THE information may not be new, but the issue is so crucial that it bears repetition: Pakistan will have no future unless it invests heavily in the young — and this investment begins with the long-neglected, even forgotten, sector of education.
Despite having a clause on the law books that makes education a universal right for all children, the country is still struggling to put every child in school.
On top of that, we now have stark facts and figures about the difficulty in keeping children in school, even if they make it there in the first place. On Tuesday, education campaigner Alif Ailaan released its latest report, Broken promises: The crisis of Pakistan’s out-of-school children.
The figures are worrying: of those that do enrol in school, only one in four make it to Grade 10; as indicated by data from various sources used by Alif Ailaan. That means some 25 million children drop out of school.
A perusal of the reasons the report lays out for this shamefully high figure is as revealing as it is instructive. A couple of myths are busted, for example, only 1pc of girls were forced to opt out of school because of marriage.
Some reasons are obvious — poverty, the need to start pulling in an income and the expense of schooling are deterrents for both boys and girls. But other factors are an indictment of the education infrastructure and its handling. Consider, for example, that 5pc of male dropouts find that school is too far off to make attendance viable; and 51pc of such boys don’t go because they themselves are not willing to continue. The figure for girls not attending for the latter reason is 28pc. But why would children be unwilling to go to school?
An answer is found in what the Rawalpindi deputy district education officer had to say to this newspaper. The major reasons, according to him, are “[in]consistency of policies, poverty and a shambolic education infrastructure”. A schoolteacher from the city commented in addition: “a poorly managed system of examinations and teachers’ maltreatment of students”.
The path to remedying the situation on paper is quite clear. But so far the country has lacked the sort of political will needed to make it happen. For instance, in the wake of devolution after the passage of the 18th Amendment, the centre seems to have abandoned the subject as a provincial matter; the provinces have, meanwhile, done little (other than Sindh, which has started to try and weed out political appointees in schoolteachers’ positions).
The low school enrolment rates coupled with high dropout rates are a disaster in the making for the country’s social and economic future. But going by the response to this abysmal state of affairs, the dire implications have not yet filtered into the consciousness of those at the helm.
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