Pakistan: Children’s free education

THE FRONTIER POST

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2012 that President Asif Ali Zardari signed on Wednesday as an act of parliament, is a landmark law that mandates free education to children between five and 16 years of age. Parliament has also called upon provinces to soon enact similar laws to ensure access to quality free education for all children of school-going age. The milestone legislation meets the most basic need of the national life where poverty forces parents to send their children to work. This is bound to broaden the base of education in Pakistan and also promises an end to child labour, The act has come at a time when national education is all but a sham and a host of steps are needed to pull it to the real direction. National resource allocation is the top issue because this is not sufficient in catering the need of free education up to secondary school. The government is presently earmarking a mere 1.7 per cent of the GDP for education whereas about six per cent allocation is a conservative estimate to make a meaningful start. The availability of teachers, particularly science teachers, is also a fundamental issue. All public educational institutions have about half of the required teaching staff. With only 50 per cent teaching staff available and that, too, needing training, realizing the ultimate objective will be extremely difficult. The new enactment also tends to bring private schools under a stricterdiscipline but mere allocation of 10 per cent quota for poor children in private schools of their areas, is no answer. Strengthening of public education will be vital area that cannot be addressed by mere cosmetic steps. The government, in fact, needs to develop a basic educational structure that addresses all the impending difficulties and this can be developed with the help of hundreds of studies made before. Literacy in Pakistan has recently seen a boost to 37 per cent, yet illiteracy is one of the highest in the world. Provinces will have to obviously share the major burden in enhancing education and its quality. But all of them have since abdicated their role to the greedy private sector which fleeces the middle class in the name of quality education which, for them, means English medium instructions that continues to create huge flaws in the system with the promotion of a class-based education that has destroyed ethos of Pakistan. What is really needed is to lend the schools run by provincial or local governments credence that parents prefer them over private schools. Education for all is certainly a striking inspiration but it is also a social dilemma and this has always to be kept in mind.