Nationalise and be damned
From the Blog PkColumnist.com: Nationalise and be damned - IN a country whose leaders are notorious for constantly denying any errors, it was refreshing to hear the prime minister admitting that the nationalisation of schools and colleges by his party in 1972 was a mistake. Understandably, Mr Gilani understated the impact of the decision, whose effects we feel to this day. Among the huge catalogue of disastrous government policies over the last 60-plus years, I would place the nationalisation of schools and colleges at the very top. As somebody who ran a private university for five years, I can attest to the steady decline in educational standards in Pakistan since nationalisation. Generally speaking, students taking our admission test had a poor grasp of the subjects they had been taught at school. The better ones came to us from private schools, while those condemned to learning in state-run institutions fared poorly. The reason for this is evident in the recent news item and editorial in this newspaper informing us that out of 311 government schools in Rawalpindi district, 152 are without principals. This is true for most state schools across the country. A study has shown there were around 4,000 ghost schools in Punjab where 20,453 teachers were drawing salaries of apparently Rs1.4bn a year without turning up to teach. Given this state of affairs, it should come as no surprise that three million students are being educated in nearly 29,000 madressahs across the country. After all, these seminaries not only educate their students (albeit in mostly irrelevant subjects), they also feed and often house them. Although most nationalised schools and colleges have been returned to their owners, the damage had been done. The nationalisation policy gutted not only the taken-over institutions, but the ones already under state control as well. Bhutto`s policy did not take into account the fact that the federal and provincial education departments simply did not have enough manpower or money to manage this huge increase in the institutions they were supposed to supervise. As a result, there was a sharp decline in the budgets of even the best government schools and colleges. Another unexpected consequence of this ill-conceived policy was that teachers and principals from state schools and colleges began using any political contact they had to get themselves transferred to more prestigious nationalised institutions in big towns. And as teachers were now all on the state payroll, it became very difficult to fire them, even if they taught poorly, or not at all. Good teachers could not be rewarded as they were all slotted into government salary scales. Institutions previously administered by churches were the worst hit as they lost all autonomy. Many were unable to resist bureaucratic and political pressure to accept below-average students and teachers. Private school owners, deprived of their investment overnight, resorted to stripping buildings of all portable fittings. A few years ago, I visited a government girls` school in Karachi`s upmarket Clifton area. To enter the premises, I had to balance on a plank to cross an overflowing gutter. Inside, I found unpainted classrooms, shabbily printed schoolbooks, archaic teaching aids and a demoralised staff. The students did not seem to mind, as this was the only school most of them had ever known. The principal told me she kept asking the provincial education department to repair and paint her school, but as maintenance was centralised, she had no say over when, how and if anybody would address her concerns. In another middle-class locality, a boys` school I visited had broken windowpanes, stinking toilets and a barren playing field with no facilities for any sports. Here, too, the principal complained of total neglect from Sindh`s education department. According to him, his budget was barely enough for salaries, with the electricity being often disconnected for non-payment of dues. And while Zia began the process of de-nationalisation, he also unleashed an insidious Islamisation policy in schools. Ali Chishti, writing in a newspaper last June, informed us that under an ordinance issued in 1984, graduates of madressahs were hired by the government to teach Arabic. Since these people had been taught at seminaries supported by different religious groups and schools of thought, they have been indoctrinating successive generations of students with their respective brands of political Islam. Yet another impact of this policy was to open a new avenue of corruption by giving politicians an opportunity to recruit large numbers of teachers for a vastly expanded state sector. Provincial education ministers began charging thousands of rupees per job. For those who could pay, minimum qualifications were waived. Thus, poorly educated graduates were hired to teach the next generation of students. But as government salaries are so low, these teachers often had to get other jobs to survive. Hence the thousands of `ghost schools` across the country. While we are critical of this disastrous nationalisation policy, it is easy to forget the logic that underlay it. The PPP had promised equal educational opportunities for all, surely a goal worth reaching for. However, this socialist impulse was disconnected from reality: instead of improving access and standards in the existing state system, as well as steadily expanding it, the PPP government crippled the private institutions while doing nothing to improve the existing state system. The result was chaos as a bloated educational system spun out of control. Unsurprisingly, standards plummeted. Over the years, no government has done anything to arrest this slide. No national leader or party has shown much interest in education. While desultory attempts have been made to cleanse the curriculum of the hate-filled material that has poisoned millions of young minds, the government remains resistant to the introduction of modern content into an archaic syllabus. The result of this mismanagement and malign neglect is before us in the form of millions of poorly educated and brainwashed products of a dysfunctional system. So when the prime minister admits that his party made a mess of education through its nationalisation policy nearly 40 years ago, he should also tell us what his government is doing to correct this monstrous wrong. . Read Full Post
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