future can be
brighter.

Seven decades later, those who sharpened Pakis­tan’s education into an

ideological weapon need to be shrugged off. This has brought us nothing
but ruination and disgrace. To become a part of the modern world, a
complete reorientation is needed. Online education, if done right, offers a
way out.
PTI’s Education plan Exposed

BE prepared, Pakistan! Imran Khan’s government is poised to inflict damage

upon this country’s education system in a manner never seen before. Its so-called
Single National Curriculum (SNC) hides systemic changes going far deeper than
the ones conceived and executed by the extremist regime of Gen Ziaul Haq.
Implementation is scheduled for 2021.
At first glance a uniform national curriculum is hugely attractive. Some see it
striking a lethal blow at the abominable education apartheid that has wracked
Pakistan from day one. By the year, a widening gap has separated beneficiaries of
elite private education from those crippled by bad public schooling. So what could
be better than the rich child and the poor child studying the same subjects from
the same books and being judged by the same standards?

But this morally attractive idea has been hijacked, corrupted, mutilated and
beaten out of shape by those near-sighted persons now holding Pakistan’s future
in their hands, and who, like their boss, kowtow to the madressah establishment.
Prime Minister Khan was widely criticised in 2016-17 for making huge grants to
madressahs of the late Maulana Samiul Haq, self-professed father of the Taliban
who was murdered by an associate in mysterious circumstances.

The SNC massively prioritises ideology

over education quality and acquisition
of basic skills.
As yet only SNC plans for Class I-V are public. But the huge volume of religious
material they contain beats all curriculums in Pakistan’s history. A
column-by-column comparison with two major madressah systems — Tanzeemul
Madaris and Rabtaul Madaris — reveals a shocking fact. Ordinary schools will
henceforth impose more rote learning than even these madressahs. Normal
schoolteachers being under-equipped religiously, SNC calls for summoning an
army of madressah-educated holy men — hafiz’s and qaris — as paid teachers
inside schools. How this will affect the general ambiance and the safety of
students is an open question.

The push for a uniform national curriculum idea derives from three flawed
assumptions:
First: It is false that quality differences between Pakistan’s various education
streams stem from pursuing different curricula. When teaching any secular
subject such as geography, social studies or science, all streams have to cover the
same topics. While details and emphases obviously differ, each must deal with
exactly seven continents and water being H2O.

Instead, learning differentials arise because students experience very different

teaching methods and are evaluated using entirely different criteria. So, for
example, a local examination board will typically ask a mathematics student to
name the inventor of logarithms whereas an ‘O’-level student must actually use
logarithms to solve some problem. The modern world expects students to reason
their way through a question, not parrot facts.
Second: It is false that a hefty dose of piety will somehow equalise students of
Aitchison College and your run-of-the-mill neighbourhood school. The legendary
Mahmood and Ayyaz prayed in the same suff (prayer line) and established a
commonality without ending their master-slave relationship. Similarly, rich and
poor schools will remain worlds apart unless equalised through school
infrastructure, well-trained teachers, high quality textbooks and internet access.
How the needed resources will be generated is anybody’s guess. Under the PTI,
defence is the only sector seeing increases instead of cuts.

Third: It is false that school systems belonging to the modern world can be
brought onto the same page as madressahs. Modern education rests squarely
upon critical thinking, and success/failure is determined in relation to problem
solving and worldly knowledge. Madressah education goals are important but
different. They seek a more religiously observant student and a better life after
death. Understandably, critical thinking is unwelcome.

While some madressahs now teach secular subjects like English, science and
computers, this comes after much arm-twisting. Soon after 9/11, madressahs
were spotlighted as terrorist breeding grounds. Musharraf’s government,
beholden as it was to America, ordered them to teach secular subjects. Most
rejected this outright but others were successfully pressurised. However,
madressahs teach secular and religious subjects identically; reasoning is sparse
and authoritarianism dominates.

While the new Class I-V SNC document also discusses secular subjects, much of
this is pointless tinkering with the minutiae of teaching English, general
knowledge, general science, mathematics and social studies. They are not
accompanied by plausible plans for how the necessary intellectual or physical
resources will be garnered and the plans implemented.
Still bigger changes are around the corner. The Punjab government has made
teaching of the Holy Quran compulsory at the college and university level.
Without passing the required examination no student will be able to get a BA,
BSc, BE, ME, MA, MSc, MPhil, PhD or medical degree. Even the Zia regime did
not have such blanket requirements. To get a university teaching job in the 1980s,
you had to name all the wives of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and recite some
difficult religious passages such as Dua-i-Qunoot. Still, students could get degrees
without that. That option is now closed.

Starkly inferior to their counterparts in Iran, India and Bangladesh, Pakistani

students perform poorly in all international science and mathematics
competitions. Better achievers are invariably from the elite ‘O’-/‘A’-level stream.
More worrying is that most students are unable to express themselves coherently
and grammatically in any language, whether Urdu or English. They have stopped
reading books.

Significantly, as yet the PTI’s new education regime is mum on how it will
advance its goal of closing a huge skill deficit. So poor is the present quality of
technical and vocational institutes that private employers must totally retrain the
graduates. That’s why private-sector industrial growth is small and entire state
enterprises, such as PIA and Pakistan Steel Mills, have collapsed. Pakistan’s space
programme flopped but Iran has just put a military satellite into orbit and India is
well on the way to Mars.
Empowered by the 18th Amendment, Pakistan’s provinces should vigorously
resist the regressive plan being thrust upon the nation by ideologues that have
usurped power in Islamabad. Else Pakistan will end up as the laughing stock of
South Asia, left behind even by Arab countries. Pakistan’s greatest need — and its
single greatest failure — is its tragic failure to impart essential life skills to its
citizens. To move ahead, the priority should be to educate rather than score
political points.

PK-India Education Compared

ON July 29, Narendra Modi’s government unveiled what it calls a

groundbreaking new national education policy (NEP 2020). The 65-page
document’s wide range — from primary to university — forces me to
consider here just a single issue: To what extent does NEP reflect the BJP
ideology of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan? And how does it compare against
Pakistan’s newly declared single national curriculum with logo: one nation,
one curriculum?

At face value NEP is innocuous, even charming. It speaks of India’s rich

heritage, the ancient universities of Nalanda and Takshashila,
mathematicians like Bhaskaracharya and Brahmagupta, jnan (knowledge)
and satya (truth) etc. The goal of education is: “complete realisation and
liberation of the self”. Who can possibly object? Still better: my computer
word search yielded only two occurrences of the word ‘religion’, both times
in the harmless context of NEP’s purported inclusion of all religions.
NEP also engages our anti-colonial sensibilities: Indian children up to
grade 6-7 can learn English if they want but, under its new three-language
formula, states and regions can choose their languages provided at least
two of the three are native to India. In principle Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and
Christian students will use the same books, study side by side in the same
classrooms, and take the same exams. Wonderful!

But inside NEP’s not-so-hidden agenda are the clear wishes of RSS, the
BJP’s ideological parent. RSS follows its guru, M.S. Golwalkar, who
suggested India learn from Hitler in keeping races pure. In 1947, RSS
wanted all Muslims remaining in India expelled to Pakistan. Then a
minority, it now enjoys full state support.

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER AD

India must look towards its glorious past, declares NEP, with that past
exclusively Hindu. Although Sanskrit is a culturally dead language, NEP
calls it the fount of all sacred and secular knowledge. Urdu, on the other
hand, although spoken by tens of millions of Indians and once the language
of the Bombay film industry, is absent from a list that includes Tamil,
Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Pali, Persian, and Prakrit.

India and Pakistan’s new education

policies will push their respective
religious minorities into a corner
All education policies are cooking recipes; the final product depends upon
ingredients. NEP hints at, but leaves unspecified, what textbooks will
contain. Will history be dispassionately presented as a series of invasions
which, layer by layer, built Indian culture over the millennia? Or are
Muslims merely wicked temple-destroyers who shattered the seraphic
heaven of Mother India? One worries because in BJP-ruled states, leaders
have demanded removal of references to Mughal emperors Akbar and
Aurangzeb to make space for Hindu kings like Maharana Pratap and
Shivaji.

Interestingly, RSS’s nativism appears driven more by its anti-Christian

agenda than its anti-Muslim one. Since the days of Lord Macaulay,
convents and other English-medium Christian missionary schools have
been the mainstay of modern Indian education. But today, tens of
thousands of RSS-associated vernacular language schools stand against
them. These will gain from downgrading English.

RSS pracharaks are jubilant but Indians face a reality check.

English-medium schools, not traditional patshalas and gurukuls,
modernised India and gave it global clout. While India can name its
satellite ‘Aryabhatta’, Isaac Newton’s laws actually guided it into orbit. Even
the BJP minister whose signature is on NEP, Prakash Javedekar, knows
this. From Indian press reports I found that he, along with nine other BJP
ministers, has also sent his children to study abroad.
NEP is a step backward for India’s national integration. In spite of 30
languages, 130 dialects, and well over a dozen faiths, India took barely 50
years to create a national identity after Jawaharlal Nehru set it on a secular
track. Most Muslims, Sikhs and Christians were then proud to declare
themselves Indian. But, as Indian secularism retreats, this is now
disappearing.

Pakistan’s new education policy, only parts of which are known so far, is
much more upfront on creating a religion-based society. The goal is to put
madressahs at the same level as all other kinds of schools. Henceforth,
bearded men from the Ittehad Tanzimat-i-Madaris (Coalition of Madressah
Organisers) will decide what Pakistani children will learn and will also
scrutinise their textbooks.

Religious materials are mandatory from nursery classes onward. The new
Class 1-5 curriculum is extremely detailed and reveals more religious
content to be memorised than even madressahs require. Discrimination is
automatic. Since non-Muslim students cannot be allowed to study from the
Holy Book, they must be separated.

Major changes are afoot at higher levels as well. The governor of Punjab,
Ghulam Sarwar, told me during an exclusive one-on-one meeting in his
office on July 23 of his decision to make the award of all university degrees
in Punjab contingent upon studying the Holy Quran together with
translation. Doing so, he said, will ensure that our university students learn
Arabic. He did not elaborate on how this would help make better doctors,
economists, engineers, or scientists.
For building national identity Pakistan seeks to Arabicise and Islamise
whereas India wants to indigenise and Hinduise. The BJP’s way is more
subtle than Pakistan’s but cleverer because it understands the enormous
power of culture. Programmes such as ‘Aik Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’ aim at
developing a multilingual, multicultural (but not multi-religious) Indian
national identity.

Compare that with education policies in Pakistan where regional cultures

and languages find only fleeting references. With no lessons learnt from
1971, Pakistan still assumes that solidifying its Islamic identity will
somehow create national integration. Even something as mild as the 18th
Amendment, which entrusts education to the provinces, has the sword of
Damocles hanging over it.

The new education policies of India and Pakistan will further divide them,
both from each other as well as within each country. Majoritarian
consensus against their respective religious minorities will be hugely
strengthened. The Indian policy is milder in tone than Pakistan’s but is
probably more dangerous simply because it is better thought out and
professionally formulated, hence, likely to be more successful when
implemented. On the other hand, the Pakistani policy document is
half-baked, wrapped in multiple layers of confusion, and will almost
certainly flounder. But if it is implemented, it will lead to fasaadi extremism
of a kind that operations like Radul Fasaad cannot ever defeat.

Classless Education Ahead?

IT is official now: Cambridge O-A levels and International Baccalaureate will not
be touched by the PTI’s Single National Curriculum (SNC). This is fantastic news
for those who once feared privileged education for the rich was in danger. Parents
paying monthly fees between Rs15,000 and Rs45,000 per child in O-A-IB schools
are breathing easily today. Talk about equal opportunities for all turned out to be
just talk — opium for the masses.

Personally I am pleased foreign certification hasn’t been banned. Having taught

physics, mathematics, and sociology across a swathe of Pakistani universities and
colleges for 47 years, I know there’s a world of difference between the analytical
and reasoning abilities of O-A level certified students and those of local boards.
Yes, I’ve seen many brilliant exceptions. But exceptions are, well, exceptions. So,
although the government’s decision reeks of hypocrisy, I’m still happy because I
dread a total collapse of standards.

The federal minister of education, Shafqat Mahmood, puts things differently. In

multiple TV interviews and Zoom meetings he denies hypocrisy. His government
is merely allowing elite schools the right to choose, he says. In just a few years, he
claims, the PTI’s superior local system will render foreign examination systems
unneeded. Sure! Didn’t we all hear Imran Khan’s announcement atop his
container that Pakistan’s revitalised economy would never need the IMF again?

Let’s see what makes foreign systems so superior to local systems. It is not a
matter of curriculum. Blaming inferior education quality upon this is a political
stunt. In secular subjects like science and general knowledge all systems cover
almost identical topics. The difference is entirely in their education philosophies.
Foreign systems stress comprehension, reasoning and problem-solving. Local
systems build around rote memorisation.
 Yoking ordinary schools to madressahs will impair
the reasoning capacity of children and job
competitiveness.

What is SNC and why must it be feared? Parts of it are perfectly innocuous. The
new stuff regarding secular subjects is actually rehashed old stuff. Cutting
through the verbiage one sees that the released PTI curriculum is a near perfect
copy of Gen Musharraf’s 2006 curriculum. Of course, neither was accompanied
by implementation plans or financial outlays.

What’s dangerous and different is that — for the first time in Pakistan’s history —
ordinary schools will be yoked to madressahs. Students in both streams will use
the same curriculum and books, and take the same exams. But this is like forcing
someone to board two trains at the same time, one going north and the other
south. It doesn’t matter which train’s engines and carriages are in good condition
or bad. What matters is that they have different destinations. The analogy is not
far-fetched.

Modern secular schools aim at preparing doctors, engineers, businessmen,

scientists, etc. Inquiry and questioning are fundamental and exams test
conceptual understanding. But madressahs prepare students for the hereafter.
Memorisation and a passive mindset are crucial and duly rewarded while
questioning and critical reasoning are frowned upon. Were a madressah student
to put hard questions to his teachers he would likely be chased out.

Teaching science will not be straightforward. A widely watched religious TV

channel recently featured young students being lectured to by a madressah head.
He told them emphatically that the sun goes around the earth, not the other way
around. One wonders what else they have learned.
Hybridising madressahs with secular schools has been tried but failed.
Modern-era progressive Muslim leaders like Muhammad Ali of Egypt and Kemal
Ataturk of Turkey discovered this well over a century ago. Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf countries are following. They’ve figured out that worldly success in the 21st
century is difficult for students who go through the 11th-century education system
of Nizam-ul-Mulk.

Pakistan wants to buck this trend and prove that hybrids work — and that too
without a pilot test project. But it will pay dearly for such wild experimentation.
Except for ones with foreign certification, our students are at the bottom end of
global educational achievement. Few succeed as practising engineers and
scientists. Just look at the composition of Pakistan’s overseas work force. This is
mostly unskilled or semi-skilled labour. According to GIZ and ILO, only three per
cent are high-level (engineers, doctors, managers, teachers, etc.) while the
remaining 97pc are mostly labourers, house helpers, drivers, carpenters,
electricians, etc.

In its eagerness to bring madressahs into the fold of public education, the PTI
government is lowering standards and thus damaging Pakistan’s national
interests. It knows that madressahs had resisted reforms in the years after 9/11.
In fact, some were pinpointed as sources of jihadist fighters, a fact that they did
not deny. Under American pressure, reform plans were made by Musharraf’s
government. They flopped. Most madressahs refused his government’s entreaties
and enticements knowing it would lead to their disempowerment.
So why have madressahs accepted a deal now? First, the changed situation on
Pakistan’s borders, together with FATF, has hugely reduced the need for
extra-state fighters as well as their funding. Second, the government welcomes
madressah education as ideologically desirable. Public schools will henceforth
teach much more religious content than before. In fact the amount exceeds that
presently taught in madressahs. Readers can check by comparing the published
SNC document with curricula on various madressah websites.

The madressah-poverty nexus can be broken if there’s a will. There are roughly
25,000 madressahs and 250,000 ordinary schools in Pakistan. That translates
into a one to 10 ratio for students. What if resources were saved by buying fewer
tanks/aircraft or launching fewer prestige projects? What if these resources were
instead used to make regular schools that give free board, lodging and a learning
environment to the poorest of our children? This would amount to truly caring for
the downtrodden.

A classless education system isn’t just a beautiful ideal. Approximations exist in

parts of the world. A government that’s serious about levelling the playing field
for all Pakistani children should not go for cheap shots like single national
curriculum. Instead, it must develop what every modern education system needs:
school infrastructure, a proper student assessment and examination system,
trained teachers who can teach the designed syllabus, and good textbooks.
Pakistan is severely deficient in all these areas.
Dr Faisal Bari Articles
Online teaching by faisal bari

THE pandemic has forced many teachers to learn more about online teaching,
learning and pedagogy. I am one of them. And though all of us are still learning, and
the field is still evolving, quite rapidly, it is opening up new ways of thinking about
learning and teaching for many of us.

Online teaching has many challenges. Unequal access to devices and to the internet,
summarised under the notion of the digital divide, has already been talked about a
lot. I am not going to focus on that here, other than to say that if not addressed, the
digital divide will increase already significant educational inequalities, and so these
problems need to be tackled on an urgent basis.

Besides challenges, however, online teaching is also opening up new opportunities.

In a recent course I took on online teaching, the instructors asked us, the students, to
create a small lesson and deliver it to other participants. Then they asked the
participants to provide feedback to the presenter. The sessions were also videotaped
so that the presenters could later review the lessons themselves.

The exercise was extremely enlightening. Seeing myself in the act of teaching allowed
me to learn a lot about some of the small and large mistakes that I was making. From
simple things, like word repetition, to more complex ones, from patterns of thought
to managing technology while trying to focus on delivering content, and so on.

What was once confined to a room can now be opened up to the world.

But the real gains came when peers gave me feedback. Their own experiences
enriched the discussion and allowed me to reflect more deeply on the more
embedded structures of my thought patterns as well.

When we do research, the standard practice is to present research to peers. Peer

feedback is an important way of not only improving research but of getting it
accepted as well. Journals run double-blind reviews (in which the reviewer does not
know the author and vice versa) to get feedback on research, and only when peers
consider the research to be of good enough quality is it accepted for publication.
Quality, of course, might vary, but all reputable research journals will have a solid
peer review process.

Teaching did not and still does not have the same level of peer review. Most
schools/universities had some level of student feedback, and student results are
usually tracked to gauge teacher performance, but these are post-fact and they do not
provide a peer review. The act of teaching, in a room with a faculty member and
students, was more or less closed to outside scrutiny and possibilities of peer review.
Online teaching has opened tremendous opportunities here. What was once confined
to a room can now, at no cost, be opened up to the world. A lecture or discussion
session can have as many participants, and from anywhere, as one wants. Lectures
can also be recorded at no additional cost. Live lectures as well as recordings make it
possible to open up teaching, restricted to enclosed space in a classroom, to a much
larger group. And the possibilities for peer feedback, again at little or no additional
cost, open up significantly. So, online teaching can make teaching, an act once
thought of as confined to a physical space, an open, accessible and more easily
available activity too.

The possibilities that this opens up, for teaching and learning, are tremendous.
Quality of instruction is considered, rightly, to be a very important aspect of
education that needs attention. Curriculum, syllabus and books are important, but —
and most people concede this — the role of the teacher in determining the quality of
education is considered crucial. How do we ensure quality teaching when we do not
have good ways of monitoring what a teacher does, and do not have effective ways of
supporting them in their role? Online teaching and learning can help a lot in this
area.

Imagine how our continuous professional development programmes could be

redesigned and/or supplemented with new possibilities. If teachers had peers
occasionally attending their lectures, feedback would be very quick. If sessions are
recorded and a teaching and learning centre provides peer feedback, the teacher in
question would get significant continuous support. The cost of doing this online
would be much less, and the impact — given where bulk of teachers currently are and
where we need them to be, in terms of what they are delivering — could be
significant.

But the impact of opening up teaching to make it more public could be much larger
as well. We would be able to develop a public and broader dialogue on teaching
practices. This could also lead to academic work on pedagogy and practice as well. It
could, potentially, assist in the development of best practices. Technology also makes
it easier to make the student more of a peer and partner in the learning enterprise.
The peer bit is more important at the college and university level, while the partner
bit is important throughout the education system.
There has been significant pushback against online learning in Pakistan over the last
six months, and this is continuing. Given the digital divide and the variation in home
environments of students, this is not surprising. But the pushback should not blind
us to the opportunities that online teaching and learning offer. And in many ways, we
have just started to explore these possibilities. One example is mentioned above: the
opening up of teaching to the public and for peer feedback. This could, potentially,
have large impacts for teacher training, teacher support and continuous professional
development, as well as on starting a larger, public debate on teaching quality and
thus on quality of education. Given the importance of the issues involved, how can
we not be open to exploring such opportunities?

Beyond the content Faisal bari

THERE has recently been much debate on the issue of the Single National
Curriculum (SNC). The debate is mostly focused on the content of the curriculum for
each grade and what has been or has not been added to the requirements that a child
in a specific grade is expected to know. A lot of the debate has been focused,
predictably, on Islamiat. That debate is warranted, but we will come to issues in the
curriculum at another time.

In this article I want to focus on some of the larger issues that the SNC debate has
revealed. Purportedly, the main aim of the SNC is to reduce and/or remove class
distinctions in Pakistan. It has been argued that children, especially those going to
madressahs, do not have access to mainstream subjects and a good curriculum in
these subjects. The SNC remedies that, and with agreement from madressahs, it
mainstreams all madressah-going students. Now, supposedly, after the
implementation of the SNC, all students in a given grade and across the country will
have the same learning objectives.

Having equality of opportunity for all children and giving access to quality education
to all children are promises that we have made to all children in the Constitution. So,
there is every reason to work towards these goals and to applaud efforts that take us
in that direction. But a single curriculum is not a necessary condition for achieving
this. More importantly, it is not even a sufficient condition for achieving these goals.

If the goal is to provide quality access to education to all children in Pakistan, we

should worry about the more than 20 million five- to 16-year-olds who are out of
school. Do these children have no rights? Should we not strive to provide for them?
Even though Article 25-A on the right to education was added in the Constitution as
part of the 18th Amendment 10 years ago, successive governments have done almost
nothing to realise this universal right. How will the SNC help here?
Can the SNC really achieve its purported goal of reducing inequity in education?

It is estimated that some 10-12 per cent of children in any country have some form of
disability (physical, mental, or learning related). Will the state ensure that this SNC
is tailored to the needs of such children? Will these children also get the same rights,
or will they remain children of a lesser god? Again, scant effort has been made in the
area of inclusive and/or special education over the last few decades and the SNC is
going to be of no help in this.

One could argue that the SNC is about children who are in educational institutions or
who will be in educational institutions later. But even here, the arguments for a
single curriculum are not clear. Madressah students should have access to quality
mainstream education. Who can argue with that? But this could have been done
using the 2006 national curriculum too. Why do we need a SNC to mainstream
madressah students?

Some have argued that the SNC is a ‘floor’ and not a ceiling on what children are
supposed to know in a particular grade. If that is true then why call a floor a ‘single
national curriculum’? Why not call it a ‘minimum standards curriculum’, which sets
the standard that every child in any educational institution is supposed to meet? If
some schools want to do more, so be it. It should be clear that this is not just a
semantic distinction. The government has purposefully chosen to call this a single
national curriculum and not a minimum standards curriculum.

If the objective is to reduce inequity, a guarantee of a minimum standard of

education for all children would be more effective than a SNC. Differences in child
achievement and progress are determined by many factors including household
income and home environment, ability-related factors, school environment, quality
of teachers and teaching, books, assessments and others. The curriculum is a small
part of the equation. To put pressure on a small variable to deliver a very large result
seems counterintuitive. But it might be that the state feels that it cannot do much in
other areas and has more control over curriculum and so is trying to do what it can.

The problem is that using the curriculum to reduce inequity, when other variables
are not being looked at, can have many other and some unintended consequences
too. Is the SNC debate a battle to take back some space from the provinces that was
devolved to them through the 18th Amendment? Is this a move to centralise certain
things again? One could argue that the federation should have a voice in setting
minimum learning standards for children across Pakistan, and that this should not
have been devolved in the first place. But if that is the case, this space should be
taken back through a constitutional amendment and not the SNC. More importantly,
the distinction between a minimum standards and single national curriculum should
also be kept in mind.
The state has always had a deep interest in managing the national narrative. This has
usually been done by using religion and nationalism to suppress alternative voices.
These alternative voices could be from an ideological (left), geographical
(Balochistan, erstwhile Fata), gender based (women), or other perspective. If they do
not fit the religious/nationalistic frame that has been forged by some elements of the
state in Pakistan, they would be rejected. And education has been a battlefield for
this rejection. Will the SNC play into the same dynamic and allow these elements to
continue that game? There is a danger of that. Whether this is an intended or
unintended consequence, I leave it to readers to judge.

There should be more discussion on the SNC. This is an invitation to that debate. We
will come back to some of the SNC’s content-related issues later. But larger SNC
issues also need to be aired and heard

Disequilibrium in education By Faisal bari

ONE post-pandemic prediction is that irrespective of when the Covid-19 threat goes
away, online education, especially at the undergraduate level, is here to stay. For
many, the trend towards online education predates the virus; Covid-19 has just
pushed us harder and faster in the direction of exploring online potentialities for
education.

What are the implications for how universities and the higher education sector are
organised? Is there a potential for globalisation to work here too? Can a top
university, like Harvard, MIT or Oxford, offer its degrees to students across the
world, and in much larger numbers? How will this impact lower-ranked universities
and/or universities in developing countries?

Some argue that the potential of online education is being overstated. Online
education had been around for a decade and a half before Covid-19. And it made
scant inroads in the market for higher education. Right now, universities have no
option but to go online due to the pandemic. As soon as universities can open up,
people will go back to their preference for in-person education.

Technology for communication is evolving very quickly. Even four months ago, few
people knew of Zoom or Microsoft Teams. When people wanted online meetings, it
was usually on Skype. The pandemic changed that almost immediately. And now
technology companies are scrambling to bring newer innovations in existing
platforms and/or creating new ones to facilitate even better online communication.
Zoom has added a significant number of new features for security as well as ease of
communication over a short period of time. Comparing the possibilities of online
learning now with what was available a few years ago might be very misleading.

Can universities in Pakistan create value that global players cannot?

Perhaps, equally or more importantly, the experience of the last few months has
shaken people out of their inertia and entrenched ways of doing things. It has
weakened some of the shackles of habit and removed some of the blinkers on our
sight and imagination. A lot of people are realising that, in many instances,
communication that seemed to necessitate physical presence can be done almost as
well through virtual interaction. For example, many professional conferences have
shifted to virtual spaces and are finding that the savings on time and money makes
virtual conferences quite an appealing and competitive alternative. Similarly, for
many people, remote work is quite possible, and might work even in times when
there are no problems with having physical meetings.

Working from home saves substantially on time and money spent commuting. What
benefits and opportunities are there in online education? We might be at the start of
the innovation cycle in this area so it might be hard to predict but, clearly, even
looking at what is currently available, online education is going to become a stronger
and more competitive alternative.

Ronald Coase, a pioneer in law and economics, had long ago asked the question
about the nature and boundary of the firm. He had asked, given economies of scale,
why did we not just have a few or one large firm instead of so many firms.
Researchers spent a long time answering the question about the boundary of a firm
and factors like technology, transaction costs, economies and diseconomies featured
prominently in the answers. It might be time to ask the same question for
universities too. If technology allows us to deliver reasonable quality education
online, do we need 200 universities in Pakistan? Or should we have a fewer larger
ones? Will the higher quality ones expand their reach into smaller cities and even
rural areas? What are the pricing models that will back up these expansions?

If a student has a choice between an online education from a well-recognised

university and an in-person education from a not-as-well-recognised local university,
which one would the student choose? What fee differential would tilt the individual’s
choice from one to the other? Imagine if the best engineering school in Pakistan was
currently charging a million rupees per year in tuition fees and a local university was
charging Rs300,000. If the best school offered an online degree, how much lower
would it have to be priced in order to attract students from the local university? If the
best school were able to reach that price, can the local university survive by cutting
prices and enhancing quality, or would it have to close its doors? These are the type
of issues that will come up, locally and globally, in higher education over the next few
years.
If undergraduate economics is all theory and empirical techniques that apply
globally, why would you not take the degree from MIT and why would you choose to
go to a Pakistani university? Can MIT make a competitive pricing model? Can the
Pakistani school create value through local content and through processes of
teaching that the global player cannot? Answers to such questions will determine the
shape of the higher education landscape in the years to come.

Multinationals have driven local businesses to extinction in many areas, but in the
provision of many goods and services — especially services, where customisation,
localisation and/or contextualisation are important — local businesses have been
able to effectively create competition.

Is undergraduate education a standardised product and/or service? If it is, the bigger

players will, with the help of new technologies and innovations, be able to provide it
to all and drive out local and smaller players. But if it is not, the impact of online
education might not be strong enough to change higher education landscape much.
Smaller players would be able to compete effectively by making their services more
customised.

There is already talk in many universities of how their teaching, even online, is going
to be more individualised than more standard offerings. Already, there is also talk of
local content in many disciplines and sub-disciplines. Whatever the new equilibrium,
there will be significant turmoil for universities across the world for the next few
years.

online learning by Bari

UNIVERSITIES, which were in the middle of the spring semester when the orders
for closure were announced, have been told to remain shut until May 31. It has raised
significant questions for universities to consider.

If universities can continue the semester online, should they? The Higher Education
Commission initially asked all universities to go online. But, a few weeks later,
realising that a lot of universities do not have the infrastructure necessary to make
the transition quickly, the HEC seems to be saying that those universities that can
should move online, while others can take time (until the end of May) to develop and
implement the necessary infrastructure, materials and trainings.

There has been a fair bit of pushback from students on the issue of online classes.
The main points made, to the best of my knowledge, are about access to the internet,
bandwidth and internet stability issues. There are areas in Pakistan that do not have
good internet connectivity, and students who, for one reason or another, do not have
access to a stable, high-speed internet connection.
The point is well taken. Internet access needs to be ensured for all students. As the
HEC has standards for onsite teaching, they will also have to develop online teaching
standards to ensure a certain level of access to the internet and other technologies
before online teaching can become the default mode. But these will take some time.

Access is, in fact, the most straightforward of issues to address right now.

Due to the lockdown and distancing rules, the burden on the internet in Pakistan and
across the world is also increasing rapidly. Internet speeds are starting to slow down.
We will also have to keep an eye on this. Infrastructure will need to be upgraded to
take into account the additional expected and unexpected traffic.

But this does not mean universities should not start experiments in online teaching.
It means we have to start looking for, developing and deploying solutions. It will take
some time for all universities to get there and for all students to have access of a
sufficient quality, but the work has to start now. And universities, given their
situations, will traverse this distance at varying speeds. The HEC should be ready to
invest in infrastructure, material development and trainings. It has already
announced some committees on these issues, but it remains to be seen what
resources are invested in this pursuit and what the results are.

Access, the issue being agitated on right now is, in fact, the most straightforward of
issues to address. There are several other, more complex problems to contend with.
Online teaching does not simply mean putting reading materials online and
expecting students to read, understand and/or regurgitate them. It does not mean
that if you change onsite examinations to open-book online examinations, there is
nothing more that needs to be adapted for online teaching.

Learning and teaching objectives of every course will have to be rethought. Teachers
have to carefully consider each instrument they use for getting material across to
students once again. Are synchronous and live classes needed? If so, since students
are not sitting together in one room, how are these to be conducted? Do online
platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams offer the same environment that a
classroom does and how? How do you structure class participation in synchronous
classes? Or could all teaching be done online without synchronous teaching? The
teacher posts readings and questions. The students can submit their questions, if
they have any, through email or in chat groups. Teachers and peers can respond to
each other that way. Will learning this way be even better than in face-to-face
classes?
Technology could offer distinct advantages as well. We can do a lot of small group
and/or individual teaching too. If lectures could be recorded and made available to
students to view whenever it suits them individually, and teachers then schedule
small group or even one-on-one interactions (tutorials), learning in some subjects
that require a lot of discussion (such as philosophy) could become even better than
running large face-to-face classes.

A lot of thought needs to go into designing assessments. When faculty cannot

conduct in-class quizzes, tests and examinations, and are potentially restricted to
open-book and not necessarily strictly time-bound assessments, what sort of
instruments can be created? For example, live multiple-choice tests will not be easy if
students do not have sufficient bandwidth and internet stability. What could be a
substitute for these? How do we ensure new instruments get to the right level, how
do we validate them, and when do we move towards standardisation?

And it is not just teaching that needs to go online. A lot of administrative work of
universities also needs to shift to online platforms. Some of them, for some
universities, will take a lot of time.

Do bear in mind these things are important as it might not be just for a semester that
we have to move online. Nobody knows how long the situation with distancing and
partial lockdowns is going to continue. Even when the first wave of infections is
through, it might still not be possible to go back to the way things were and have
crowded dormitories, classes and/or cafeterias. Some universities in other countries
have started to plan for the next 18-odd months in totally online mode or in hybrid
mode at the very least.

Clearly, a lot of research and experimentation is needed here. The HEC’s insistence
to do this quickly will have issues. Internet access might come quickly, but the larger
and deeper issues need a lot more work. This is a difficult time to organise new
things as a lot of people are worried, and rightly so, about their and their families’
well-being. Rather than worry too much about this semester, the HEC should really
set up incentives for the medium term so that we can get closer to long-term answers
for the deeper questions.

education: looking forward by bari

ALL educational institutions, across the country, are currently closed. This is as it
should be. The same is true of most schools in most countries across the world. The
government has, for now, said that schools will remain closed till April 5. This date is
likely to be extended. We cannot open schools as long as we do not have control over
the spread of the coronavirus. We cannot take the risk of infecting a large number of
people. Even if children do not get very sick if they get the virus, they become
carriers. This is a risk we should not take.
If schools remain closed till end May or June and then we enter the summer vacation
and cannot have schools opening till mid-July or somewhere around that time, what
will this mean for education? Clearly, it is a major disruption that will create some
ripples. But if the delay is only of a few months, the ripples can easily be contained
and dealt with by the end of the current calendar year.

We were almost at the end of the last academic year when schools were closed. So,
from the point of view of curriculum coverage, most schools were probably in
revision mode by now. Examinations were to be held in March. These had to be
postponed. But this should not be a major issue. For grades 1-8, we only have
school-based and/or internal examinations. We will not lose a whole lot if we moved
all children to the next grade without examinations in these grades this year.

When the children come back, they should start in the next grade. For grades 1-8,
having a pass on your transcript, for one year, is not going to impact the educational
trajectories of these children in any way. This was done in Pakistan in 1976-77 as
well. To the best of my knowledge, there were no adverse effects on educational
standards that were recorded.

The HEC and most universities are already looking at online teaching as an
alternative.

Where external and/or board examinations are concerned, we cannot do without

these examinations. These are usually school-leaving exams and next stage
admissions depend on performance on these examinations. These will need to be
held, even if they get delayed a lot. If the examinations are held in July/August,
instead of March/April, there will be a four-month delay. If we can rush results a
little, we could probably start the new academic session for school-finishing students
by December/January. So, we lose one semester. But, most universities could cover
that semester quite easily in the next summer.

Most universities were in the middle of their spring semester. But here too, even if
we cannot come back by May or June, the disruption can be reasonably contained
without major changes in learning outcomes. The Higher Education Commission and
most universities are already looking at online teaching as an alternative. These
systems will probably be put in place in the next couple of weeks. Even if they are not
and the spring semester has to be extended to the summer, it is not a huge cost. This
and the next summer can be used to absorb some of the disruption cost.

If the educational disruption, and it should be clear that I am only talking about the
delivery of education here, is only for a few months hopefully; students, parents,
teachers and administrators need not panic. A lot of work will need to be done, but
the cost of the disruption can be managed relatively well and reasonably.
However, we should be prepared for another scenario as well. The coronavirus might
not go away in a few months. Even after the first wave has been lived through, and
we are currently at the beginning of the first wave, the virus will be around and will
possibly continue to impact people till the latter develop immunity, the virus fades
away, or a vaccine is found. This might mean that issues of distancing, minimal
contact and other precautions might have to be in place for a year or so. If this is the
case, and we pray it is not, the adjustment in education will have to be much larger
and much more permanent.

If students cannot return to schools and universities till the end of the year, or can
only come back with restrictions about numbers of people in a room and/or
dormitory, we will be in unchartered territory. Pakistan has 200,000-plus schools,
we have a very large five-to-16-year-old population; it will not be easy to figure out
online solutions for such large numbers. Elite private-sector institutions might be
able to shift to online services or hybrid models, but for most Pakistanis, who do not
have internet access or will not have the resources to have internet access, the shift is
not possible, even if we designed an effective education delivery system. A solution
here would require much deeper thinking.

Solutions developed in higher-income countries might not be of immense help for us

here. Our school system is much larger, with a lot more students, our resources are
more restricted, household poverty levels much higher, parental education lower and
internet availability far more sketchy. So, we might have to find our own solutions in
this case.

Though the university sector is much smaller in Pakistan, with only 200-odd
universities, it will not be easy for them either to create new systems that have to
either fully deliver education through online systems, or create a hybrid model for
education delivery that limits in-class interactions significantly. But if
coronavirus-related restrictions persist across the world, we might be able to benefit
from solutions that might get created in other parts of the globe.

If virus-related issues last only a few months, education-sector disruptions will not
be too damaging and can be reasonably managed. This should not worry
policymakers, parents or students too much. We have bigger issues related to the
virus to worry about. If issues persist even after the first wave, till the end of the year
or beyond, we will be in unchartered territory and will require much deeper thinking
for schools as well as universities to be able to manage education delivery issues.

Higher Education funding cut by bari

A UNIVERSITY in every district’, increasing the percentage of youth going to tertiary
education from 6-7 to 15-odd per cent (ie 100pc increase), improving the quality of
higher education, providing more ‘relevant’ higher education, providing more
advanced vocational skills, making breakthroughs in information technology. These
have all been touted as government goals and priorities in the last few years. Even
today, ask any government official if higher education is a priority and the answer
would inevitably be ‘yes’.

Read: HEC chairman urges govt to save higher education from crisis

But, at the same time, the government has cut the higher education budget
substantially this year. Allocations for recurrent expenditures of universities have
been reduced by a good 15-20pc compared to last year. It is a lot less than what the
Higher Education Commission had asked for to allow for proposed expansions. The
cuts in development expenditures are even deeper. A significant portion of funds that
could have lessened the impact of HEC cuts have been allocated to Dr
Atta-ur-Rehman for special initiatives. It is not clear what these initiatives are and
how they will contribute to higher education and/or the country’s development
needs, but it seems Dr Atta-ur-Rehman’s access to higher authorities has led to this
split, at the cost of money for the HEC and public-sector higher education.

How do we square the government’s aim to expand and improve higher education
with significant reductions in resources for higher education? We are going through a
financial crunch where, as part of its coping strategy and IMF commitments, the
government has enforced an ‘austerity’ policy on all public departments. Are HEC
cuts just a part of this austerity plan? As the economy stabilises and moves towards a
growth path (which all hope will happen soon), will the resources be increased again?
In other words, is this a short-term setback that will go away in a couple of years?

If higher education is a priority, why impose a cut on higher education? The

government always has leeway, even under austerity, to decide which sector would
bear how much of the burden of austerity. And even if austerity had to come, why
split the money for higher education between regular university needs and
speculative projects outside the HEC’s control?

Students dropping out of university today are not likely to return to their education
tomorrow.
The need for austerity might not go away as quickly as some expect. We are starting
to see signs of stability in some of our macroeconomic variables, but the path to
sustained growth is going to take time. We also have significant accumulated loans
that will have to be serviced and paid off over the next few years. This might mean
that, even if growth comes back — which is a big ‘if’ — we still might not have a lot of
fiscal space to raise expenditures quickly and to levels that will allow public
universities to come up in all districts and to double the number of students that
access higher education.

Even if we get more fiscal space and the government decides to use this to expand
higher education, the hysteresis effect of the changes that austerity brings with it will
have an impact on subsequent expansion. Universities have had to raise fees, stop
new programmes, and cut back on hiring new faculty and staff. Students who drop
out today or are unable to join due to cutbacks and/or fee hikes are not likely to
return to education a couple of years later.

There is a deeper issue here as well. What is higher education for? Why does the
government subsidise higher education? There are a certain number of people we
need in various specialisations (eg, engineers, doctors, lawyers, computer experts,
etc) to ensure smooth functioning and growth in the economy. If the private sector
cannot produce them, the state has an interest in subsidising education in these
areas to ensure sufficient supply of human resources. This is definitely an explicitly
stated reason for funding higher education in Pakistan.

If the above is the only reason for subsidising higher education then, given the
unemployment rates in the graduate population, a squeeze on higher education is not
problematic from the point of view of the state, even if it still contradicts the stated
aim of the government to expand access to higher education. Changing stated aims
might be politically costly, so the government might as well live with the
contradiction of continuing to express its goals to expand access while
simultaneously reducing and keeping funding low.

But there are other issues at stake too. Access to higher education has strong links to
social and economic mobility. The government has repeatedly said that it aims to
create a society based on merit and equal opportunity for all. If this is the case, a
squeeze on funding for public universities directly contradicts these aims. The rich
can always attend private universities in Pakistan or abroad. It is those coming from
more constrained economic circumstances that depend more on state subsidies in
order to access higher education. Higher education funding cuts hit these individuals
directly.
There is also a gender angle to this story. There are strong links between education
and employment of women with many other important variables like health, health
outcomes for the next generation, income, wealth and many others. Funding cuts will
deprive us of these benefits as well.

Funding cuts to higher education is not a simple issue and should not be treated as
such. It plays havoc not only with societal goals but with the lives and life chances of
millions. This government has not only cut public higher education funding, it has
also allocated some of the remainder for non-mainstream projects. A deeper debate
on the issue is warranted.

one curriculum? By bari

FEDERAL Minister for Education Shafqat Mehmood has, on a number of occasions,

talked of his desire to see a uniform curriculum being taught for grades one to 12
across Pakistan. The Punjab education minister has also announced that a uniform
curriculum for grades one to five will be implemented in the province by the next
academic year. It is still not clear what the conversation is about, what the objectives
of this effort are and what Pakistani children will gain out of uniformity.

Read: Uniform syllabus for education institutions, madressahs approved

Let us leave out the debate on mandate, or lack thereof, of the federal government
post-18th Amendment in the area of education. This is an important debate in and of
itself, but we will keep that for another time. Here I want to focus on the substantive
debate about uniformity and what it implies and, more importantly, what it does not.
And then some debate on what is meant by ‘curriculum’.

From what I have been able to gather, it is thought that uniform education/
curriculum/ books/ examination will allow us to reduce or eliminate disparities
among children across the country. Children from across provinces, cities as well as
the rural areas, across gender, and across socioeconomic status will read the same
thing at more or less the same time and will be tested in the same way. Many believe
that this will remove disparities among children and create a ‘level playing field’.

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER AD

But the problem is that a uniform curriculum, however it is implemented, will not
reduce disparities. Children come from very different socio-economic backgrounds,
from different households where parents have different levels of education. They
have different endowments, they have different language skills, they come from
different cultural and religious backgrounds, and they live in very different
geographical environments. The same curriculum, the same books and even the
same examinations will not reduce disparities. In fact, they may even increase
disparities.

The government is seeing the uniformity matter as a means for addressing issues of
equity.

If examinations are too difficult, they will create disparities between those who can
pass and those who cannot. This disparity between Matric-pass and Matric-fail,
when institutionalised in terms of who can or cannot have access to jobs, will
increase disparities, not reduce them.

If uniformity of the language requirement (Urdu for all, say) ignores the home or
mother language of some children as opposed to others, we put some children at a
disadvantage in terms of learning.

If the curriculum and books are uniform, the children in Sindh get the same books as
the children in Punjab, and their regional cultures, traditions, history and literature
get ignored (should Bulleh Shah not be taught at all or should he be taught to all?).

A couple of days ago, the prime minister said that a uniform curriculum was essential
for creating ‘one nation’ in Pakistan. Though it is not clear what the prime minister
meant, I presume the unity aspect of the nation has to do with not only the removal
of inequality, but with some notion of ideological uniformity as well.

Again, there is no evidence that I know of where one curriculum, set of books and/or
examination has moved a large and diverse group of people towards being an
ideologically more homogeneous or harmonious group. Has the compulsory study of
Islamiat and Pakistan Studies facilitated this? Is there any evidence of this? What
makes us think that one curriculum, even if we can implement it, will allow us to
achieve something as difficult as ‘one nation’?
An experiment of this sort has a cost as well. We cannot just say that maybe it is
worth trying something of this nature as there is no downside to it. We will be
spending a lot of money and political capital in trying to get all schools to move
towards a uniform curriculum, a prescribed set of books and an examination system
that we approve of. There are alternative uses of resources. We can use the political
capital on other things as well. There are plenty of other education-sector reforms
that are crying out for attention. Should we not prioritise these over the effort to
move to a mythical ‘one curriculum’?

Twenty-two million or so children between the ages of five and 16 remain out of
school in Pakistan. The majority of children in schools, whether in the public or
low-fee private sector, are getting poor quality education. Rather than focus on these
issues, we want to spend resources, time, money and political capital on issues of
uniformity.

We should be clear that one curriculum, set of textbooks and even examinations,
even if we can implement it, are not going to resolve the issues of access and quality
mentioned here. How will one curriculum allow the enrolment of 22m more
children? Higher enrolments require more schools, teachers, transport facilities and
incentives for enrolment. None of these will be impacted by uniformity of
curriculum. Quality of education has to do a lot with quality of books, pedagogy and
content knowledge of teachers, teacher motivation, and quality of assessment tools,
but what can uniformity do to bring improvements in these areas?

The government is seeing the uniformity issue as a means of addressing issues of

equity. But I have argued here that even equity issues cannot be addressed through
uniformity. Equity issues have to be addressed while remaining within the
framework of diversity of the circumstances, needs, abilities and ambitions of
children. A uniform curriculum will do nothing here. In fact, to the contrary, it will
exacerbate some of these equity issues even more.

The area of education needs a lot of reforms, and very deep ones, to address issues of
equity, access and quality. There is no doubt about this. But having a uniform
curriculum, books and/or examination system is not the reform that we need. It will
not address any of the issues that are of interest to us. It will take a massive effort to
implement such a reform, even if possible, and this will hurt work in other areas.

out of school out of sight by bari

AROUND 22 million five- to 16-year-olds do not attend schools in Pakistan.

Although there has been some progress in getting more children to enrol in primary
schools in the past 10-odd years, the dent in the number of out-of-school children
has been marginal at best.
How many more years will it be before we have all five- to 16-year-olds in schools?
Will it be 10 years or 20, or even more? At the rate at which we are progressing, will
we ever have all children attending school? There are two separate issues here. The
current stock of children who are out of school will, in all probability, now enter
adulthood without receiving an education. This is the stock problem we have, and it
will have to be dealt with through adult literacy and other such programmes.

Then there is the flow issue. We are still not enrolling all five-year-olds in schools.
This means we keep adding to the number of five- to 16-year-olds who are out of
school. This issue can only be resolved if all young children start going to school by
the age of five.

But all of the above, given the numbers, require a lot of work and resources.
Twenty-two million out-of-school children — do keep the number in mind. This is
more than the population of Karachi. This is more than the combined populations of
Lahore and Faisalabad. If you want the entire population of Lahore and Faisalabad to
attend school, in addition to the children who are already going to school, it will
require a lot of commitment, planning and resources to be able to do so.

What will it cost the government to get all children to go to school?

And, whatever the nature of the plans, this change will not happen in a day or a year.
It will require a plan that is spread over five to 10 years.

The key here though, is that a plan is needed; a plan that the federal and provincial
governments need to conceive, and then stick to. Currently, no government has any
such plans. All governments are aware of the issue. They keep talking of small
initiatives to show their apparent resolve for addressing the issue, but none of the
governments have worked out a financial plan for enrolling all children or an action
plan for how this is going to be achieved. What will it cost the government to get all
children to go to school? How will this be done? Where will this money come from?

Current education budgets are not enough to bring out-of-school children into
classrooms. If there is little or no space for increasing education budgets — which
seems to be the accepted fiscal reality at the moment — there is not a whole lot that
can be done about out-of-school children. This is just the reality we will have to
accept.

But if we do find some resources, equally importantly, we need to make plans and
figure out how they will be implemented. How many children will be enrolled in
existing schools? How many new schools will be needed? How many teachers will
need to be recruited? In what existing schools can double shifts be started? How
many children will go to private schools? Will governments pay for these children to
attend private schools under some sort of public-private partnership arrangement?
It is relatively easy to figure out, conceptually speaking, what to do with children in
the five-to-10 age bracket. We can always enrol them in regular schools and/ or offer
slightly accelerated programmes of learning to them so that they can eventually be
integrated into the regular system.

The issues for out-of-school children aged 10 and above are different. Some of them
are already working and contributing to their families’ income. To bring them back to
mainstream schools is going to be very difficult. To have a 10-year-old in a class
where the rest of the children are five years old is difficult anyway. If the child in
question was earning for the family and already has some vocational skill, to expect
the child to start from grade one and have the patience for years to go through the
regular education cycle is also unrealistic. We need different programmes for such
children. These programmes will need to give these children literacy and numeracy
skills for sure — and some might also pursue their education further than that — but
for others, vocational skill programmes would need to be added to their education.

We will need to experiment with a lot of different kinds of incentive and regulatory
schemes as well as programmes to figure out what will work for out-of-school
children aged 10 and older. These programmes might vary with geography and
gender too. Currently, there is little or no thinking on such specific programming in
any of our governments. At most, there is talk of double-shift schools and the need to
experiment, but there is no experimentation taking place anywhere as yet. When will
such programming be developed? Implementation will take years. We need to move
forward from the initial thinking on this if we want to implement any major
initiatives over the next few years.

The issue of out-of-school children issue keeps coming up in various conversations.

However, none of the governments have started to think about this issue seriously.
There is no work being done on any actual plans to address it. There is no thinking
on where the resources to address it will come from, and what sort of programming
is required. We are, in fact, not even in a position to ensure all five-year-olds get to go
to school. Issues related to illiteracy will remain with us for a very long time to come.

Vication learning by bari

SUMMER vacations are beginning. Millions of children and young adults, who are
enrolled in schools, colleges and universities, will have two or so months to relax,
spend more time with their families, socialise in a larger circle, sleep and wake up
late, laze around, enjoy leisure activities, enjoy sports activities. For some, it will be
an opportunity to go on trips to other cities within or even outside Pakistan.
All of the above is very important for individual growth and for having a more
balanced personality. Young people should have these opportunities to experience
downtime. School and universities put significant academic and other pressures on
children. The regimentation of everyday schooling is in and of itself taxing enough.
There is a need for more relaxed and less structured time for young people —
summer vacations provide that opportunity.

Some university students will have to do summer internships. This might be needed
to acquire some experience and/or to explore professions they might later want to
pursue. But, if an internship programme is not structured well, it will be a waste of
time. There is no need to spend a month photocopying papers or fetching coffee for
the bosses. In such cases, spending some time lazing about is better than being an
intern performing work that is not stimulating.

This is true of summer camps and summer schools as well, but in a different way. If a
summer school is focused solely on academics — guaranteeing revision of the entire
course or completion of the course ahead of the rest of the class — this too is a waste
of time. Again, being at home might be a better alternative. But if the summer school
allows children to socialise, play, learn new skills (music, dance, art) especially ones
that are not taught in regular curricula, then it might be worth attending.

Children should be encouraged to read widely, beyond their assigned curriculum.

Relaxation does not mean having no goals or plans for the summer. There should be
some thinking that goes into designing activities for children during vacations. There
should definitely be some time allocated for homework, or schoolwork if no
homework has been given to them, in order to solidify their understanding of and
reflect on what they have learnt in the past academic year. But there needs to be a
component of this that is focused on looking forward as well, so that children get
some idea of what is to come post-summer.

More importantly, there should be plenty of looking sideways. Children should be

encouraged to read around their curriculum. They should be encouraged to think of
applications and examples of what they might have studied. These processes will
enrich and deepen their understanding of what they have studied and what they will
be studying. It will also allow them to break free from a reliance on rote learning.
Most importantly, children should be given plenty of time and encouragement to
read anything and everything children and young adults like to read. They should
read all sorts of novels, especially some of the classics. They should read history;
there are plenty of history books that are well written and not ‘boring’. Children’s
literature is now much more accessible than ever before. But the level of reading
should be varied. Children should be challenged, based on their interests, to attempt
slightly advanced material as well, though it should not be so advanced as to
discourage curiosity.

Autobiographies were a personal favourite. To read about people I admired, to see

them in action, to gain access to their thought process and to be acquainted with the
challenges they encountered and how they faced them was very helpful to me. It also
provided a window into the thinking of these people. Whether they were
philosophers, scientists or artists, reading about their lives, struggles, failures and
achievements provided me with a very strong sense of community.

Biography, as a genre, still resonates with me. But it is not the poison of choice for
all. Some of the reading should be general, but a large chunk should be in the area
that the child is interested in. A friend liked reading about wars. Another was only
interested in Islamic history. Another focused on science. Summer is an excellent
time to explore and develop possibilities.

Three of four decades ago, there were few bookshops and no internet and/or digital
resources. But there were libraries we had access to. In my case, other than our
school library, I had access to the British Council’s library and the Punjab Public
Library in Lahore. Both were well stocked. Both gave plenty of space to young people.
And they happened to be close to where my school was.

Though books have become a lot more expensive now and library access has become
harder with expanding cities and higher transportation costs, reading material is
more readily available via the internet. This material needs some curating and
selection, but easier access can have larger benefits for young people: they can read
more widely.

Other forms of entertainment have increased as well, and this has increased
possibilities for distraction too. Television or net surfing can have negative
consequences. But this is where some structure and plans can help. Children should
have time to play — even to goof off — but there should be time for interesting
activities that develop their potential as well.
Summer reading can help in acquiring language proficiency too. What better time
than the summer to focus on English or Urdu reading, speaking and writing skills?
Again, with a bit of structure, developing a regular habit of reading, listening,
speaking and writing in a particular language can change proficiency levels within a
couple of months.

Summer vacation is a beautiful concept. It can be a time for rejuvenation and growth.
But it requires some structure and planning. I wish the millions of children and
young adults starting their vacations this week a very happy and productive summer.

Higher Education budget cut

AUSTERITY is upon us. With the IMF programme imminent, the cuts are going to
get deeper. Barring debt servicing and defence, all government expenditure is going
to take a hit. Debt servicing will not change as this is an international obligation and
unless a creditor is willing to roll it over or refinance it, we will have to pay back the
money. The defence establishment will not let civilian governments take anything
away from them. The question there is always about limiting the increases for them.

The Higher Education Commission has already been informed, and this has been
reported in the press, that the budget for the higher education sector is going to be
cut. Compared to what the HEC would like to demand, the cuts might be to the tune
of 10 per cent to 15pc in recurrent expenditures and up to a whopping 50pc in
development expenditures. The ultimate numbers will not be known until the budget
has been finalised.

Even if people rally behind the HEC to get the cuts to be as small as possible, and it
will take some rallying for that, some cuts are still going to be there. A 10pc to 15pc
cut in recurrent expenditures for the HEC means significant cuts in ongoing
university programmes across public-sector universities. And a 50pc cut in
development expenditure means that plans for almost all new programmes will have
to be postponed or cancelled. The throw-forward of existing development schemes is
going to take more than what will be given for development expenditures. So, there
will be no space for new schemes.

Recently announced initiatives will have to be postponed or cancelled. These include

the university in Hyderabad and the advanced study centre at Prime Minister House.
Similarly, the plans for expansion of existing universities and the promises of
opening new universities in the districts that do not have this educational facility will
have to be shelved.

Even if universities get to work on raising private funding, it will take years to build a
successful campaign.
The cuts might be deep enough to even having to close down some of the ongoing
development projects. If universities started multiyear projects last year or the year
before, and the funding was supposed to come over the period of the next few years,
these projects will come under pressure and universities might have to either get
resources for these projects from other sources or might have to cut down on a few of
them.

But the more difficult cuts will be on the side of the recurrent budget. Most of the
recurrent budget in the education sector is salary related. If the HEC budget is cut by
10pc to 15pc, how will universities manage?

Most public-sector universities subsidise educational provision: the cost of provision

is higher and tuition fees do not cover the total cost. The HEC transfers cover the
rest. But if the HEC transfers go down, can universities raise their fee to cover cost?
This would have implications in terms of restricting access to higher education.

Only a small percentage of Pakistanis currently enrol at university level. If the fee is
increased, it will restrict numbers on the margins and the rise will, inevitably, hit the
poorer students more. Can the PTI government, which made so many promises
about increasing opportunities for our young people, and which keeps talking about
the ‘demographic dividend’, afford to cut funding for higher education and cause
unrest among young people as fee levels increase?

It should be borne in mind that if universities have to fund 10pc to 15pc of recurrent
expenses and some part of their development expenses from fee increases, the latter
will have to be substantial. In some places, these increases might have to be 50pc to
100pc and it will still not be enough. Can the government afford such a situation?
Even more importantly, should this government force universities to raise their fees
to get more money, or should it not allow such deep cuts in the funding for higher
education?

Can universities raise financing from other sources? Universities, in general, cannot
fund themselves fully through fees and government transfers alone. They usually
have endowment funds, based on donations from alumni, philanthropists and other
interested parties that partially cover expenses. The endowment fund is invested to
generate a stream of income that covers some part of the recurrent expenses, and
special funds are generated to take care of some of the capital and development
expenditures (donation for a building etc). Public-sector universities in Pakistan,
barring one or two, have never taken fund-raising seriously. The IBA’s new campus
gives an interesting glimpse of what is possible, but the institute is quite the
exception in public universities.
When news of expected cuts in higher education funding was reported a couple of
weeks back, newspapers also mentioned that universities had been asked to raise
‘charity’ so that they would be able to cover the shortfall. If raising financing through
alumni and/or philanthropists is now being thought of, public-sector universities are
not going to get far with the idea. The mindset will have to change about funding
sources and opportunities.

Even if universities can change the mindset and get to work on raising private
funding, it is not going to happen very quickly. It takes years to create successful
funding campaigns. And Pakistan is not known for its philanthropic giving to the
education sector. So, this is not a short-term solution.

If funding cuts do come through, this is going to spell a lot of trouble for universities
and for students who depend on low-fee programmes. The public universities cannot
develop alternate sources quickly and will have to cut programmes and/or raise
tuitions substantially. This will have a heavy cost for the higher education sector, for
the youth of the country and for the party in power. The PTI had better be sure of its
priorities before it sanctions deep cuts in funding for higher education.

Inclusive education

NOBODY is sure what the issue is with Nabila. She joined the kindergarten class of a
local low-fee private school a few months ago. She does not speak. She does not
respond to questions. It is not clear if she hears properly. She does not interact with
others. She has to be accompanied by an adult when she needs to go around
anywhere in the school, whether to the washroom or outdoors during recess.

Nabila’s parents do not have the resources to have any diagnostic testing done. Her
mother, who brought Nabila to school, insisted that she be admitted. The
teachers/principal who have interacted with Nabila’s mother feel that she is not
really worried about having Nabila tested for an underlying condition (perhaps due
to non-availability of resources), nor does she seem particularly concerned about her
education, ability and potential to learn. Her primary concern seems to be related to
having some form of childcare during the day for Nabila so that she can focus her
attention on housework and other chores. This school is the only option for Nabila’s
mother.
The school also feels it does not have the resources to a) have Nabila diagnosed, b)
have teachers trained in special needs education (the school had only three children
with disabilities), and c) adapt the curriculum and mode of instruction to support
children with disabilities. So, though the administration has allowed Nabila to come
to school, it has not been able to do anything for her other than providing a place
where she can be supervised. Other children have not been able to interact with
Nabila. The school is fine with having Nabila in class for these early years, but feels it
will have to ask her mother to make alternative arrangements soon, within a couple
of years.

Khadija has a hearing problem. She also attends a low-fee school located close to
where she lives. Though her parents knew that Khadija could not hear when they
brought her to school for enrolment and told the school about it, they also mentioned
that they have never had Khadija’s hearing problem diagnosed. They also feel that
they do not have the resources to pay for any diagnostics and/or intervention (such
as a hearing aid) if one is needed.
Nabila and Khadija are in trouble. They are at risk of dropping out of school.

Khadija comes to school regularly. Other children in the class are aware of Khadija’s
impairment, and try to be as cooperative as they can be — but communication,
through signs that have evolved in the process of class interaction, is still difficult.
Khadija seems to enjoy the company of other children and her time in school, but she
is not learning a whole lot.

The school feels it does not have any resources to spend on having Khadija
diagnosed. It also does not have the resources to have the teachers trained in
interacting with children with special needs. The school has only four or five
children, it feels, who have visible/perceptible physical/cognitive impairments. The
school does not want to spare any resources for such small numbers.

Khadija’s teacher, who does not know sign language, has spent quite a bit of time
with her mother. This has allowed her to understand how Khadija and her mother
communicate: a combination of signs and facial expressions they have
evolved/developed over time. So her teacher can now have a basic level of
communication with Khadija, which allows her to keep Khadija calm and somewhat
involved in class activity through the day.

Nabila and Khadija are in trouble. They are at risk of dropping out of the education
system. They got enrolled — which is difficult enough coming from challenged
economic and social sections of society, let alone facing physical and/or cognitive
impairments. But they are not learning anything, and the schools they are in are not
able to help them.
Is the state not responsible for the education and welfare of every child? Does Article
25-A of the Constitution, guaranteeing every child the right to an education, not
apply to children with disabilities? Have we not signed international conventions on
the rights of children with disabilities? Do none of these commitments matter?

Pakistan does have departments for ‘special education’ in all provinces. But these
departments are small, underfunded and restricted to providing services through a
small number of institutions. Special education departments do not even have any
interaction with the government’s mainstream education departments. They have
absolutely nothing to do with private schools. Who, then, is going to look after the
Khadijas and Nabilas of Pakistan? Are they children of a lesser god?

If parents cannot afford diagnostic tests for children who exhibit signs of disabilities,
there should be a referral system where the state steps in to pay for it. There should
be provision for schools, both state and low-fee private schools, to receive some
resources from the state in order to provide for the special needs of children with
disabilities who are attending regular schools. The principle of ‘least restrictive
environment’ should apply: children should be taught in the least restrictive
environment possible and should be moved to more restrictive settings only if the
interest of the child requires that.

We need to move towards creating an inclusive society. Whatever the nature of the
diversity we have among our children, and the learning challenges that they may
face, they have to live with each other in this society. We have to ensure we prepare
all children for this. The state has a very important role to play here. As far as our
obligations towards children with disabilities are concerned, we have not even
scratched the surface yet. It is time to change that.

Austerity and education

FISCAL and foreign currency account deficits were destabilising the macroeconomic
situation. The government, in a bid to acquire macroeconomic stability, has been
trying to reduce both deficits. Devaluation and import duty changes are the main
tools on the currency side. Additional taxation measures have been taken to raise
revenues and an austerity drive has been initiated to reduce expenditures. The
economy has responded to the changes to an extent, and trade and fiscal deficit have
narrowed a bit or won’t be as large as they would have been had these measures not
been taken.
Import and expenditure curbs will slow down the growth rate. This means lower
employment generation and lower income increases for all. Expenditure cuts have
mainly hit development expenditures. Development expenditure is where the
government has the most discretion, so most cuts inevitably hit development the
most. But development expenditures impact growth directly.

Development has been cut at both federal and provincial levels. The federation asked
provinces to run surpluses in their budgets. Some complied. Those that did have had
to slash their development spending deeply. In some cases, the provinces do not even
have the money to run existing programmes. For example, Punjab has halted the
expansion of private-public partnerships in education, and is even having trouble
coughing up money for programmes that were already under way.

The austerity imperative is not just going to go away in a year or two. For Pakistan to
be able to increase expenditures and open up imports, we need structural changes in
the economy. Stabilisation does not guarantee structural change. If exports and tax
collections do not start increasing, the government will not have the fiscal space to
increase expenditures. And exports and tax collections are not going to go up in a
year or two. The need for austerity, though it may be not as severe as it was this year,
will remain with us for some time.
Our education sector needs significant improvement. How is this possible without
more money?

The provinces are going to feel the pinch even more. The federal government is
looking to reduce the share of the provinces in the next National Finance
Commission award. There is going to be some provision, out of provincial shares, for
former Fata as well. There might be a cut for Punjab if the weight of population is
reduced in the NFC formula. No province has a local tax base and they all depend on
federal transfers for resources.

We have 20-odd million children out of schools. The quality of education in most of
our schools, private and public, needs significant improvement. How is this possible
without more money?

This government has promised equality of opportunity to all — and education is a big
part of this. The government, through numerous statements, has said they want
‘uniform’ education for all. How is this going to happen under austerity?
I want to debunk a really misleading argument that has been doing the rounds in
Pakistan courtesy of some education experts. They argue that we do not need to
spend more money on education but to spend more efficiently, and that will give us
the necessary gains. There is no doubt that expenditure efficiency, whatever the field,
is low in Pakistan and could be improved, but if a nation only spends 2 per cent to
2.5pc of GDP on education, there is no way, whichever way it stretches this money,
that it is going to be able to provide education for a population of 207m with a large
proportion of young people

If 20m children are not going to school, clearly, they are mostly those whose parents
cannot afford to send them to private, fee-based schools. How are these children
going to be educated without more schools? How many can you fit in existing schools
and classes when a lot of your existing primary schools only have two to four
classrooms?

Rahim Yar Khan has 2,200-odd government primary schools and only 222 high
schools, Rajanpur has 989 primary schools and only 69 high schools, for Bhakkar the
numbers are 1,027 and 114, and for Rawalpindi 1,198 and 388. When the objective of
the government is to have every child finish high school, how do we cater for all
children who join primary school if we do not set up more high schools? Can children
from 2,200 primary schools fit into 222 high schools? And we do not even provide
transport to children.

Dataset after dataset is showing the poor quality of learning in our schools. It might
be improving a little, but the level is still very low compared to where children should
be at their age and compared to where their peers from other countries are. How
does one improve the quality of learning without more resources? We have already
gotten gains in learning through introducing monitoring systems across the
education system. Teacher attendance is also up. Now learning gains probably need
to come by improving teacher motivation as well as their pedagogic and subject
skills, and by creating communities of learning around our schools. How do we do all
this without more funds? It is hard to see how large-scale interventions (there are
100,000-plus government-run schools across Pakistan) can be made without more
resources.

Unless more resources are available, it is hard to see how the government will be able
to achieve any of its education promises. And resources are definitely not going to be
available for the next couple of years. It might even be longer if our exports do not
respond and if the provinces and federation do not find new ways of taxing and of
extending the tax net. It seems ‘education for all’ and national and international
commitments will remain unrealised promises for quite some time to come.
A staggering gap

NAZIA is a student at a university. It has been quite a battle for her to be where she
is, ie at a good university pursuing an undergraduate degree. She has been telling me
that her parents did not want her to study beyond high school. She was eventually
able to convince them but there were some conditions. She could not study the
subject of her choice (literature) and had to take business studies and she has given
her word that she is going to get married as soon as she graduates.

Nazia is a very gifted individual, with good skills now, and exceptional interpersonal
abilities. Not letting her decide her future for herself, not ‘allowing’ her to go to
graduate school and not ‘allowing’ her to work is not only negating her ‘self’, it is
limiting her growth and is also imposing a large cost on society.

Over the two decades that I have been teaching, hundreds of young women have
talked to me about related issues. At the university level, the most common issues
have been about the choice of subject, the ability to go to graduate school and the
ability to work. But there have also been discussions on issues of not having enough
of a say in marriage decisions — ie when a woman should get married and the choice
of partner.

But these young women hail from a small set who have been able to reach university
level. Pakistan has millions of boys and girls who are not even able to go to school.
And though gender gaps have narrowed over the last few decades, the gap is still very
much there and the pace of narrowing has been very slow. The size of the gap is
larger and the pace at which it has been narrowing has been slower in Pakistan than
in many other comparable countries..

Millions of educated women are still not in the labour force. Imagine the impact on
Pakistan if they were.

Beyond education, in terms of labour market participation, the gap between men and
women, in Pakistan, is quite staggering and out of line with almost all comparable
societies: only one in four or five women participate directly in labour markets. This
is not about work. Most women work. It is about paid work.

Regional differences, across Pakistan, in opportunities for education and work,

remain staggering as well. A young girl from rural Balochistan, if she survives infancy
(our child mortality rates are still unacceptably high), has a slim chance she will be
enrolled in a school. Only two to three girls from rural Balochistan are able to finish
10 years of education. Reaching college is still a rare phenomenon.
It is not just about rural Balochistan. Geography, location, gender, caste, family
income, religion, ethnicity, and language continue to determine the life chances of
our children. What is true of all children is doubly, if not more so, true for females.
This needs to change — and change fast.

It is common to hear the argument that the future of Pakistan will be determined by
the youth of Pakistan. We are a very young nation and since our youth constitute the
majority of people in this country, they are going to be a decisive influence in most
decisions where numbers will matter. We, as a nation, owe it to our youth to not only
prepare them for what is to come but to ensure they are able to develop to their
fullest potential. We cannot do that if we continue to ignore half our population.

Many of us also believe that the future of Pakistan is going to be shaped, decisively,
by the women of Pakistan. We see signs and potential of this already. With the
narrowing of the education gap, and with enrolments going up at the primary level,
however slowly, over the last couple of decades, there are millions of young educated
women in Pakistan now. They are not yet participating in the labour force in the
numbers we would like to see, but imagine if they were able to come into the labour
force, and in all fields. This would transform our work and workplaces completely.

Hundreds of thousands of women are already working as teachers. One could argue,
and quite plausibly, that the impressive and massive expansion in the private
provision of education has been made possible by the entry of these women in the
workplace. This has been documented in research papers as well. It has been shown
that low-fee private schools open up faster and expand more in areas where a girls’
high school was already present: the supply of teachers is there, private schools can
open up with low initial investment.

Given the lack of other opportunities, the salaries of private-sector female teachers
are low. This has allowed the low- and medium-fee private schools to come up and
they have sprouted up around the country. More than 40 per cent of our enrolled
children are now attending private schools. The percentage is much higher in urban
areas. It is the educated young women who have made this possible. They are now
producing the next generations of educated people.

Millions of educated women are still not in the labour force. Imagine the impact this
could have on Pakistan if they entered the workplace.

The quest is for women’s agency and rights. These are an end in themselves. Every
human being has to have basic rights, as many of us do. But we have significant other
benefits attached to ensuring that all our children have the opportunity to develop
their potential to the fullest. Though they are narrowing, differences in opportunity,
based on gender, remain large. The quest is to level these differences. The Aurat
March should be seen in this light as well.