The federal cabinet has finally approved the education policy. It aims to raise annual budgetary allocation for education up to 7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and increase literacy rate to 85 percent by 2015. Contrasting this with current figures of 2 percent of GDP and a literacy rate of around 54 percent, a rate achieved because of successive governments' penchant for applying an extremely lax definition of literacy, the targets are ambitious indeed.
However if one looks in the context of the present government's tendency to be overly optimistic in terms of not only its ability to generate revenue from multiple sources, internal as well as external, coupled with a record of mercilessly slashing development expenditure when ever there is a shortfall in revenue generation one is forced to look at the education policy with a high degree of skepticism.
This is not to deny that if the government is successful in injecting 7 percent of GDP into education it would not only effectively deal with the menace of terrorism and fundamentalism in the long-term but also make governments in Pakistan more democratic and transparent as that is the demand of a literate population.
The education policy did not dwell on the differences in literacy rates in various provinces but Federal Education Minister Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani did note that an inter-provincial forum of education ministers had been given a supervisory role in the new policy.
It is relevant to note that around 60 percent of the population is literate in Punjab province, with male and female rates given as 70% and 51% respectively; in NWFP, 47.4% population of the province is literate, out of which 63% are male and 30.8% female; literacy rate of Sindh province is about 51.5% out of which 60.5% are male and 42.5% female and 34% population of Balochistan are literate and the literacy rate of male and female is about 45% and 23% respectively.
It is imperative for the government to take account of these differences and identify areas within provinces where literacy rates are low and therefore the focus of the government during the early stage of implementation of the education policy. However in NWFP, Balochistan and perhaps Southern Punjab enhanced education opportunities in Taliban ridden areas has to be accompanied by a heightened level of security.
The policy also envisages the merging of FA (class 11 and 12) into school, as is the practice in the US, and higher education enrolment would be increased from the current 4.7 percent to 10 percent by 2015 and 15 percent by 2020. It is not quite clear if the merger would become an administrative nightmare for those engaged in its implementation.
There seem to be dichotomies in the parameters set out in the Education Policy 2009. For example, the government plans to explore avenues to increase contribution of the private sector, which at present stands at 16 percent of total educational spending. Will it be on public-private partnership basis?
As the private sector already has an edge in terms of quality of academia and teaching methodologies over public sector institutions, largely because of traditional fund starvation of public sector education in the country, won't it further solidify the existing dichotomies?
However, the policy thrust to teach formal subjects at Madrassa level is a good initiative that will help the marginalised segments of society to join the national mainstream, which in the long run can also help address the problem of extremism. According to experts, school curriculum in Pakistan has been largely unresponsive to the country's needs, as proper focus in the local context has been missing.
Secondly, the curriculum revision has been mostly irregular and non-standardised mainly because of education bureaucracy's alleged whims and manoeuvrings, often in cahoots with unethical sections of the book trade. Thirdly, deficiencies in the curricula have resulted in poor development of analytical skills among students, which has had a damaging impact on education sector. Fourthly, there is a need to match vocational skills with requirements of the labour market to ensure productive employment.
The curricula formulation, medium of instruction and academic and professional standard of teachers are the most critical planks, in which we have been patently deficient. The second major policy flaw has been the English-Urdu duality, which has cemented the existing disparities. Then, there is the urban-rural duality, which has further complicated things.
Proper focus on provision of education in rural areas will help reduce the speed of rural-urban migration in quest of quality education. Above all, this will help develop talent in both rural and urban areas at parallel planes. The government should further fine-tune the Education Policy parameters to augment its effectiveness.
The Education Minister stated that education is a provincial subject and the federal government only takes policy decisions in this regard. This may be seen by provincial governments as the Centre's desire to have its cake and eat it too; or passing the buck onto the provincial government, akin to the Minister for Industries exhortation to the Punjab government to implement the sugar price according to the Lahore High Court decision while he had gone ahead earlier and made a controversial price deal with the sugar mill owners without taking other stakeholders on board including the provincial governments.
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