Schooling in Pakistan

Dr Tariq Rahman

National Distinguished Professor

Every year the Government of Pakistan (GOP) publishes some report or the other about education. If it does not publish a specific report about education, at the Economic Survey of Pakistan carries a chapter on education. These reports confess that the literacy level is low, the rate of participation in education at all levels is low, and the country is spending too little in this area. Then there are brave promises about the future, such as the achievement of hundred percent literacy, increase in spending on education to 4 per cent (it has been hovering around 2 per cent for many years) and so on.

What is really alarming, and relatively less known, is the fact that the students of our educational institutions (the vernacular-medium schools, English-medium schools and madrassas) have such different opinions as to live in different worlds. This has happened partly because their textbooks and methods of learning are different and partly because their teachers, the discourses they are exposed to inside and outside school, and their families are so different from each other. Indeed, all these influences are from worlds which are alien, and even hostile, to each other. To understand these different institutions and their products is to understand how dangerously polarized Pakistani society is and how this has hampered national cohesion and a sense of commitment to unified policies.

Urdu-Medium Schools

The number of all government schools is given as follows in the Economic Survey of Pakistan (2002)

Box
Level	Number	Student Strength	Teachers
Primary	169,089	19,921,232	345,457
Middle	19,180	4,278,392	99,098
Secondary	13,108	1,795,444	66,522

These numbers include Sindhi-medium government schools also. The number of these, however, was 36,750 in 1998. The Pashto-medium primary schools were 10,731 in 1999 (field research). Thus, most of these schools are Urdu-medium ones.

These students and teachers both come from the lower-middle class. In a small survey of 230 students and 100 teachers of Urdu-medium schools undertaken by the present author in December 2002 and January 2003, it was discovered that they belonged to low income groups. After ten years of schooling students sit for examinations held by the different Boards of Intermediate and Secondary Education. Most of the examination papers are in Urdu (except in Sindh where they are in Sindhi) and English is like a sieve which separates the ‘sheep’ from the ‘goats’.

The text published by the textbook boards glamourise war and are full of anti-India remarks and either ignore the minorities or trivialize them. More detailed analysis are present in K.K. Aziz’s book, The Murder of History in Pakistan (1993); several books of Rubina Saigol, the present author’s book Language, Ideology and Power (OUP, 2002) and a report edited by A.H.Nayyar and A. Salim called The Subtle Subversion (2003).

The Government of Pakistan lays down certain objectives for the teaching of various subjects. These are often ideological. They use Islam as a marker of identity to define the boundaries of the self. The ‘Other’ is, by definition, non-Muslim. However, this notion of Islam is so tempered with nationalism as to exclude Indian Hindus rather than non-Muslims who are friendly with Pakistan. Because of this Pakistani students exposed to the Textbook Board books tend to be intolerant of Hindus, Christians and non-Muslim minorities.

Just as the poorest children have the lowest enrolment in schools, they also tend to drop out more than others. Thus 53 per cent of the poorest quintile dropped out before completing class 6 compared with only 23 per cent of the richest quintile according to the Integrated Household Survey of 2002. Parents explain this as lack of motivation as do teachers. This shifts the burden of failure on to the pupil. However, if one considers the extremely harsh conditions at home and the cruel treatment children receive at school, one wonders why more do not drop out.

Madrassas

The madrassas are associated with the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan some of whom were students of these institutions.They have also been much in the news for sectarian killings and supporting militancy in Kashmir, They are considered the breeding ground of the Jihadi culture–a term used for Islamic militancy in the English-language press of Pakistan

There is hardly any credible information on the unregistered madrassas. However, those which are registered are controlled by their own central organizations or boards. They determine the syllabi, collect a registration fees and an examination fees. They send examination papers, in Urdu and Arabic, to the madrassas where pupils sit for examinations and declare results.

At independence there were 137, or even fewer, madrassas. In April 2002, Dr. Mahmood Ahmed Ghazi, the Minister of Religious Affairs, put the figure at 10,000 with 1.7 million students. They belong to the major sects of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shias, However, Pakistan being a predominantly Sunni country, the Shia ones are very few. Among the Sunni ones there are three sub-sects: Deobandis, Barelvis and the Ahl-i-Hadith (salafi). Besides these, the revivalist Jamat-e-Islami also has its own madrassas.

The number of madrassas has been increasing during General Zia ul Haq’s rule (1977-1988). During the war by Islamic Afghan groups in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union the United States sent in money, arms and ammunition through Pakistan which is said to have been used to support the madrassas. In recent years, the Deobandi influence has increased as the Taliban were trained in their seminaries.

Before Mulla Nizam Uddin standardized the curriculum known as the Dars-i-Nazami different teachers taught different books to students. The Dars-i-Nizami has come to symbolize the stagnation and ossification of knowledge. It is taught through canonical texts which, however, are taught through commentaries (sharh); glosses or marginal notes (hashiya) and supercommentaries (taqarir). There are commentaries upon commentaries explained by even more commentaries. For the South Asian students, they no longer explain the original text being themselves in Arabic. They have to be learned by heart which makes students use only their memory not their analytical powers. Indeed, the assumption on which the Dars functions is that the past was a golden age in which all that was best has already been written. What remains to the modern age is merely to preserve it.

Besides the canonical texts students learn the munazra (argumentation). In this students are taught to refute the views their sub-sect considers heretical or mistaken. Refutation (Radd in Urdu) has always been part of religious education. However, it is only in recent years that it has been blamed for the unprecedented increase in sectarian violence in Pakistan. They do, indeed, teach their maslak (interpretation of religion) which is obviously sectarian or sub-sectarian. However, this has been going on for a long time.

The texts used for refutation of other sects, sub-sects, heresies and alien points of view, which may be called Radd-texts, may not be formally taught in most of the madrassas as the ulema claim, but they are being printed which means they are in circulation. They may be given as supplementary reading material or used in the arguments by the teachers which are probably internalized by the students. In any case, being in Urdu rather then Arabic, such texts can be comprehended rather than merely memorized. As such, without formally being given the centrality which the Dars-i-Nizami has, the opinions these texts disseminate --- opinions against other sects, sub-sects, views seen as being heretical by the ulema, Western ideas --- may be the major formative influence on the minds of Madrassa students. Thus, while it is true that education in the madrassa produces religious, sectarian, sub-sectarian and anti-Western bias, it may not be true to assume that this bias automatically translates into militancy and violence of the type Pakistan has experienced. For that to happen other factors ---- the arming of religious young men to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir; the state’s clampdown on free expression of political dissent during Zia ul Haq’s martial law; the appalling poverty of rural, peripheral areas and urban slums etc. etc ---must be taken into account.

Madrassas were supported by land grants and wealthy patrons in medieval India. Madrassas in Pakistan are also financed by voluntary charity provided by the bazaar businessmen and others who believe that they are earning great merit by contributing to them. Some of them are also given financial assistance by foreign governments ---the Saudi government is said to help the Ahl-i-Hadith seminaries and the Iranian government the Shia ones---but proof of this is not available to this author. And even if it does exist, it goes only to a few madrassas whereas the vast majority of them are run on charity (zakat = alms, khairat = charity, atiat = gifts etc). The present author found that madrassas spend around Rs. 5000 per year on studies, board and lodging per student.

Madrassa students are exposed mostly to militant and intolerant views. However, they are not written in the Dars-i-Nizami. Rather, they are part of the informal sermons, talks by visitors from fighting areas or previous experience of war etc. Apart from the madrassas proper, religious parties---such as Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harkat-ul-Mujahidin---print militant literature which circulates among the madrassas and other institutions. Although these parties have been banned, their member are said to be dispersed all over Pakistan, especially in the madrassas.

English Medium Schools

The stated official policy of the government is that public money will be spent on schools which will use Urdu (and Sindhi only in parts of Sindh) as the medium of instruction. It is often stated that private educational institutions are run by private resources and enterprise. However, this is only partly true as we shall see below.

In Pakistan the armed forces and the higher bureaucracy use English for official purposes. Thus they were interested in obtaining young people who were competent in that language. Moreover the elite which aspired for jobs in the modern domains of power: the officer corps of the armed forces; higher bureaucracy; superior judiciary; commerce; media; higher education etc---was very desirous of teaching English to their children. They could either buy it at exorbitant cost at the private elitist schools or they could establish institutions where English would be the medium of instruction but the cost would be lower---at least for their own wards. This is what happened and the cadet colleges, armed forces institutions of education etc multiplied. The cadet colleges are given land grants, funds for construction of the buildings and also additional grants on a regular or irregular basis by the government which covers approximately 15 to 20 per cent of their total expenditure.

Apart from the schools run by agencies of the state itself ---the federal government, the armed forces, the bureaucracy --- in contravention of the stated policy of providing vernacular-medium education at state expense, there are private schools which deal in selling English at exorbitant prices. Private schools catering to the elite have existed since British times. These schools were not as expensive as those which replaced them from 1985 onwards. The new schools which took their place were Beaconhouse, City School, Froebels, Roots, Grammar (Lahore) and Khaldunia. Most of them have campuses spread all over the country though all are not of equal quality. They charge tuition fees of Rs. 1500 and more per month. They prepare students for the British Ordinary and advanced level examinations. Their faculty, especially at the senior levels, is paid better than government school teachers (Rs. 10,000 per month plus). However, there are vast differences in salaries even in the same school and full data on salaries is not released. On the whole women from the middle classes, some of whom are themselves from English-medium schools, are employed as teachers. Male teachers, however, tend to be from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Because of textbooks containing discourses originating in other countries as well as exposure to cable TV, fiction from Western countries and grownups who are exposed to other discourses, children from such schools tend to be more tolerant of the ‘Other’ --- be it religious, the West or India --- and less supportive of militant policies in Kashmir than their counterparts in other schools. However, they are alienated from Pakistani society and look down upon their own people. Moreover, when students of these schools hold offices of power in the state (civil or military) they become architects and supporters of pro-war policies and show complete indifference to the intolerance of religious minorities, the working classes and women which earlier state policies created and sustained.

In short, Pakistan’s educational system is stratified according to socio-economic class which is expressed roughly in terms of media of instruction or type of educational institution. The cost per student per year in these institutions is by itself an indicator of the economic apartheid which prevails and is supported by the state in the educational system of Pakistan.

Box
DIFFERENCES IN COSTS IN MAJOR TYPES OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS (in Pakistani rupees)
Institution	Average cost per student per year	Payer (s)	Cost to the state
Madrassas	5,714 (includes board and lodging)	Philanthropists + religious organizations	None reported except subsidies on computers, books etc in some madrassas
Urdu-medium Schools	2264.5 (only tuition)	State	2264.5
Elitist English medium schools	96,000---for ‘A’ level & 36,000 for other levels (only tuition)	Parents	None reported except subsidized land in some cantonments.
Cadet colleges/public schools	90,061 (tuition and all facilities).	Parents + state (average of 6 cadet colleges + 1 public school	14,171 (average of 5 cadet colleges only)
Source: Data obtained from several institutions.

The worldview of the students of these institutions is so different from each other that they seem to live in different worlds. The most acute polarization is between the madrassa students and the students of elitist English-medium schools. The former are deprived but they express their anger---the rage of the dispossessed---in the idiom of religion. This brings them in conflict with the Westernized elite which looks down upon them in contempt although its most powerful members legitimize their hold on the state apparatus in the name of Islam. The state has strengthened the Islamic lobby itself by Islamizing education and sacralizing the Kashmir dispute so that religious and nationalistic emotion has come to be invested in it. Now that the state feels obliged to reverse these policies, it is already facing resistance from the Islamic lobby. If the state keeps investing only in defense and on the elite, it will withdraw further and further away from the social sector. This has already occurred and both religious extremists and the ethnic nationalists have tried to fill in the vacant space. If the armies of the unemployed and the marginalized are not to be increased till they become unmanageable, the state should invest on the poor. The best investment will be on education---but education which promotes tolerance and humane values. The way to achieve this will be to create a just and fair education system which can only happen if we have one stream of education and not so many polarized ones.