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| Social Development in Pakistan (SDiP) 2002-3 |
| The Annual Review presents an in-depth analysis of the state of education in Pakistan Technological changes and globalization of markets is setting an unprecedented process of transformation of the economies of the world from the traditional ‘resource’ to a ‘knowledge’ basis. The most important components of a knowledge-based economy are human and institutional capital as opposed to physical and financial capital in the resource-based economy. According to the world ranking of the Technology Achievement Index – which measures the level of technological achievement of an economy – and the Knowledge Economy Index – which measures how effectively an economy creates, diffuses and uses knowledge for its economic and social development -- Pakistan is categorized as a marginalized economy. There is, thus, the need and urgency for serious efforts to upgrade the educational level in the country.
The above indication of Pakistan’s low standing in the emerging knowledge-based world economic order is not surprising, given the rather poor education statistics. Adult literacy rates have been increasing at less than 1 per cent per annum over the last 30 years, with considerable urban-rural and provincial differences. The number of illiterate people has increased from 28 million in 1972 to 46 million presently. The 1993-2000 period witnessed an annual growth rate of only 3.4 percent in primary enrolment against 6.4 percent during the 1980s. The situation in terms of the net primary enrolment ratio is even worse: not only are the levels of net enrolment rates low, they also exhibit a declining trend over the years and is now even lower than in Nepal and Bhutan
Persistently low levels of primary enrolment have led to an increase in the population of out of school children in the 5-9 age group: there are 13 million out of school children out of about 50 million children in this age group, over half of whom are girls. With respect to the net secondary enrolment rate, Pakistan registers a dismal 10 percent, with the same gender, rural-urban and provincial disparities that are evident in all indicators. At the national level, the overall dropout rate has increased steadily from 40 percent in 1996-97 to 54 percent in 1999-2000. Dropouts are generally higher among girls and are increasing at a higher pace relative to boys.
However, it is encouraging to note that the primary enrollment rate for girls has increased by 11 percentage points from 52 percent to 63 percent during the 1993-2000 period. Educating girls has been empirically shown to be associated with numerous social benefits, including lower fertility and improved individual and family health. More heartening is the fact that notable growth in girls’ enrollment is observed in smaller provinces. In NWFP, primary enrollment rate for girls has increased by 26 percentage points from 35 percent to 61 percent, while it rose by 26 percentage points again from 22 percent to 48 percent in Balochistan. Investment in education and human resource development offers high returns in terms of economic growth and development. The Review empirically documents the positive relationship between education and economic development and between investment in education and economic growth. It also shows that poverty has an adverse impact on access to education and unequal access to education has an adverse impact on development level. The rise of income inequality and poverty in recent years is shown to restrict access to education for the poor and unequal rural land ownership has contributed to unequal access to schooling. Poverty is also shown to be concentrated in households in which the head of the households is illiterate. Thus, children belonging to such households, trapped in illiteracy and poverty, tend to remain out of school and/or be pushed into child labour with all its attendant consequences. It is not surprising that the single largest reason cited by households for not sending boys to school is that education is too expensive. For girls, however, the main reason cited is parental permission, which indicates the importance of socio-cultural and socio-political factors in addition to economic factors in determining educational development.
Within this overall situation of low educational achievement, there are stark patterns of regional inequalities in educational endowments: is the only province in which nearly half of the population resides in the top 20% of the districts sorted according to educational achievement in the province and less than 2 percent of its population resides in the bottom quintile districts. Balochistan is the only province where the majority of the population falls in the bottom quintile. Sindh, excluding Karachi emerges as the only province where no part of the population resides in the top quintile districts. The analysis establishes a case for greater and more broad-based spread of educational opportunities in order to reduce the disparity between districts and raise their development levels.
In addition to economic development, income and education inequality also has implications for social cohesion. Income is the primary determinant of whether a child goes to an English-medium or Urdu-medium school or to a madrassah. The students of these different streams hold such different worldviews and opinions that they seem to be living in different worlds. In many respects, these worldviews are even hostile to each other and to an extent that has polarized society and impeded social cohesion. The starkest difference is between students from elite English-medium schools and madrassahs, which stand diametrically opposed to each other in terms of their opinions on almost every issue.. Elite English-medium schools strongly support a free press, democracy, equal rights for women and minorities and peace, while madrassah students attach significantly less weight to these issues, while strongly supporting a less tolerant society and a narrower view of the world.
Despite the obvious importance of education, public spending on education in Pakistan as a percentage of GDP, is 1.8 percent, which is the lowest in South Asia and has actually declined from 2.6 percent in 1990. Pakistan is among the 12 countries in the world that spend less than 2 percent of GDP on education. Over the years, a stabilization driven macroeconomic policy has shrunk the fiscal space for provinces, leaving little to spend on the provision of social services. Consequently, the growth in provincial expenditures for all levels of education has collapsed since 1997.
The Review, however, shows that an absolute increase in resources for the whole economy is not a necessary condition and that reallocation of resources can also achieve substantial results. A shift of expenditure from other sectors to education is empirically shown to enhance economic growth. The highest impact on GDP growth results from increasing enrolments at the secondary and tertiary level, implying that the objective of generating accelerated economic growth requires investment beyond primary education.
The total number of education policies, and major plans, programmes and schemes in Pakistan stands at 23. However, these policies and plans have persistently failed to achieve their targets. The current initiative is the Education Sector Reforms Action Plan 2001-05 [ESRAP] also suffers from problems with respect to federal-provincial coordination, monitoring of targets, and financing. With only one year of allocations left, there are large shortfalls in the ESRAP development expenditure budget and there is a danger that it will go down as yet another failed project.
The Review highlights the fact that the basic problem with primary education is that the learning process propagated through the official curriculum does not conform to scientific teaching requirements and tends to be more an exercise in indoctrination. The curriculum is narrow and leads to learning by rote and rigid classroom control. The function of education has been reduced to what policy makers think young children ought to know, instead of promoting the spirit of inquiry prescribed by universally accepted principles of learning. Another major problem is the management structure of the primary education tier, which places teachers at the very bottom of an top-heavy bureaucratic structure and gives no academic autonomy to head teachers.Given these problems, simple allocations of more resources towards increasing enrolment are not likely to be productive; unless the broader context of curriculums, textbooks and examinations are taken into account. Fortunately, there does seem to be some awareness in this direction. For example, the new Conceptual Framework of the National Curriculum 2000 is a very enlightened document and provides a good basis for the future of curriculum and syllabi reform. Also, officially prescribed textbooks are showing improvements, while high quality textbooks, produced by citizens groups, provide viable alternatives to officially prescribed textbooks.
The summary policy conclusions that can be derived from the Review is that significant amount of resources will have to be diverted to education at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. However, resources alone will not deliver on the objectives. The curriculum will need to be reformed to enable it to encourage the spirit of inquiry and creativity. School heads will need to be accorded greater autonomy and the teacher’s status raised substantially from the current lowly salary grade-7. Perhaps, separate education and administrative cadres need to be created and teachers placed at par with administrators. The system of examinations will need to be changed in order to test the student’s ability to understand and reason. And inequalities being reinforced through separate mediums of instruction and through liberal and religious education will need to be removed. |
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