A month
ago, as the darkness of the night gradually faded, hundreds of boys and
girls in several counties of Britain stepped out of their homes. They
walked for two hours in the near-freezing late autumn dawn before
wending their way to school.
The purpose of their
march was to demonstrate support for Malala Yousafzai who had been shot
in the head a few days earlier for merely standing up for her right to a
proper education. Seldom has a gesture, so majestic in its simplicity,
been so overwhelming.
The Irish playwright and co-founder
of the London School of Economics, George Bernard Shaw, once said: “What
we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge
in pursuit of the child.”
Had he been alive today, he
would have had the satisfaction of knowing that in this
microchip-dominated twenty-first century world, where merit is measured
in terms of economic success, there are still voices like those of
schoolgirls such as Malala that hunger for learning even at enormous
personal risk.
Shaw, the only person ever to be awarded a
Nobel Prize in Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), at first refused
the Nobel Prize because he had never sought public honours. But his wife
prevailed upon him to reverse his decision because it was “a tribute to
Ireland.” However he did not accept the money that went with the award,
and requested that it be used instead for translating Swedish books
into English.
Till his death in 1950, he believed that
learning brought a person out of darkness through the gate of knowledge
to the orbit of light. Only then could life become “a perpetual song in
an articulate harmony of thought and form” as a former chief justice of
the Dacca (Dhaka) High Court said in the 1960s.
The
education that Malala so desperately sought is the birthright of every
child, and it is the duty of the state to ensure that it is freely
available. This is endorsed by the Constitution of Pakistan, and was
further reinforced through the 18th Amendment which introduced Article
25A making it binding on the government to “provide free and compulsory
education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years in such a
manner as may be determined by law.”
A leading newspaper
commented that education had “now become a right and no longer a
privilege as it was previously. Article 25A sets up a possible scenario
where a citizen can take the government to court for not providing them
access, or even be the grounds for a suo motu action.”
But
all laws are meaningless unless they are enforced. The ground reality
in Pakistan is altogether different. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan
(TTP), in league with its affiliates, has destroyed schools with a
vengeance, but successive governments have completely demolished
education.
Statistical data shows that Pakistan spent a
miniscule 2.5 percent of its budget on education in 2005-2006, and, as
if this was not bad enough, the current outlay hovers around a
disgraceful 1.5 percent. A recent survey reveals that 30,000 schools are
housed in shaky dilapidated buildings, thereby endangering thousands of
children. No less appalling is the finding that 21,000 educational
institutions do not even have a building and an estimated 32,000 are
“ghost schools” that only exist on paper, but receive government
funding.
Education has never been a priority with the
government which prefers to spend more on bailing out inefficient and
corrupt state-owned enterprises such as the PIA, Pakistan Steel, P and
Pakistan Railways, than on educating the country’s youth. Resource
constraints can certainly not be advanced as an excuse for this criminal
neglect because there are 26 countries poorer than Pakistan that have
more children in school.
The country also has the dubious
distinction of having the second largest out-of-school population (5.1
million children according to the Unesco) in the world after Nigeria.
But on Tuesday, during the debate on the Right to Free and Compulsory
Education Bill 2012, which was unanimously passed by the National
Assembly, the PPP lawmaker, Shahnaz Wazir Ali, was honest enough to
concede that the actual number of out-of-school children had increased
to 7.2 million.
Even more disconcerting is the “State of
Pakistan’s Children Report 2011” released in September this year by the
Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child. The study claims
that almost 25 million children are out of school, while seven million
have never received any form of primary education.
The
Education for All Global Monitoring Report recently released by the
Unesco shows that Pakistan ranks among the bottom ten countries of the
world when it comes to female education. The authors of this
comprehensive survey lay bear the truth that “62 percent of girls in
Pakistan, between the ages of seven and 15, have never seen the inside
of a school.”
Despite these incontrovertible facts, the
leadership in Pakistan does not tire of regurgitating half-truths which
are then touted as formidable achievements. Last week the Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa (KP) chief minister bragged that in the last four years the
provincial government had established 72 colleges out of which 52 were
for girls. He also said that a scheme had been launched to provide
scholarships for girls at the primary level and Rs400 million had been
earmarked for disbursement among parents who enrol their girls in
school.
However, the statics compiled by the South Asia
Terrorism Portal on the destruction of schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and
the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) for the four-year period
from 2009 till September 30, 2012 tell a different story altogether. In
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone 184 schools were blown up by the TTP in 171
terrorist incidents. The tally for Fata in the same period shows that
155 schools were destroyed, as a result of 175 bombings. The total
number of schools razed to the ground in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata
since 2009 stands at 339.
But where there is a will there
is always a way and this is borne out by Afghanistan’s experience. In
2001, when the country was still under the Taliban’s control, there were
barely a million children in school of which only 5,000 were girls. But
currently an impressive nine million students are enrolled and 40
percent of these are girls. In an article on Malala Yousafzai carried by
the Huffington Post, Sarah Fane, who was recently in Afghanistan, made
the stunning disclosure that in the Kunar province adjacent to Fata, the
expectation was that 16,000 children would enrol in this school-year
but the actual number was 34,000 and 46 percent were females. The
pattern was the same in neighbouring Khost.
Afghanistan’s
Education Minister Ghulam Farooq Wardak has claimed that his country is
on course to achieve universal primary education by 2015 as envisaged in
the UN’s Millennium Development Goal 2 (MDG). Similarly, India,
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are all set to reach the MDG target. India’s
school enrolment rate is ten times that of Pakistan, and Bangladesh’s is
twice as much.
A hundred million Pakistanis, or 65
percent of the population, are below the age of 25, while 32 percent in
the 15 to 29 age bracket are illiterate. Furthermore the workforce is
growing at the rate of three percent per annum, which means that all the
ingredients for a demographic disaster of Pakistan’s own making are in
place. The only remedy is education.
Experts are of the
opinion that the situation could improve within two years, if an
additional Rs100 billion is injected into the education sector. But as
things stand it seems that the government believes more in the catchy
Pink Floyd refrain, “We don’t need no education.”
The
country’s leadership should heed the warning of Aristotle: “All those
who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced
that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”
The writer is the publisher of Criterion quarterly. Email: iftimurshed@ gmail.com