When gestures are important

PTI MPA Ziaullah Bangash’s decision to enrol his daughter, Abeeya Zia, at a government school in Kohat is perhaps a cosmetic gesture. This is what has been said about the highly publicised step taken by the MPA, who claims that the decision demonstrates the PTI government’s commitment to improve the standard of public sector schools and ensure that they are able to provide quality education.

However, in many ways, the gesture draws attentions towards an issue that has been ignored for too long in the country. The failure of our public education sector has increasingly left people dependent on either low-quality and poorly regulated private schools – which are essentially run as businesses – or on madressahs which suffer from their own problems. Instead of spending so much money and time on attempting to control private schools or regulate madressahs, the government could mend the schools that it runs itself so that they can provide meaningful education to children.

It is no secret that the quality of these schools has worsened sharply over the years and even the best-known public sector schools are now in shambles. These schools, at one time, produced scientists and scholars such as Dr Abdul Salam and poets like Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Today, it seems hard to believe that these schools could replicate such a feat. Successive reports and studies carried out in all four provinces of the country – most notably in Sindh – have reported that hundreds of schools stand deserted like ghost structures as there are no real teachers or pupils.

Many other schools in all four provinces of the country lack proper classrooms, furniture, water or power supplies or even boundary walls. Teacher absenteeism remains high. The lack of teachers and their failure to impart education that meets the needs of pupils means the dropout rates before class five stands at around 50 percent – despite repeated promises made over the years to change this trend.

Altering the nature of government schools could therefore hold the key to many other aspects in life. The lack of priority given to this matter has been one of the biggest failures of governments since the 1950s. The fact that the children of policymakers or others who hold power do not attend government-run schools is a pivotal factor in this regard.

It is not necessary that we eliminate all other tiers of education. Instead, it is necessary that we do all that is possible to raise the standards of government schools and make them a viable option for families who have been forced to either remove children from schools and enrol them at madressahs or struggle to bear the exorbitant fee and other costs of even smaller private schools.

Many of these schools – that often label themselves as ‘English medium’ – have no trained teaching staff and few other facilities. Despite this, the belief that almost any private school is better than a public sector school strongly determines decisions made within many households about their child’s education prospects.

To raise the level of government schools, the budget available for education – which currently stands at barely two percent of the GDP – will have to be increased. But beyond this, we will need to see a genuine commitment to education by the government at all levels. The devolution of education to the provinces also means that the provincial governments will have to play an active role in this effort.

The experience of Ziaullah Bangash’s daughter will be important. It will demonstrate whether the KP government has truly managed to bring about any change in the quality of learning at government schools or whether the problems that hold back the operation of any administration have left it unable to do so. Regardless, the reality as we all know it is that government schools generally fail to offer young pupils the education they need to move forward in life. Attending a government school itself has become a stigma. Most parents make desperate attempts to avoid such a fate for their children.

If the operation of government schools is changed, the repercussion will be potentially vast. In the first place, enrolment and literacy is quite likely to increase. More often than not, many people opt to send their children to work solely because they are receiving very little education at schools.

The poor quality of textbooks and also their content adds to this problem. The purpose of education, beginning at the primary level, is to enable children to develop their capacity to think and reason logically. Our failure to achieve this at our schools is one of the reasons for the alarming growth of intolerance and brutalities in our country. We often talk about madressahs and the extremist mindset they foster in children. In many ways, this mindset is also being constructed at our government schools where rote-learning remains the main means of teaching children and teachers – who are often poorly educated themselves – are unwilling to allow curiosity to flourish.

Children learn without understanding the content of their books. Surveys that are carried out by private groups working to improve educational quality suggest that government schools pupils in class five are, in a significant number of cases, unable to write a sentence in either Urdu or any other language. They also struggle with simple mathematical calculations. This alarming state of affairs needs to be urgently looked into if we are to rescue our country from the darkness it faces.

The failure to introduce quality examinations through our local boards has, to some degree, contributed to the problem. The elitism at schools, which Imran Khan talks about so frequently, has been created in the past by the fact that the more privileged pupils take examinations set by foreign bodies. Only the less privileged take examinations set by local boards.

There is quite a distinct difference in the quality of examinations set by local and foreign boards. The various examination boards in the provinces and other territories have all struggled to modernise the matriculation system and set examination papers that test the ability of students to think and comprehend rather than to learn by memorising large chunks of texts. Changing this system could bring about a definite improvement in the manner in which schools are run and teachers deliver their lessons.

We also need a major investment in teachers and their training. At present, the teaching profession enjoys little status and limited financial rewards. For these reasons, only the least-able tend to opt for a career in a sphere that is perhaps more important than most others in any society. The example of Finland, where teachers earn the highest salary among other professionals, including doctors and lawyers, shows us the right direction. Finnish schools are ranked as the best educational institutions in the world. We cannot hope to reach the same standards immediately. But we can at least try to work towards this goal.

How hard we try to achieve the goal of improving government schools is fundamental to our future. We cannot say if the young daughter of the MPA from Kohat will stay at her current school over a long period of time. We do hope, however, that the step taken by her father – whatever his reasons may be – will, at least, highlight the issues at the public sector level and persuade governments and other institutions with influence of the need to direct major attention to save the public school sector from the ruins it finds itself in today.

The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor.

Email: kamilahyat@hotmail.com