While hearing a complaint from a Faisalabad citizen on Tuesday regarding the state of education, a Supreme Court bench, presided over by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhary, observed that the country's education system is in a complete mess.
The complainant had made his case through a letter, which the CJ turned into a writ petition, pointing to some fundamental flaws in the present education system. The complainant's chief grievance was that the government had abdicated its role in the field of education, leaving the citizens at the mercy of the private sector that hardly had any interest in promoting education.
More to the point, he submitted, it was extremely difficult for him to send his children to better-run private schools since he had to provide for a family of five with his monthly income of Rs 5000.
He prayed to the court to direct the Punjab government to do something about improving the public sector schools and making private schools more accessible so that he could send his children to a good educational institution.
That indeed is a serious indictment of successive governments, including the present one. Here is a person eager enough to provide proper education to his offspring but finds it beyond his means.
The case goes on to show how parental aspirations in majority of cases get nipped in the bud, and the country's human capital remains in a dismal state of underdevelopment. An idea of what it means for this nation's socio-economic progress can be had from President General Pervez Musharraf's recent lament that even if three percent of our population is properly educated, it can easily outnumber the well-educated workforce in any of the Scandinavian countries.
Of course, he did not mean that Pakistan should aim to equip only three percent of its people with modern learning and know-how, but that a huge segment of the human resource potential remains unutilised or under-utilised.
Successive governments in this country, the present government included, have been making lofty claims about aiming at achieving hundred percent literacy and improving the government-run institutions' standard of education, which has deteriorated drastically over the last two-and-a-half decades.
But budgetary allocations to both education and health care sectors have remained extremely low as a percentage of the GDP. Further aggravating the matters is the sad reality that whatever rupee allocations become available to the two sectors these are not utilised effectively.
Last year, for instance, the federal and provincial allocations to education stood at Rs 208 billion. It was a substantial increase from an allocation of Rs 111 billion three years earlier. Yet there is no visible betterment in the field, which raises the question where has all that money gone? Then there is the problem of a heavy pro-urban bias in the setting up of new educational institutions.
Needing special attention, as the petitioner pointed out, is the issue of fees. There has been a big proliferation of private sector schools from the nursery level all the way up to colleges and universities, all of them asking for astronomical fees. Unfortunately, even the previously government-run premier educational institutions, after getting autonomy a while ago, have been charging hefty fees, pushing good education out of the reach of talented but economically disadvantaged students.
That is hardly a plan for putting the country on the road to social and economic progress. Indeed, if one is to identify a single feature of commonality that distinguishes the developed countries from the developing ones, whether in the West or the East, it is their firm commitment to education.
It is possible for countries to be rich without education but no nation can claim a place in the advanced world without popularising learning and encouraging the quest for knowledge. The desperate father's petition in the Supreme Court for proper schooling of his children is a wake-up call to which the government must pay urgent attention.