Education Reforms: Yet Another Sham 
by Pervez Hoodbhoy

posted: December 12, 2001

On 31 October 2000, at a meeting presided over by General Musharraf and attended by provincial ministers and governors, the federal minister of education presented the new “Education Sector Reforms – Action Plan”. In the weary tradition of a dozen previous such efforts, this 70-page document sets impossible targets and makes impossible promises. Worse, it is an “Action Plan” without clear specification of responsibilities, without a definite work-plan, and without a time-table by which progress could be monitored. It is a sham, clothed in the rhetoric of the Dakar Declaration, whose real purpose is to give the impression of policymaking when in fact the policy makers are clueless.

But first, I have a personal gripe. Together with a dozen other people from all over Pakistan, I had agreed to become a member of the Education Advisory Board (EAB) that was supposed to help prepare the Reforms. I participated in its many meetings in the hope that it could make a difference. Not all these meetings were productive – primarily because they were chaired by education ministry bureaucrats who set the agenda – but they did result in certain important decisions. However, when it came to the finished product, the EAB may as well have not existed. Sad to say, the whole idea of having a consultative body was eyewash, a waste of time and effort.

Now to the issues. The Action Plan has a gimmick -- compulsory primary education -- and it is unconvincing. The lion’s share of the budget – a whopping 29 billion rupees out of a total of 52 billion rupees – goes straight into the bricks-and-mortar for 8504 new primary schools. While hungry building contractors and government officials responsible for awarding lucrative contracts will rub each other's hands in glee, the benefits to education are less certain. Study after study has established that the real problem in primary education is the lack of qualified teachers and, to a lesser extent, teaching materials. But teacher training gets only a measly 0.8 billion rupees, and even this is to be spent in the same old unproductive manner with a big chunk going on making hostels for trainee teachers.

Astonishingly, issues of correcting wholesale corruption and school mal-administration find no mention either in the main document or the accompanying addenda. Instead there is a call for setting up a staggering 90,000 new schools without buildings, in addition to the 8504 schools mentioned above, at a cost of 8.6 billion rupees. How so many new schools can be properly administered within the present system boggles the mind. In his speech at the Army Education Corps conference held at the National Library in June 2000, General Musharraf claimed that ghost schools constitute 20% of all schools in Pakistan. If taken literally, this amounts to nearly 32,000 schools without students but whose ghost headmasters, headmistresses, and teachers draw real salaries.

To be sure, there is no real source of quantitative data by which to confirm or refute the General’s numbers, and the Army Education Corps compiled no report after its blitzkrieg on ghost schools in Punjab in 1998. Even so, few Pakistanis doubt that the education system is massively hemorrhaging from within. In this circumstance, does it make sense to build thousands of new school buildings while keeping intact a wholly dysfunctional system of administration, monitoring, and evaluation?

Let us now come to the higher education section of this grandiose “Action Plan”. The target is to increase enrollment in universities by 100% over a period of 3 years, at a cost of 10.6 billion rupees. To anyone who knows the real problem of Pakistani universities, and knows the difference between the possible and impossible, this proposed target makes him or her cringe.

The abysmally poor quality of our universities owes primarily to the lack of qualified university teachers, rather than buildings or equipment. This is especially evident in technology and scientific disciplines. Even technical institutions such as GIK and NUST, which pay very high salaries, have failed in attracting quality faculty that could make them remotely comparable even with a B class university in Europe or the US. In our state universities the situation is much more acute. In such circumstances it is unreasonable and irresponsible to claim that enrollment can be doubled in 3 years unless some radical plan, such as importing university teachers, is simultaneously adopted. There is absolutely no indication of any such scheme.

New schools and teachers aside, if one is serious about improving education in Pakistan then action has to be taken in reforming curricula, examinations, and school textbooks. Unfortunately, the Action Plan is no different from previous ones on this score. The currently enforced curriculum contains absurdities sufficient to fill a little book. For example, Class-V children must “learn to identify rumour mongers”, to "make a chart of the administrative setup of the province", to "demonstrate by action a fear of Allah", and are asked to “collect pictures of soldiers and policemen”. The head of the curriculum wing of the ministry of education flatly refuses to delete any of these items. The minister of education seems pre-occupied with cutting ribbons and foreign visits, and has no time to fight this battle.

The Pakistani system is strongly examination driven, but poor testing procedures, excessive memorization and widespread cheating have made exam results dubious indicators of student performance and learning. The Action Plan allocates a budget of precisely zero rupees for reforming the country’s 22 examination boards. The rationale given is that these boards, whose mismanagement and corruption is almost legendary, will realize the necessity for self-reform and fund their own rehabilitation. This mighty leap of faith reflects astounding ignorance of the situation, and would be funny if the consequences were not so tragic.

Elaborate plans for restructuring and improving the examination boards – which requires a good bit of money – have existed for a decade, the result of careful studies by international teams of educational experts. The reports, representing years of effort and money, lie on the dusty shelves of the Ministry of Education, and no bureaucrat or well-heeled consultant has bothered to read them while preparing the new grand plan for reforming education. Instead, a sum of 50 million rupees shall be spent on a “National Education Assessment System”, NEAS. But pray, shall someone enlighten us as to why the “National Education Testing System”, NETS, has never functioned since its establishment a decade ago? Will substituting “A” for “T” really make the difference? Will it smell any sweeter?

One fears for a nation when a semi-literate bureaucracy, which couldn’t care less about education, is empowered to write proposals for “education reform” and make decisions that will determine the lives of the young and the yet unborn. One fears its policy makers, in office but too easily willing to be powerless. One fears, most of all, a people who seem not to care enough to act.

from Chowk.com