Education is the least of our concerns. The sheer number of M.Phil and PhD degrees awarded at various universities is ample testimony to our nonchalance towards higher education. As for the state of affairs of secondary education, it has taken a comical turn.

It is ironical how the astronomically high marks in Matriculation or Intermediate levels hardly correspond with the knowledge of the examinees.

Anyone having appeared in matriculation examination 30 years ago will certainly go berserk to see the high percentage of marks being doled out by various secondary boards. The top position holder at the matriculation level got 1083 out of 1100, a fact good enough to stun a normal being. As if it was not enough, a newspaper carried news the other day about a girl from Gujranwala secondary board securing marks which were just one short of the total. The chief of the Punjab administration was prompt enough to hand her a cash prize.

Is not it an ‘Alice in a wonderland’ situation? At the GC University, marks scored by the last student in the category of pre-medical were 1043 and the last student admitted in the pre-engineering category got 1035 marks out of 1100. One thing is absolutely clear that the secondary boards are unabashedly promoting rote learning. Regrettably, a farce is being promoted in the name of education. The retentive memory that can store certain swathes of information which can be recalled and reproduced at will is all our secondary education system has been reduced to. Examinees are supposed to answer questions in one liner(s) or maximum two. Almost half of the question paper comprises of objective type questions that could only be answered by memorising.

Curriculum has also been cut down quite drastically which does not stretch the faculties of students.

All said and done, exams conducted by secondary board(s) are just a facile and worthless exercise and nobody is paying any heed to it. It may be anything but not education by any account. Education is something entirely different.

The very word education is etymologically derived from the Latin word education which means "a breeding, a bringing up, a rearing". Education in the modern terms "is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and habits". The educational methods include storytelling (it may involve literature or history), discussion, teaching by arousing curiosity among the young minds through various methods of pedagogy. Eventually, a student is groomed through education into a responsible citizen who is cognizant of his/her rights and obligations. They are also encouraged to abide by the rules, laws of the land and the constitution.

Sadly, all this does not happen by reproducing stuff that is committed to memory through act of incessant cramming. Neither does it happen by preventing young children to develop and, subsequently, hone their analytical skills. Most of the high achievers in secondary board exams are unable to even construct a single sentence. The acquisition of skills required for developing of the argument which subsequently leads to the construction of a concept or a notion remains an untenable proposition.

With the existing pedagogic system, knowledge, skills and values can neither be instilled nor disseminated among the taught.

The next question of considerable relevance is the reason for the secondary education’s steep decline over the years. It is not hard to delineate.

For the last 25 years or so, education has steadily been taken over by private schools. The elite sections of our society clearly preferred foreign examination boards over the traditional education from local secondary boards. Gradually, Pakistani middle classes followed suit. In a bizarre way, a vast majority of the children from upper-middle classes are seeking instruction which has foreign orientation. Majority of their book are authored by foreign writers. Their question papers are set by foreign academics and similarly, in most cases, their answer sheets are judged by foreign examiners with the exception of Urdu, Islamiat and Pakistan Studies.

Are we preparing a Pakistani citizen here, is another pertinent question? The English speaking students of O &A levels or those aspiring to go for International Baccalaureate deem Pakistan merely as a springboard that may get them eventually to ‘better’ destinations.

It is an undisputed back, however, that the standard of local education retains a semblance of respectability only when children from the upper-middle classes are taught and tested through it. Otherwise, its standard is bound to plummet; particularly when the secondary boards are left to cater to those who don’t have means to send their children to private school charging hefty fees. Thus the question of class differentiation becomes extremely significant here. Not only the possibility of social mobility has been squeezed for the marginalised but the class difference is widened quite substantially. There is no bigger and starker social reality than class, which is constantly being overlooked.

Now that an allusion has been drawn to disconnect between the upper-middle classes and the Pakistani state and society, one may argue that the citizenry can connect with the state only when it is disciplined through local education. Acclaimed educationists (with progressive and integrative orientation) from every discipline should be encouraged to write course books at least for the students of schools and colleges. History, geography and culture of the land ought to be the particular focus of those books. Through these texts, young minds are instructed to contemplate and also express.

That is how one learns to represent oneself. One thing that must be underscored is that real independence comes with self-representation and education is the only source of it. It never comes by clinging on to the foreign education system. It never does. We have to reform our local education. There is no other way.