“All children deserve education of equal standard”

January 19, 2025

Dr Abdul Hameed Nayyar is a physicist and was professor at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, where he taught for over three decades. Following his retirement, he taught at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore. He has also led the Ali Institute of Education in Lahore. As a senior research fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, he co-authored key reports on education, including a critical review of public school curricula and textbooks. Speaking to The News on Sunday, Dr Nayyar discusses critical flaws in Pakistan’s education system and suggests pathways towards reform.

“All children deserve education of equal standard”

The News on Sunday: From your vast experience, what simple changes in the public education system do you think can make a positive difference?

Dr Abdul Hameed Nayyar: The public school system follows government-prescribed curricula and textbooks and prepares students for public examinations, which are prescribed and controlled by the government through the thirty-six boards of intermediate and secondary education. This system has been declining for decades. It is poorly funded and managed; uses poor pedagogy; forces students to memorise texts; does not enhance their critical and analytical skills; and, ultimately, produces literate individuals who lack creative skills.

No simple changes could make our current public schooling system competitive globally. Yet, many think that a little more generous input into the education system could make a difference. For example, Pakistan’s public education system is starved. The internationally prescribed expenditure on education is 4 percent of the GDP, which public education in Pakistan has never had. Currently, it is a shameful 1.5 percent. Consequently, it cannot provide schooling facilities to all its children. Nearly one-third of all school-age children are not in school.

On the other hand, designing good curricula that meet international standards, writing and printing high-quality textbooks, posing challenging examination questions that distract students from rote memorisation, and making classroom teaching more interesting for students do not depend on providing more financial resources.

Thus, the tasks are all identifiable, but none are simple. It is important to appreciate the enormity of the problem.

TNS: What do you see as the biggest challenges in making primary education accessible to every child in Pakistan; what can be done to address these?

Dr AHN: The biggest challenges are the availability of schools for children; children’s dread of these schools; children not learning enough despite the time spent there; and parents losing an earning member or a helping hand in household chores when the child goes to school.

What can make a difference are the following:

(a) Make schools available to every child. Primary schools should be a walking distance away for every child.

(b) The school environment should be such that the child yearns to go to school every morning.

(c) Primary school learning should:

(i) Be fun-filled, not a dreary burden.

(ii) Be in the mother tongue. In a class of mixed mother tongues, the language should be one which children are all familiar with and easily understand.

(iii) Combine not just literacy and numeracy but also arts and crafts and teach children friendship and togetherness.

(iv) Not have any examinations, no competition for positions.

(v) Not get any homework.

(vi) All primary teachers ought to have a course on Montessori.

(d) Child labour should be strictly forbidden. The right to education laws should prescribe punishment for employers of children.

(e) Parents should be adequately compensated for the lost livelihood because of the child being in school.

TNS: How do you think the education system should evolve, especially with AI and automation shaping the job market?

DR AHN: It is still evolving, and it is still unclear who benefits from this and how we prepare future generations to face its challenges. The implications of AI for present-day societies are quite similar to those of microprocessor technology in the early 1980s. Examining them would help us see which policies help nations benefit from such developments and which do not.

Computer technology, invented in the 1940s, had found rather limited use in the initial decades. It was used mainly for number crunching in the scientific and financial sectors. Very few people were attracted to it until the early 1980s, when electronic miniaturisation led to the evolution of microprocessors and mini-computers, which led to the age of personal computers. This development opened up a large job market for persons trained in mathematics, physics and electronics. This was the point where nations that had invested adequately and wisely in education gained immensely from the new openings and earned good dividends.

India was among such nations. It had invested heavily in high-class education from the beginning, setting up competitive IITs whose graduates were well prepared to embrace the new technology, helping India earn tens of billions of dollars a year from software exports alone. Pakistan, in contrast, had not paid sufficient attention to advanced education; was left behind; and still struggles to earn a few hundred million dollars a year from this technology.

This goes to show that a national investment in modern education never fails to pay back.

Nevertheless, introducing AI in primary classes would be overzealous. If we establish a good education system in our country with a focus on modern disciplines and do not starve it of the needed funding, the educated youth thus produced will have no difficulty comprehending and using AI for useful outcomes.

TNS: How can we start bridging the gap between what is offered at public schools and that at private schools?

Dr AHN: One major difference between elite private schools and public schools is the certification examination. Local matriculation examinations are pathetic compared to the foreign examinations private schools prepare their students for.

The question is: are persons employed in our examination boards (in all 36 of them) so incompetent that they cannot change to setting up exams like the foreign boards? It is a common observation that there are hardly any teachers who can set exam questions that go up on the learning skills ladder beyond the reproduction of text. They seem to have never been trained to ask questions that test higher cognitive skills. All have, thus, settled into a laissez-faire: what and how the teachers teach; how examiners set question papers; how graders grade answer books; and how the boards avoid any change.

Pakistani parents pay over Rs 2 billion a year to foreign boards for O- and A-level exams. If the Pakistani government decides to hold such examinations internally, that amount could be saved and educational standards could be vastly improved. This would be a sure-shot way of bridging the gap between the education that children of the elite and common citizens receive.

TNS: What are some practical, low-cost strategies that could help improve education in rural areas?

Dr AHN: One should not be looking for a low-cost substitute for education for rural children. Rural children deserve to receive an education of the same standard that their fellow urban students get. We need to keep in mind that all education systems pursue two objectives: one, to provide standard education equally to all; and two, to keep eyes open for the special brains that can be turned into bright minds because they are a potential national asset.

Nature produces brains of varying capabilities completely randomly, with as many in rural backgrounds as in urban. For this reason, all children deserve to receive education of equal standard. Missing out on cultivating a promising brain is a potential national loss. In nearly all developed societies, promising children are offered the option of accelerated learning.


The interviewer is a freelance contributor

“All children deserve education of equal standard”