KARACHI: “More than 98 per cent of the money allocated for education in our budget goes into teachers’ salaries. And who are these teachers? When a reporter asked some teachers protesting for their rights outside the Karachi Press Club to spell ‘secondary’, they could not give the correct spelling of the word,” said former state bank governor Dr Ishrat Husain.

He was speaking at a seminar on ‘A Holistic Approach to Improve Pakistan’s Stagnated Education System’ organised by the Pakistan Women’s Foundation for Peace (PWFFP) at a local hotel here on Saturday.

The former SBP governor and prime minister’s adviser, who has also been the dean and director of the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) and is currently the Emeritus Professor at the same institute, said that he was not really an educationist or an educator but a “practitioner”.

He said that education was a great mobiliser. Taking the example of IBA, he said that IBA had been a public-sector institution since 1955. “It charges market-based fees from the well-to-do segments of the population who can afford it. They have the capacity to pay so they go to IBA, AKU or LUMS. And the money paid by them as fees is used to assure financial assistance to students who got in through merit but could not afford to pay the full IBA fees.

Experts discuss ways to find a holistic approach to end education system’s ‘stagnation’

“This is a remarkable model that has enabled us to have students from Duki in Balochistan, Hunza in Baltistan and South Waziristan to make sure that our national talent progress. Our students are there in CSS exams and have gone to universities in the US. The point I am making is that education is a great mobiliser. Therefore, we should have a financing model where the rich and well to do should pay while the poor should be fully subsidised on the basis of their achievements and merit.

Earlier, former Vice Chancellor of the Allama Iqbal Open University, Dr Shahid Siddiqui said that Pakistan is lucky to have a young population that if equipped with the right skills can contribute to the stability of the country. However, if they are not equipped with the right skills, they could become a big liability, he added.

“Countries where people are skilled have a good human capital and are powerful,” he pointed out.

“Therefore countries are investing a lot in education. But we are allocating only 1.5 per cent of our GDP to education despite pledging to increase it to 10 per cent some 15 years ago,” he lamented.

While sharing some horrifying statistics, Dr Siddiqui said that currently 25.37 per cent children in Pakistan are out of school and 42pc are dropping out before they reach grade eight. The literacy rate here is 62.8 per cent while the literacy rate in South Asia is 73.28pc,” he said.

The founder and chairperson of PWFFP, Nargis Rahman, said that they had organised a series of seminars in search of a holistic approach to improve the country’s stagnated education system.

“Education must be made a national priority no less important than national defence. We strongly feel that Pakistan’s stagnant education system can be vitalised and it can yield high outcomes if provided the will to make it the national priority.

Seasoned educationist and the Director of Teachers Development Centre, Abbas Husain, said that the government declared an education emergency in May of this year even though an action plan was missing after that declaration. He said that his work comprises the training of teachers. “Many of my teachers want to do good work,” he said. “The issue is that we somehow have those people who can fix things not there while those who cannot fix anything are there,” he pointed out.

He also said that there is a caste system in education where the MA pass teachers only want to teach in universities not schools.

PWFFP president Ayesha Islam and general secretary Simeen Tapal also spoke.

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2024