Pakistan - The 25 million missing students

S M Naseem

The state’s responsibility to provide basic education underpins all major efforts to universalise elementary education from industrial Europe to the US and Japan.

A recent report by an NGO funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), run by a journalist/television personality/former diplomat/USAID contractor, on the state of elementary education in Pakistan has made the seemingly earth-shaking revelation that 25 million children, or roughly 50 percent of the children of schoolgoing age are not in schools. The report, titled ‘25 million broken promises’, is an obvious allusion to Article 25-A of the Pakistan Constitution promising the right to education “to all children of age five to 16 years”. It has used available data sources, none of which is tailored to the task at hand, to come to a conclusion in the hope of shocking the nation out of its slumber about a glaring aspect of our social dystopia.

The 25 million figure, although lacking validation by demographers on technical grounds, is itself not particularly disputable. For more than two decades since Dr Mehboobul Haq raised the banner of human development under UN auspices, a slew of statistics showing the gaping gulf between economic and social development in South Asia, especially Pakistan, has failed to move people out of their comfort zone. Indeed, if anything, it has inured the country through a stunningly potent mixture of “complacency and bureaucracy”, compounded by self-serving donor initiatives and NGO collaborations that prefer to sweep basic structural issues under the rug for the sake of not disturbing the status quo. Such complacency and inertia has resulted in the explosion of a middle-class intifada (uprising) in the country.

The state of economic and social accounting in Pakistan is among a myriad scandals that continue to plague and undermine the country’s economic management, which is often predicated on the need to embellish its performance to please donors or to fool the public rather than face ground realities. However, there is a high degree of consensus that the percentage of the population below the poverty line — which this author first estimated at 40 percent more than four decades ago — has increased considerably since then; some estimates put it at above two-thirds, depending on how one chooses to define poverty.

Lack of education is an important correlate of poverty and there is likely to be close correspondence between households that are very poor and those whose children are out of school. In order to provide clarity on the issue, the report needed to elaborate more on the various definitions of schooling and distinctions between the qualities of schools. If the idea is to focus on the right to education with a basic minimum quality of education, if not a uniform quality of education for all, a large number of those children supposedly in schools, especially poor schools, will have to be counted as out of school. The report ought to have focused on this aspect of the disparity in access to education, rather than simply counting those who, through some stretch of the imagination, can be said to be going to ‘school’.

In a rejoinder to the distinguished demographer Zeba Sattar, the authors of the Alif-Ailaan Report, Ms Naz and Ms Pastakia, admit: “The data is flawed. Publicly available sources for education statistics are marred by inconsistency, methodological problems and sampling issues.” If true, one wonders why the authors and the parent NGO and donors spent so much effort, resources and time on a task that could have been much more competently performed by a research-oriented organisation such as the planning commission, the ministry of education or many other organisations much better equipped than an ad hoc advocacy group, headed by a non-academic contractor and funded by donor agencies that have multiple political axes to grind.

Despite the furore about raising awareness about education in Pakistan, the social apathy towards education remains unabated and public concern remains largely synthetic and confined to a narrow section of the educated population. The emphasis on the constitutional underpinnings of the right to education influences the manner of its delivery, making it the state’s primary responsibility. The idea of basic education as a public good is universally accepted because of the positive externalities provision entails. This is particularly true where poverty, economic deprivation and social exclusion make it difficult for large sections of the population to access private education, an elixir that is being strongly advocated by some influential persons. Some argue that “in future the government should not set up its own schools but fund the private provision of education so that children get free schooling”. The argument is based on the fact that “compared with 45,000 government schools in Punjab there are more than 60,000 private schools”, which they take as evidence “that the parents have been voting with their feet” and rejecting the services provided by the government. Perhaps it would be more apt to substitute purses for feet and protesting against the abdication of its responsibility as a reason for the lower proportion of government schools and the upsurge in the number of private schools.

The state’s responsibility to provide basic education underpins all major efforts to universalise elementary education from industrial Europe to the US and Japan. In the second half of the 20th century, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other economies in East Asia and more recently Vietnam and Malaysia followed similar plans for state-funded general expansions of education. With the exception of Sri Lanka, neo-colonised South Asia has failed to achieve universal literacy and education, with part of the gap being filled by religious schools. In Pakistan, during the Bhutto regime an ill-conceived attempt to step up the state’s role in education by nationalising schools backfired in the absence of any increase in the funding for education. After Zia’s coup, the nationalisation policy was reversed, giving school privatisation a big boost. This trend gained further impetus through the structural adjustment programmes of donors, who pushed the agenda of private education and a minimalist role for the state, not only in economic but also social fields. After the enactment of Article 25-A, the government, instead of mobilising more public resources for education and social sectors, is eager to outsource its responsibility to the private and NGO sectors, which is likely to make the goal of universalising education even more remote.

The omission of these and many other institutional issues, including that of the continuing feudal hold in the countryside and of land mafias in the urban areas as well as the gaping inequalities in our economic system, make the Alif Ailan report sound like a hollow drum. Alif Ailan’s alarming numbers and bad news about out-of-school children are likely to fall on the deaf ears of those they intend to shock. However, those who matter remain largely unmoved, if not openly or consciously hostile to the idea of universal primary education.