An education sector that can produce only warriors...

Daily times, September 1, 2005
EDITORIAL: An education sector that can produce only warriors...

After the Punjab University in Lahore announced its 2005 BA/BSc annual examinations results on Tuesday, it became clear that Pakistan’s real crisis lies in the education sector. A total of 142,785 students appeared in the examinations, out of which only 50,951 passed, which comes to 35.68 percent only. The boys flunked more than the girls who grabbed all the top positions in BA and BSc. They also showed a significantly higher pass ratio in all subjects. BA examinees from Lahore fared worst of all. No college from “the city of education” and its suburbs could get any prominent position in the examinations.

All the good positions were secured by students appearing from other towns of the province. First divisions among girls in BA stood at 6,438 and among boys at 1,245. In BSc the figure was 1,019 for girls and only 716 for boys. The girl who came first in BA was from Mandi Bahauddin, and the one who came second was from Chunian, both one horse towns-come-lately! A report said that 10 colleges in Punjab failed to get a single pass in the exams. All these colleges, which might as well not have competed at all, are run by the state. The institutions included the famous Zamindara College in Gujrat! The college has a brilliant past. A large number of great Pakistanis graduated from there or taught there. The chief minister of the Punjab comes from Gujrat. There may be things happening in Gujrat — like the police assaulting citizens watching plays on stage — but education is not one of them. Among the many districts for which the chief minister is responsible is his own, whose education standards have fallen through the floor.

The abysmal performance in Punjab has come in the wake of repeated announcements made by the provincial government that teachers’ careers would be planned in the light of the results demonstrated by their institutions. But it is quite clear that many teachers in Punjab have not taken these announcements seriously. Education continues to be a provincial service and at this level no career is properly planned. No self-respecting citizen wants to become a teacher unless he is a ‘loser’ content to live in semi-starvation. Those who are not ‘losers’ and have waited in vain for the state to come to their rescue have taken to after-hours tuition centres and no longer depend on the pittance they receive as salaries from the state. Absenteeism is rampant and there is nothing in the textbooks worth reading anyway.

Only 35 percent of the youth who aspired to be graduates have actually passed the exam. What will happen to the rest? They will try to retain their seats in the overcrowded colleges. Many of them will not be able to do so, in which case they will either enlist with private tuition centres or swell the population of the unemployed. In this 65 percent who have failed, most are boys who will now roam the streets looking for ‘causes’ to support. Some of them will become dacoits, others will be attracted to religious fanaticism to give substance to the charge that terrorists mostly don’t come from the madrassas, but from middle- class families with state ‘education’. On the other side of the fence, the seminaries in Pakistan enlist a million pupils and throw up thousands of ‘graduates’ every year with nothing much to do except set up new mosques to earn their livelihood.

The news about the heart-breaking pass percentage in BA broke as PTV was rerunning President Pervez Musharraf’s address at an Islamabad seminar informing a foreign audience that there was no way a million seminarians could be looked after by the state. He was asking a dozen madrassa federations to get their seminaries registered and include some secular subjects in their syllabi to enable their pupils to join the job market. All this will hopefully lessen the number of those forced to live in complete isolation from society with their minds filled with thoughts of revenge. Needless to say, the federations have refused. First the Deobandi Wafaqul Madaris — politicised by the MMA — staged a revolt against registration; then the Barelvi Tanzimul Madaris — its heads enjoying the power of the fatwa more than ever before — also refused. Thus now we have an education system that doesn’t work, and we have a parallel system that works but produces graduates who can do nothing worthwhile or productive for the economy.

Given this situation, Pakistan cannot produce young people who can propel the economy forward. What kind of young men does Pakistan produce? In a word, warriors. The truth is that there is nothing secular in Pakistan Studies, English and Urdu, either, if you take a close look at the textbooks that the students have to mug up. Before the world began trying to reform Pakistan’s fearful madrassas, it tried to persuade Pakistan to do something about the hate literature it was passing off as its secular syllabus. But a report by an Islamabad NGO on how the textbooks were ruined by crass indoctrination was rejected by the ruling politicians.

Education in Pakistan is in dire straits. Only girls are benefiting from the system, but they are of no use because the country’s ideology doesn’t want them around in public or productive life. Meanwhile, the boys have turned away from literacy and show their true colour on August 14 when they come out on the roads and frighten the older citizenry with their rowdy behaviour. The state must take another look at secular education and think of readopting it with better teaching standards in the institutions that already exist. *