Pakistan - Illiterate literacy

In an astounding revelation by leading educationists and renowned literary experts at the All Pakistan Children’s Mushaira held in Karachi, it seems 90 percent of Pakistan’s schoolgoing children cannot read ‘adequately’. Moreover, 98 percent of schoolgoing children cannot write satisfactorily in Urdu or in English. This is an appalling number that suggests most children at the primary level of education cannot read or write and hence have not developed indispensable cognitive skills necessary to survive in an ever competitive world. The three R’s, ‘reading, writing and arithmetic’, are the first order of learning required for a strong foundation of a basic skills-oriented education. It has been a favoured practice of our social agents to encourage slogans of ‘progress and development’ under the rubric of ‘education’, but our basic thrust of addressing quantitative issues in the educational field has not produced an intellectually enhanced and literate society. Our focus is pegged on improving enrollment statistics rather than addressing the qualitative worth of literacy and the incessant gender disparity within education. To add fuel to the fire, 99 percent of teachers in our seemingly ‘luminous’ private schools cannot even boast of a fundamental understanding of ‘phonetics’ and ‘phonology’. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals 2015 (MDGs) concerning universal primary education have unfortunately not taken flight in Pakistan, despite a gradual increase in numbers since 1991.

At the heart of the matter lies our often fickle relationship with language itself. Misplaced notions of nationalism and patriotic sentiments have crowned Urdu and English as our exclusive lingua franca, leading to a steep yet sustained decline of our regional languages. UNESCO studies have suggested the mother tongue is the best point of entry for a child to develop vital cognitive skills essential for good schooling and a well-informed worldview. Enlightened policies that stress primary education in the mother tongue coupled with other languages has led to the achievement of a 99 percent literacy rate in post-independence Tanzania. To salvage our sinking ship, we should take a cue from this positive example and take a much needed initiative that critically reviews our curricula, equips our teachers with essential pedagogical training, and doesn’t just pay lip service to developing regional languages, i.e. our ‘mother tongues’, but also creates academic space for them in practice. Language holds within it the DNA of our cultural psyche; its loss obliterates our identity, stunts literacy, mangles customs and values, severs the connection to a traditional past and systematically muddles a defined course for the future. We should learn from this discouraging report and cease mass production of ‘parhay likhay jaahil’ (educated illiterates), students as well as teachers. It is time we recognised our multi-lingual reality that authentically defines our pluralistic national conscioussness. Its celebration and development can lead to a truly literate and by extension prosperous society.