INTRODUCTION There is a “crisis of education” in Pakistan. This accepted characterization is endlessly repeated, and its salient attributes enumerated. The most striking of these is that almost a third of all school-age children, over 20 million, are out of school altogether! — if that is not a crisis, what is? After that, one is reminded how negatively international and local assessments tate the quality of the education being received by the children who are in schools. The last time Pakistan participated in the assessment by TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) was in 2019. Pakistan’s showing was rated “dismal” by an Aga Khan University review of the results: “Performance- wise, it stood second from the bottom. Only 27 percent of 4th graders in the country met the low international benchmark in mathematics, 8 percent met the intermediate international benchmark, and just one percent (1%) met the high international benchmark.”? The latest local assessment (ASER * https://wenr.wes.org/2020/02/education-in-pakistan * https://www.aku.edu/iedpk/blog/Pages/TIMMS-in-Pakistan.aspxer 2021) reported that nearly half (44 to 45 percent) of grade 5 students could not read a grade 2 level story in Urdu or English or work out a two-digit division in arithmetic.* More critically, this statistic left out an assessment of the extent to which students actually understood what they were able to read, Since 30 percent of the population is illiterate to start with and only about 6 percent has education beyond Grade 10,; it is the quality of school education that is most relevant in a discussion of the subject. Students receiving such a poor school education cannot be expected to perform miracles even if the quality of higher education was orders of magnitude better, which it is not. None of these are new revelations. The levels and trends have been known for years and one should ask why we must repeat them every time there is a discussion of education in Pakistan. Instead, the real question should be: What are we doing with this information? Now that we are convinced there is a deep “crisis of education” in the country and we know its parameters, what is to be done? 3 http://aserpakistan.org/document/aser/2021/reports/national/ASER_report_ National_2021.pdf ‘ https://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files//tables/EDUCATED%20POPUL ATION%20BY %20LEVEL%200F%20EDUCATION. pdf 2A typical response has been tor expert, consultants, advisors, critics, and well-wishers to come up wilh a laundry list of recommendations about what the government of the day ought to do about the “crisi the government invariably does nothing meaningful and what it does, despite the best and most costly advice, ends up worsening the situation. Think of Mr. Bhutto's nationalisation and General Zia’s Islamization of schools. Mr. Imran Khan’s Single National Curriculum (SNC) is not going to be any different. The SNC has inadvertently refocused attention on education and there have been several new analyses, but they in education.” And, every time, follow the same template of “advising” governments to do what the latter have shown no intention of doing over 75 years. A different response has been to give up on the government as a lost cause and to offer “alternative” education. These alternatives come in various forms — high- fee private schools, low-fee private schools, and charity schools run by non-government organisations (NGOs).5 As quality in the public school system has collapsed and parents who can afford to have sought better alternatives, the private sector has mushroomed to fill the vacuum. Now over 40 percent of school-going children are enrolled in private schools. Of these, 90 percent could be classified as low-tw private schools (monthly fee less than Rs. 800 per month) wit. *Since I don’t consider the madrassah to be an alternative ford stw\ exclude it from this discussion. For the reasoning see: ‘The Mister) \ 4 School’ in this volume.the remaining 10 percent comprise the high-fee category. However, national surveys show that the quality of education in the low-fee category is only marginally better than that of public schools.‘ Even this claim is to be questioned because the surveys do not correct for the self-selection bias — children entering private schools are better endowed to begin with than their public-school peers; furthermore, the quality gap between private and public providers shrinks with the number of years in school.” The NGO schools, although they can have a dramatic impact on the lives of children they do enrol, are so few that they can, like madrassahs, be ignored in an analysis of the crisis in education — their contribution cannot scale to affect the overall quality of education in the country. For example, The Citizens Foundation, considered the most prominent of the NGO school systems, after being in existence for over 25 years now operates around 1,700 schools and enrols around 266,000 students.’ Place that in the context of the number of out-of- school children in the country which is over 20 million. Given the above observations, it is the premise of this set of essays that if we continue along the same lines — relying on https://macropakistani.com/private-schools/ 7 Marwah Maqbool. ASER Pakistan 2013 Survey: A Detailed Investigation of the Measurement and a Discussion of the Implications. Unpublished undergraduate thesis, Lahore University of Management Sciences, 2014. * https://www.tef.org.pk/publications/annual-report-2021/ ° https://www.dawn.com/news/1643918governments, expecting low-fee private schools to. provide better education, believing NGOs can reach meaningful scale — we would never get to grips with the “crisis of education” in the country, But there is a yet more serious dimension of the “crisis in education.” What have been enumerated above are only its symptoms, The real question to consider is the following: Why is the country in this crisis in the first place? In order to investigate this puzzle, this book takes a radically different approach and turns the dominant framework on its head. It begins by posing a leading question: Why haven't governments done anything meaningful in education for 75 years while presiding collectively over a virtually continuous decline in its overall quality? These essays argue forcefully that education is not simply a “technical” problem for which experts can provide optimal designs to eager governments desperately waiting for good ideas to implement. Rather, it assumes that governments know precisely what they are doing and tries to figure out why, and for what reasons, they continue to reject the good advice form a whole host of donor agencies, think tanks, and commissions which governments often set up and fund themselves. The essays ask what stands in the way of providing “better” education when no one can be expected to oppose the same for the children of Pakistan? What is stopping 5governments from improving education in such a scenario? They also ask a complementary and related question: Why do parents evince so little concern about the quality of education being imparted to their children in return for the money they are spending on it? The argument being offered for consideration is that the quality of education “given” to people is a political choice of the government, not a matter of the fate of the people. It also opens the question of whether the idea of a “good” education is unambiguous? Good for whom? A bit of history should remove any illusions about this issue. It is well documented that at one time plantation owners in the southern states of the USA made the political choice that no education was to be “given” to slaves; in fact, attempts to do so were declared a crime under the law. The Taliban in Afghanistan have made the political choice that “giving” education to girls is of very Jow priority and to be eschewed completely were it not for external pressures, In the 1980s, the American government decided that a “good” education for students in Pakistani madrassahs was to be based on a jihadi curriculum." Imran Khan believes that a good education consists largely of memorising the Quran while the French believe that it requires keeping God out of schools. ™ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/the- taliban-indoctrinates-kids-with-jihadist-textbooks-paid-for-by-the-u-s. 6There has always been a political struggle over who gets educated and receives what kind of education. The notion that someone has the welfare of the entire nation at heart is a myth that needs to be dispelled. Many Pakistanis consider the Kargil invasion a “mistake” because it was bad for the country. But it was very good for General Musharraf and his associates who got to rule an entire country of 200 million for ten years because of it. Thope to provide a framework in which concerned citizens can look at the crisis in education in a new perspective. In order to develop this perspective, these essays begin with the big picture, articulating first the nature of power and then situating education and its role in a political and historical context. They elaborate its economic dimensions and its relation to other aspects of society. Finally, within this context, they suggest the limits of reform and what might still be achieved if civil society acted in its interest based on a fuller understanding of what stands between the existing reality and the aspiration for a better education.