Lagging Education: The Achilles’ Heel in Pakistani Development

by Richard H. Curtiss

“We increased social sector spending by 33 per cent. And by the year 2000 we intend to take Pakistan’s educational expenditure from 2.19 percent where we found it to 3 percent of our GNP. This is no easy task for a country with a difficult IMF structural program [and] with a ban on economic and military assistance from the only superpower in the world.”

—Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in a speech before the International Conference on Population and Development, Cairo, Sept. 5, 1994

Most Pakistanis would place among Pakistan’s top problems its 37 percent literacy rate, its seemingly irrepressible 2.8 percent birth rate, and its lack of progress in creating jobs for its burgeoning younger generation. Some would add to this dismal trio human rights, specifically including equal rights for women.

Pakistanis may disagree as to which of these three, or four, major problems comes first, but all can agree that none can be solved until there is greatly increased progress on the education front, specifically the problem of keeping Pakistani children, particularly girls, in school.

Male literacy in Pakistan is 50 percent. Female literacy is only 20 percent. Dr. Akhtar Hasan Khan, Pakistan’s secretary of education, who reports directly to the minister of education, explains that there are many reasons, most of them cultural, for the disparity.

Given the scarcity of skilled jobs for young people, parents see little point in sending their girls to school. Further, if schools are more than an easy walk from their homes, parents are uneasy about their daughters’ security. The fact is, says Dr. Khan, girls still are not treated equally in Pakistan and the disparity in education perpetuates this unequal treatment, forming a vicious circle.

In addition to the gap in male/female educational standards, Pakistan has other educational problems, according to Dr. Khan, who holds an M.A. from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D in economics from Tufts University in Massachusetts. One such problem is the medium of instruction.

Many Pakistanis speak a local language like Punjabi or Sindhi at home. However, in the public schools the medium of instruction from the beginning of the primary level is the national language, Urdu, and then, a couple of years later, but still at the primary level, students begin taking some classes where the medium of instruction is English. As they move every day from classes taught in Urdu to classes taught in English and back again, Dr. Khan believes, many of the students do not actually master the subject matter, particularly the majority of students who do not speak either language at home.

Further, this Pakistani educational official explains, since the days of British rule there has been an emphasis in the school system on arts and letters curricula. “Such a curriculum does not prepare people for jobs,” says Dr. Khan, “but our vocational and technical education facilities are not very strong.”

The Pakistani government tries to rectify this problem by confining its scholarships for training abroad largely to technical subjects that will prepare its brightest students to fill needs at home. Unfortunately, providing such opportunities, particularly when the study is in the United States, sometimes exacerbates the problem. The pay for technical professions in the United States far surpasses that in Pakistan, and many Pakistani students studying abroad find the means to stay there.

“Students from wealthy families generally return,” says Dr. Khan. But middle-class students tend to stay in the United States, increasing the brain drain from which Pakistan has suffered since its creation. Pakistan’s proximity to oil-producing Arab states, where jobs and relatively high salaries have been available to Pakistanis since the 1960s, has been another, major factor in this brain drain. The difference is that Pakistanis employed in the Arab states of the Gulf are denied citizenship and eventually come home, whereas most Pakistanis employed in the U.S., Britain and some countries of Europe eventually adopt foreign citizenship and remain abroad.

To solve its educational problems, the Pakistani government is going back to basics, according to Dr. Khan. Government social action programs aim at universalizing primary education among Pakistanis in the next few years, and to do this 6,000 new schools are being constructed annually, with special emphasis on schools for girls.

At the same time, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are working on educational programs to help students from locations where primary schools have not been available.

Similarly, a big program in vocational and technical education is being launched by both governmental and non-governmental organizations.

Further, the four Pakistani provinces are revising the curricula in almost every subject taught, placing greater emphasis on computer education and on computer linkages with all universities and with the Internet.

The biggest impediment to a major educational catch-up program is the lack of “committed and trained personnel, and the low social standing of educators,” according to Dr. Khan. Nevertheless, he predicts that educational facilities will be readily available to all Pakistani children by the year 2010, and that by that time all of the country’s children will be literate. With time, that would make illiteracy a thing of the past in Pakistan. This schedule does not seem unrealistic, since the school enrollment rate among Pakistani children has risen from 60 to 70 percent in recent years.

To speed progress, social barriers to education are being broken. At the primary level, coeducational schools now are accepted, making it easier to provide all children with easy access to a nearby school. Students then go to segregated schools through the secondary and college levels, which takes students through 14 years of education. At the graduate level (from the 15th grade onward) students no longer are segregated. Another innovation to help overcome the shortage of teachers is the use of female teachers in boys schools.

To further speed Pakistan’s educational development, according to Dr. Khan, the country must increase the percentage of its gross national product (GNP) being invested in education from the present 3 to 4 percent.

Dr. Khan, who at 58 has spent 23 years in Pakistan’s prestigious civil service, was a teacher for two years before receiving his civil service appointment, which is given on the basis of nationwide competitive tests. He has a son who he hopes will follow in his footsteps. So far his son has done so, having studied at the Wharton School of Finance in Philadelphia and the University of Chicago. The son now is working in the field of finance in New York City.

Whether he returns to Pakistan or remains in a prestigious job in the United States depends largely upon the availability of a comparable position in Pakistan when he is ready to choose. In microcosm, the choice he faces illustrates the plight of his country, which desperately needs highly trained specialists with the skills to fulfill its ambitious development goals, but which still can’t offer its best and brightest sons and daughters the salaries and amenities readily available to them abroad.