EDITORIAL: ADB (Asian Development Bank) has revealed nothing surprising by stating that “stark disparities” in learning persist across public and private schools and schools in rural and urban areas in Pakistan.
In its latest report, “Strengthening School Teaching in Pakistan”, the Bank goes on to note that inadequate incentives and opportunities for professional development and career advancement have rendered teaching an unappealing career choice in the country, “resulting in almost a fifth of all teachers quitting the profession”.
Yet even all this only scratches the surface of the problem. When seen in light of the country’s extremely high population figures – fifth highest in the whole world – it assumes even more ominous proportions.
Pakistan also figures among the world’s top 10 countries in terms of poverty, which means most families that can send their children to school can afford only public ones, which in turn implies that only a small percentage has the luxury of private, urban education in this country. That puts a very large number of Pakistanis at a serious disadvantage when they are born.
The report did mention that Pakistan had made “remarkable progress toward universal primary education through a significant expansion of school access”, but it didn’t exactly break down if such progress had been made in rural areas as well.
Yet even if this was the case, it would still have brought more children to public schools with substandard quality. And while that is much better than leaving them completely illiterate, it still doesn’t solve the problem of “stark disparity” between the two systems.
Interestingly, the report feels the biggest challenge is “ensuring the availability of quality teaching including inadequate numbers of qualified teachers, particularly subject specialists; uneven distribution of teachers across schools; teacher absenteeism; low teacher accountability; and insufficient training opportunities and incentives”. Indeed, when the PTI administration experimented with its controversial SNC (single national curriculum) one of the problems it ran into was lack of qualified teachers.
But, once again, that was only part of the problem. While quality teachers are necessary for quality education, quality curriculum is no less important. And one reason the SNC experiment failed so badly was that it pandered to the interests of the right wing, conservative lobby to gain political points at the cost of the country’s school children.
The education system faces many challenges, but the main ones are lack of qualified teachers and a structured curriculum. One would have thought that the latter would be easier to overcome than the former, yet both have proved equally difficult.
Perhaps an even bigger problem is lack of necessary will at the very top. And that is not something reports from institutions like ADB can solve. The education problem is so obvious and acute that we don’t even need anybody from the outside to put the spotlight on it. Sadly, it has never been given the attention it deserves.
And now that we are one of the most densely populated, poorest and most illiterate countries in the whole world, it might already be too late to do something about it.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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