While differences among various socio-economic strata exist even in the most egalitarian societies, one good definition of social justice is the provision of equal opportunities for graduating from a lower socio-economic stratum to a higher one through one's own efforts. In today's world where economies are becoming increasingly knowledge-based, equal access to educational facilities provides a ladder to the illiterate and poor to climb into higher socio-economic groups. The emergence of huge middle class of educated professionals in several developing countries - Malaysia and India to quote two - are examples of using education as means to climb up the social ladder. By reverse logic, when access to educational facilities itself becomes a hereditary and a money related affair, clearly something is wrong somewhere. It is a warning sign. Thus over and above the sanctity otherwise attached to education, I relate access to educational facilities to social justice.

The famous 1947 Education Concurrence, held only months after the creation of Pakistan, had set the target of free and compulsory education within 20 years, i.e. by 1967. While researchers on that period are engaged in their debate on Liaquat Ali Khan's invitation to visit Moscow and reasons why he opted to go to Washington instead, in hindsight, if we had achieved that one target of free and compulsory education by 1967, we would have achieved more than what we did through the so-called green and industrial revolutions and several other slogan generating hypes. I wish we had achieved that target; if not by 1967, by 2007.

Far from providing free and compulsory education, literacy rates showed no remarkable improvement till 1967. In fact, the standards of education went down. No wonder we all heard from our elders that a matriculate of the 'goray ka zamana' was superior to a graduate of today. I have no doubts about that. Worse still, the importance that the sector received in 1947 and was manifest in the organisation of the Education Conference right in the middle of a billion insurmountable problems like refugees and utter lack of institutions withered away. "Karwan kay dil say ehsas-i-ziyan jata raha". Just three years before the completion of the 20 year target period in 1967, (the then) President Ayub Khan told a gathering of teachers on April 2, 1964, that his government would not hesitate from spending more on education if the country had the resources to do that. That, by the way was mid-60s, a period remembered in our history as an era of exemplary economic development. Of what use was all this economic development if our future generations had to remain illiterate?

The issue is not of resources but that of priorities. If you asked me the single most important factor that marred our education system, it was the lack of commitment and political will to educate our people. A litmus test of this commitment-deficit is the fact that all subsequent education policies - of 1959, 1970, 1972, and 1998 - had one commonality; they set lofty applause winning targets without providing matching resources. The most recent example is the 10 year 1998 policy which, inter-alia, set the target of increasing participation rate in higher education from 3 percent to 7 percent. It also stipulated that this would require an increase in the expenditure on education from 2.2 percent to 4 percent of the GDP. Ten years down the line, neither the spending on education has increased nor has (quite logically) the target been achieved, even half way. It is this lack of commitment that has led to a decay of our educational system which forms the backbone of any society.

Another indicator of our lack of seriousness is the lack of data on our educational facilities. Interestingly, the data provided by different government sources (Economic Survey of Pakistan, PSLM survey and the Education Census) is mutually inconsistent. This puts to doubt the authenticity of all such sources. Even if one were to trust these mutually contradictory figures, these are grossly inadequate for a policy maker. The available estimates and evaluation our educational system is at best based on head or institution counts. The element of quality of education is totally missing. While one could find in the government documents like the Economic Surveys the number of schools, the teachers or the pupils, what is needed but not available is the performance of these numbers. This lack of performance evaluation system masks inefficiencies of the system. In one of my recent articles on Tharparkar District ('Paradoxes in our society - Tharparkar: a case study', The Post, August 26, 2008), I had brought out the paradox of that District which had perhaps the highest concentration of primary schools in the world and yet one of the lowest literacy rates. What are the policy makers going to do with such figures; in all sincerity they would set them aside and go by their guess work. All this is happening in a country with 12 million primary school age children rotting out of schools and being added to the already existing pool of 40 million adult illiterates.

One example of the governance failure in the public sector is the inverse relationship between the teachers' salaries and their performance. As a matter of generalisation, private schools provide better quality education than their public sector counterparts. Paradoxically, in general, private school teachers get lower salaries than those in the public sector. That demonstrates governance failures, i.e. if at all such failures need any demonstration. Don't we all know that many Urdu dailies publish their 'guess' of the matriculation papers a day before the examination which is magically close to the actual question papers. I have seen these newspapers being sold two rupees a copy right under the nose of the Education Ministry Offices.

While the importance and the necessity for the private sector in education to supplement inadequate government facilities cannot be questioned, provision of education across the board is the responsibility of the state. Private sector education, especially at the school level has resulted in serious aberrations resulting in multiple systems of education and curricula. Most importantly, it has also drawn a deep cleavage between the elite who send their children to private schools and the poor masses who cannot afford them and per force have to bank on government facilities. When government school children fail to obtain the fruit of their efforts, they lose their faith in education as a vehicle of improving their lot. That is of pivotal importance. This wide gap between the two has to be bridged by serious efforts to improve the government institutions alongside effective regulation of the curricula, the medium of education and the text books of course alongside. It is very easy to lecture the illiterate poor on the importance of education, very difficult to answer them if they asked, what are their children going to do after they have spent some time in a school with no teachers?

I leave other important issues like the total spending on education, priorities within the education sector and the need for harmony between the medium of education, the curricula and the textbooks for my next column.

Source: thepost.com.pk/OpinionNews.aspx?dtlid=184366&catid=11