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Education reform priorities
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Feb (The News) - Dissenting note
Prime Minister Shaukat
Aziz has announced after a recent cabinet meeting that the education budget will
be increased from 2.6 per cent to 4 per cent of the GDP. In the same meeting the
minister for education mentioned other measures that the government was taking,
such as the compulsory teaching of English in government schools from class 1
and of revamping school textbooks. The fact that the education sector is in dire
need of reform is obvious but whether the government has a real sense of the
required reforms or the commitment to implement them is open to question. |
First of all, the budget allocation issue is tricky. It is always good
for the government to promise dramatic increases in budgetary allocation to the
social sector during the year but when it comes to announcing the actual budget
the social sector allocations never register a real jump. And, even if they do
the problem remains with spending. The government is notorious for holding off
spending the money till the last quarter of the year and then spending it
hurriedly, which ends up in ill-planned and inefficient projects.
Often
due to this, the government ends up under spending in the social sector, which
means that if the budgeted money was given by donor agencies then it has to be
returned. In addition, the corruption in the system means that very little of
the actual money spent is utilised for a good cause. Thus, promises of an
increase in budgetary allocations for education means little without improving
the government's implementing machinery.
However, apart from the
budgetary allocations, an equally important problem is that of what the
government is trying to prioritise in the reform effort. The state education
sector suffers from the problem of access as well as quality. There is need for
reform at every level whether it is linked to school infrastructure facilities
or soft issues of teaching methods, curriculum, examination systems, etc. When
so much reform is needed, a possible outcome is that without a clear
understanding of the issues and the problems, the government makes a lot of
random efforts without developing a systematic vision of reform.
In this
regard, the first and most difficult question is that of access versus quality.
Currently, guided by the international donor community, the thrust is on
universal primary education. One consequence of this is over emphasis on
non-formal schooling, which requires one teacher from the local community to
teach children from classes one to five in one classroom. In theory this is a
cheaper and supposedly a more efficient alternative to formal state schooling.
But, even this is questionable: the non-formal model requires extensive teacher
training support and monitoring which dramatically takes up the cost of running
the schools.
The real challenge, however, comes once these children
complete the primary cycle in these non-formal schools. In most remote areas
there are not enough government middle and secondary schools to absorb these
children. Without mainstreaming into the middle schools, it is questionable if
the non-formal primary education will actually increase the economic
opportunities of these children. That is not to say that providing access to all
should not be a key target but to highlight that many of the alternative or
innovative models being followed can actually end up wasting much of the
government's resources on efforts, which don't increase the country literacy
rate in any meaningful way. It is now known that primary education (especially
when it is not of high quality) in itself has limited returns to the individual
and the economy unless followed up to the secondary level.
Similarly,
the current push towards public-private partnership where the private sector and
philanthropists are being asked to take over state schools and improve their
services has resulted in some success cases. But, it is problematic to view this
as a solution to the problems of state schools as the private sector will only
take over a small number of these schools and even then there is no standard
intervention. In many cases, taking over a state school is often just limited to
improving the infrastructure; it is not necessarily leading to improvements in
teaching methods. Thus, while these innovative projects and public-private
partnership models are interesting, what is critical is that they don't remove
the focus from the real reforms required within the state schooling system. Here
the most critical reform is investment in government teacher training institutes
and monitoring system.
What is critical is to be realistic and to
prioritise the reforms rather than to try to implement the wishful list in one
go. It is good to attempt to reform the curriculum but it is also important not
to get too carried away with this and waste too many resources or efforts on it.
Those of us growing up in the eighties all studied the social studies and
history textbooks of the Zia era but clearly the majority did not end up
becoming fundamentalists.
Similarly, it is fine to want to introduce
English in all state schools from class one but are there enough teachers in
state schools who have enough command of the language to teach the language? In
all likelihood it will only end up adding to the burden of the child without
really improving his/her language ability. Given that a child is known to learn
better in his or her mother tongue makes it questionable as to what extent this
policy will be beneficial. It is no point comparing the children in state
schools with those who learn English from the very beginning in the top private
schools as the social as well as educational backgrounds of the teachers in
private schools is very different from the government schools.
Thus what
is needed is to prioritise improvement of the learning ability of the child by
having better trained and monitored teachers in state government schools and to
ensure that primary schooling is linked up neatly to middle and secondary
schooling. A strategy in which there is too much emphasis on trying innovative
models at the primary level but limited focus on linking the primary all the way
to the secondary and tertiary or higher education is unlikely to work.
Eventually, growth of the country needs people who have been given good
education to the tertiary or higher level than if the entire population gets
some form of primary schooling but most are unable to pursue it to the higher
level. Unplanned investments in the primary cycle in its own right are a
questionable proposition.
By Dr Masooda Bano
The author is undertaking
post-doctoral research at Oxford University. Email: mb294@hotmail.com
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| Education News | | Updated: 24 May, 2012 |
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