Right to education: A mere castle in Pakistan’s constitutional air

Karachi
While Article 25-A of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan assures provision of education to all, no implementation mechanism has been devised and no laws promulgated to ensure the application of this most important of articles.
This was the common lament of speakers at a session, ‘The Constitutional Right to Education: From Access to Quality Learning for All’, held on the third and final day of the Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) on Sunday.
Noted educationist Baela Jamil asserted that the 5 to 16 age group remains the most sensitive and it was vital that a child be educated at this juncture. Quoting the Annual State of Education Report (ASER) 2014, she said 279,427 children were covered in the survey and it was found that there had been a decline of four percent in the number of school-going children.
Commenting on the state of government schools, dean and director of the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) and former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), Dr Ishrat Husain, said, “We found it to be a picture of neglect and suggested that higher and tertiary education be made a federal subject, while primary education be handed over to the provinces.”
He said pay scales of clerks and teachers were the same and added that he had advised the government to revise the ratio and bring it at par with teachers’ qualifications and experience. “We suggested that if a school teacher in Balochistan was drawing Rs10,000 per month, it should be upped to Rs15,000.”
Arfa Sayeda Zehra, a professor of Urdu at Forman Christian College, Lahore, complained that our curricula had no role of the masses or governments in their framing.
Former federal education minister Zubaida Jalal said that Article 25-A assured the right to education to all and laws had been passed in that regard but, regrettably, there had been no action.
She said only four percent of girls in rural Balochistan had access to education, something, she felt, warranted greater federal attention.
“Last year, 27 percent of Balochistan’s budget went to education. Why then, one should ask, is there no improvement?” she said, adding that governance issues had their part to play in the dismal situation.
Ameena Saiyid, the managing director of Oxford University Press (OUP), said that apart from issues like governance and curricula, what needed to be done first and foremost was getting the children into schools by inducing the parents to have them enrolled. They, she said, must not be allowed to remain idle.
Sabrina Dawood, principal of Dawood Public School, was of the view that what really was affecting the children’s education today was fear and violence and, in this context, cited the carnage that unfolded at Peshawar’s Army Public School on December 16, 2014. “In the present context, security conditions merit priority. The element of fear must be taken away from the learning process,” she stated.