One village, one school

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's suggestion recently that mobile education be offered notably in the rural areas of the four provinces as well as in Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan sounds useful, at least in the short term. The move would bring learning to groups of children who may currently be out of school because there are none available to them. It is assumed that mobile education would take the form of vehicles, bringing teachers and possibly educational equipment such as white or black boards, to villages across the country. How efficiently and effectively it can be run is, of course, a challenge, and one that can only be answered if we see the project in effect.

There is, however, a wider question to all this. Why are we, even more than seven decades after Partition, not able to provide schools for our children? And why does Pakistan have a literacy rate that is 60 per cent, the lowest in the region. It is also true that it has the highest number of out-of-school children in South Asia and also when compared to many of the African countries which have all managed to provide better education to their people. It should be noted that education is a key driver for social mobility and also for employment in various sectors as well as through industrialization. Wouldn’t investors prefer an educated, literate workforce rather than one which cannot manage sophisticated machines or sophisticated tasks? A failure to provide education may then be ranked as a leading factor in Pakistan’s lack of progress over the years and the crises it finds itself in today.

But we need to ask if mobile education is the answer. While this may solve the problem for a short term, what we really need is to put in place quality schools and institutions of secondary learning and possibly higher learning in centres that are accessible to children and young people, both boys and girls. At present there are simply too few schools to meet our population’s needs. We have also allowed the public sector education system to collapse completely. It is currently such a mess that children in class five, according to reports, are unable to read or write a sentence in either Urdu or English. The question of language is one that also needs to be addressed as well as the need to train teachers in a far more sophisticated and progressive way so they can impart quality education to their charges. The fact that all this is not happening, combined with the lack of amenities available at schools and the poor quality of textbooks etc, holds back education for millions. In the longer term, it is these factors which need to be addressed rather than simply providing education on wheels to children in remote parts of the country. This may be of some use in provinces like Balochistan where the population is spread out over in vast areas, but essentially we need a school in every village and one that can offer the children not just education in name, but also quality learning which adds meaning and benefit to their lives and to the lives of their families.