Planning educational emergency

‘What the best and wisest parents wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely, acted upon, it destroys our democracy.’ – An excerpt from the book ‘The school and society and the child and the curriculum’ by John Dewey

Educational emergency has become a buzz word in power corridors in recent days at both the federal and provincial levels, but sadly the vision shared in this regard lacks any wholesome, mission-oriented, and coordinated approach; some provision of financial and gadget level assistance, and random, haywire emphasis on certain aspects seriously lacks the focus the sector otherwise needs.

The situation of education in terms of institutional, organizational, and market levels – in terms of governance, and incentive structures, along with its economic philosophical underpinnings – the overall wrong macroeconomic emphasis in which the sector operates, along with multilateral and bilateral approach, is sub optimal, to say the least.

Here, the writer takes strong exception to categorizing humans as ‘capital’ because taking them something you prepare to invest for some gains is taking a very restrictive view of human free spirit, and its expression.

Hence, the objective should be to facilitate human faculties for becoming better humans, and any reward that is reaped from this expression should hold secondary importance to primary objective of creating an enlightened society. It is with this mindset education policy is approached.

The other thing that needs to shape educational curricula is keeping a healthy balance between conformity and creativity, and teaching methods, knowledge sources, and overall environment for holding meaningful discourse within and with others, should all uphold this goal in mind.

This approach among fulfilment of human rights is important for innovation, and sustainable economic, political, environmental, and overall social progress. Moreover, education should also help reach a balanced work-life balance for much-needed restoration of values, priorities, and goals of life in an overall optimal way. Hence, it is important to set educational goals in this over-arching framework.

The approach to dealing with any sector of the economy and overall social life, if it is to be planned in an urgent way on the lines of prioritizing it to be dealt with a sense of emergency, is to adopt a purpose-driven, mission-oriented way. Noted economist, Mariana Mazzucato defined such approach in her book ‘Mission economy: a moonshot guide to changing capitalism’ as ‘Conventional wisdom continues to portray government as clunky bureaucratic machine that cannot innovate: at best, its role is to fix, regulate, redistribute; it corrects markets when they go wrong. …we cannot move on from the key problems facing our economies until we abandon this narrow view.

Mission thinking of this kind… can help us restructure contemporary capitalism. The scale of reinvention calls for a new narrative and new vocabulary for our political economy, using the idea of public purpose to guide policy and business activity. This requires ambition – making sure that the contracts, relationships and messaging result in a more sustainable and just society.

And it requires a process that is as inclusive as possible, involving many value creators. Public purpose must lie at the centre of how wealth is created collectively to bring stronger alignment between value creation and value distribution.’

Hence, all the sectors involved with the education sector need to be encompassed in the education policy, including the way multilateral and bilateral financial and technical assistance is utilized in terms of scope and coordination, and also the macroeconomic philosophy being adopted.

Therefore, instead of the usual project assistance mode of assistance, programme loans, on the basis of a harmonized alignment by donors/development partners. Currently, different countries through donor agencies like USAID, CIDA, AusAid, for instance, and through the multilateral-natured pooled resources and umbrella frameworks suffer from discoordination, and duplication in certain areas of the education sector, while other areas receive little or no attention. It is, therefore, important that education sector-related assistance needs to take an overall sectoral approach, and rather than project aid, assistance should be planned in an overall programme way for the whole education sector.

Then, emphasis of macroeconomic policy on adopting neoliberal policies has not only reduced the role of public sector in proportions that has not allowed it to properly plan, and implement education policy that is optimal for the demos, primarily safeguarding it from the over profit-minded nature of the private sector, or from the negative fallout of market fundamentalism.

Moreover, over-emphasis on austerity policies to approach macroeconomic stabilization has unnecessarily squeezed public finances for the government, and also not allowed economic empowerment of the people. Hence, aggregate demand squeeze policies, primarily through over-reliance on using policy rate as a tool to serve this end, has reduced investment potential into education sector over the years both by the public and private sectors.

Creating larger fiscal space remains a challenge for the country like in a number of developing countries – especially due to a lack of proper debt restructuring strategy global, and over-board practice of austerity policies over the years, and especially since the Covid pandemic due to creation of greater expenditure needs, putting in place higher interest payments, and aggregate supply crisis globally, and over-profiteering increasing imported inflation in particular – which in turn means greater challenges in terms of making needed development expenditures in the education sector.

Hence, any educational emergency planning will remain seriously limited without enhancing tax base, and putting in place meaningful level of tax progressivity by shifting from mostly (indirect or) consumption-based taxes to (direct or) income taxes. Moreover, evidence over the last four decades or so, have shown that austerity policies reduce economic growth in view of the fact that a lot of economic growth sacrifice is taken for a short-lived macroeconomic stability. Lesser growth means lower taxes, and increased debt distress.

Moreover, a better sense of multilateral spirit needs to come to the fore in terms of meaningful debt relief, rules of trade, including intellectual property rights (IPRs), and better provision of climate change related special drawing rights (SDRs) by International Monetary Fund (IMF) especially to highly climate change vulnerable countries like Pakistan, who otherwise have very little contribution to causing climate change. Therefore, the emergency place for education sectors needs better economic diplomacy for not only this particular sector, but for overall inclusive, resilient, green economy.

Therefore, any education policy needs a social democratic-styled economic policy framework for ensuring that the government can play an optimal role both in terms of investment, and also keeping proper regulatory check on markets, and the private sector for better price recovery for educational services, and also for checking over-profiteering tendencies.

Moreover, with the fast-unfolding of existential threats like climate change crisis, and likelihood of ‘Pandemicene’ phenomenon, it is important to produce price signals that induce investment for making educational sector more adaptive, and resilient in terms of its preparedness against the changing environment.

Once again, optimal role of government, and in a well-capacitated way, is needed for dealing with these challenges, and for taking along private sector in a more responsible, and long-sighted way. So, when the government talks of placing an educational emergency, these aspects need to be internalized with a better sense of understanding with regard to scope, and needed deliverables.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024