Education policy: a critique
By Eqbal Ahmad
THE Prime Minister's Cabinet has deferred the Draft Education Policy 1998-2010 prepared by the Ministry of Education. News reports had it that the Cabinet discussed the draft for several hours, found it wanting, and appointed a Cabinet Committee to formulate a National Education Policy. The Cabinet Committee has desired that educationists who had not been consulted earlier be asked to comment on the Draft and participate in the process of revising it. Apparently the official plan to complete the process of revising the Draft in about four weeks a task that strikes me as impossible.
I am among those who have been invited to express their views on the draft and make additional proposals "explaining in detail the objectives, rationale, policy initiatives, plan of action etc." Given the difficulty of meeting this challenge in a week, the time allowed to prepare "the detailed proposals mentioned above", I sought the assistance of colleagues, who, unlike me, have hands-on experience of education in Pakistan. It is a measure of their commitment to education in this country that all the ten academics, invited on a short notice, met in the afternoon for two and a half hours. All are highly qualified teachers and scholars; some are internationally known scientists. None had been involved, directly or indirectly, in preparing the Draft in question and, excepting me, none had yet been invited to contribute to the current process of revising it. Only a few had actually seen the draft. For their benefit, I read out the section on higher education. There was at first a stunned silence, then people talked. A gist of what I heard follows.
The drafting process of the Education Policy violated three fundamental requirements for developing a viable plan of education: openness, transparency, and critical debate. This exercise was apparently carried out outside of public view by persons whose identities, outlook, and qualifications are not known even to those of us who are in the business of teaching and research. It was not open to public discussion, criticism or comment. Even after the document had been finalized, it remained a "top secret" until the Cabinet decided to make it available to a very select group of academics. "I never heard", summed up a physicist with years of research experience at major institutions in the United States, "of an educational proposal being treated as a classified document." Everywhere and in all situations, plans of education or curricula are products of long, often tedious consultative processes and collective debates. Whatever the identity of its authors, this document is the product of a closed structure and outdated bureaucratic outlook." Two persons noted that they had attended Mr Ahsan Iqbal's year 2010 consultative meetings but "nothing people said there has been reflected in this Draft."
Concepts are the brains of the educational enterprise. An education policy without a conceptual framework is like a body without a head. yet, there is a complete absence of conceptualization in this draft. In it there is no indication whatsoever of the philosophy, assumptions and objectives of education. The draft fails to conceptualize even on its own dangerously limited terms. It makes references to education for the "21th century", to "the present regime's" commitment to education as a "tool of social change in its manifesto", to "Islamic principles and values", to the necessity of students becoming "good Pakistanis conscious of their cultural heritage", and to "higher education" as an "essential factor of development."
But there is no attempt anywhere to define and explicate even these shibboleths. There is no identification - at least in derivative if not in original terms - of the educational needs and promises of the 21st century. There is no indication anywhere in this Draft as to which approaches to higher learning best serve as tools of social change, or what Islamic principles and values need constitute the core of Pakistan's educational philosophy, or which aspects of Pakistan's cultural heritage are to go into the making of the "good Pakistanis."
The authors of this Draft Education Policy must know that these phrases are at best abstractions which can be invested with multiple meanings; or, as they have done here, no meaning at all. So the academicians who had gathered at my house concluded rather sadly that from the conceptual point of view, this Draft Education Policy is neither bad, good, nor middling. It is just not there.
It may be argued that we have inherited a conceptualized system of education to which we need to add only Islamic values and a consciousness of Pakistani "cultural heritage." No government or education administrator has explicitly argued this case. But nearly all have acted on this premise. The grafting of such requirements as Islamiyaat and Pakistan Studies is a case in point. This phenomenon has contributed in large part to the crisis of education in Pakistan. The conceptual framework of our system of education was developed by the British in the 19th century by, among others, Lord Thomas Macaulay. The aim of the higher educational system, to which his Minute on Indian Education contributed quite decisively, was not to produce leaders of society but an elite of British clones, a "class of persons", as he put it, "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste and opinions, in morals and intellect." The purposes of this educational system were not the development of critical and creative faculties. Rather, its objective was to "form", to quote Macaulay again, "a class who may be interpreters between us and the million whom we govern."
It is useful here to briefly note two points which underline the centrality of conceptualization in the organization of education. First, whatever its drawbacks from the natives' standpoint, the colonial educational system was quite effective on its own terms. Its objectives were fulfilled in so far as its elite products supplied several generations of the colonial bureaucracy and military officers' corps. This class of educated natives still mediates the relationship between post-colonial South Asia and the West, a powerful testament to the lasting impact of well conceptualized education in realizing political, economic, and social goals.
A second point appears to negate the first: many of the men and women who began the movement of reform or who made significant contributions to our cultural environment were also products of colonial education. It is noteworthy though that these latter - Syed Ameer Ali, Mohammed Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saadat Hasan Manto are among the more familiar names in Pakistan - were persons deeply rooted in their own culture by virtue of learning rather than ideological socialization. They were fully exposed to our own canons of knowledge and maintained an abiding interest in them so that English education represented for them not a break from the past but a deepening of their creative impulses and a broadening of their intellectual horizon.
Such grafts as the current Islamiyyat and Pakistan Studies curriculum are poor substitutes for canonical readings. To the contrary, they promote narrow outlook and reinforce sectarian divides in society. (An example: there is separation of Islamiyyat syllabus for Sunni and Shia's secondary school students.) A major challenge of designing a learning environment in countries like Pakistan is to locate the points of convergences and reinforcements between traditional and modern knowledge, a task which has been entirely ignored by our education planners.
A viable exercise in educational planning requires a thorough and analytical review of the strengths and failings of the system[s] in place. Similarly, a critical assessment is required of the capabilities of the institutions and personnel who administer and impart education. Without such a review it is impossible to make judgments on the balance between continuity and change in the agenda for reform, or estimate even the practicability of reforming the current system. A striking feature of the Draft Education Policy is the absence of any evaluation of our past and present educational system. Beyond generalities such as "the scenario is not very bright", or that the results of past reform efforts are "both encouraging and disappointing", the draft does not assess the successes and failures of the past or the present educational system. Nor does it evaluate the capabilities of the establishment which presides over it. It is difficult then to know what reforms, if any, are called for, and whether there is a machinery in place capable of carrying out a programme of reforms.
A common exercise in educational planning is favoured especially by school and university administrators. It entails assessments and projections of a country's need for educated manpower in various fields. They try to base curricula, enrolments, and faculty development on the basis of these calculations. In doing so they often encounter resistance from the faculties which invariably argue that expansion of knowledge occurs from explorations into the unknown and untested, and that operational calculations ought not to inform the planning for education. Normally a compromise of sorts is then reached between the realists and idealists', and serves well the overall purposes of education.
The Draft in hand avoids this exercise too. There appears here to have been no representation of the 'idealists' on the commission which drafted the education policy. To make matters worse, the 'realists' have shied away from their responsibility, passing the buck. "The Planning Commission must work out the details of the type, size, and nature of higher level manpower needed for the development efforts." Since the fulfilment of Pakistan's development needs has been repeatedly mentioned in the Draft as the goal of this Education Policy, it is strange that the draft was prepared without an assessment of Pakistan's development needs in future decades.
The Draft Education Policy's emphasis on quantity, regulation, administration, and bureaucratic and business control of education appears to be clearer than its vision of the quality of the educational environment in Pakistan. Even in the relatively austere section on higher education, it proposes the establishment of more "affiliating universities", ten more "general universities", the expansion of university and college student population to 2.5 million by the year 2010, and an increase in the funding for education "from the present 2.2% of GNP to 3.9% with enhanced allocation for universities... Additional amounts shall be raised through a special tax for education like Iqra Surcharge." Curtailment in the autonomy of the university and faculties, abolition of the Senate, 20% representation of "user agencies" on Board of Studies, and enhancement in the role and powers of the University Grants Commission are recommended. Faculty associations have protested these and other recommendations.
The Cabinet has done well to defer this report. It should be shelved as it does not, unfortunately, offer even a basis to build on. Yet, given the enormity of the task, it is unrealistic to expect that a new policy can be developed in a few weeks' time. The preparation of a viable education policy will take at least six months of work by qualified people including experienced academics. A few short steps can, nevertheless, be recommended and taken soon. These may serve to stay the rot, and also demonstrate the will of the government to clear Pakistan's poisonous educational jungle.