School campaign gears to battle 'education emergency' in Pakistan

Schoolchildren in Karachi. Pakistan has admitted it is failing to reach its UN education commitments. Photo credit: Akhtar Soomro/ Reuters

With millions of children out of school and one-fifth of teachers playing truant, Pakistan faces an "education emergency" that costs the economic equivalent of its flood disaster every year, a new campaign has warned.

The March for Education campaign, launched with British government backing, deploys stark statistics to draw a picture of a chronically ill system.

One in 10 of the world's out-of-school children live in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state that last year spent just 2% of GDP on education.

The number of children absent from primary school – seven million – is roughly equivalent to the population of its second largest city, Lahore.

Half of the population is illiterate and progress is painfully slow – at present rates the government will not deliver universal education in Balochistan, the largest province, until 2100.

"It's a challenge of global dimensions," said campaign spokesman Fasi Zaka.

The campaign calls on Pakistanis to petition the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, to double education spending. Oddly, the campaign comes from within government itself – a sign, officials say, of how serious the problem has become.

"When half your population has no skills or education, it's a serious issue of state security," said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, co-chair of the government taskforce behind the campaign. "That's why we're going public with this. It's not just a government issue, it's a society issue."

Campaigners want to raise awareness in a country that is becoming dangerously polarised. Pakistan's elite educates its offspring at expensive schools in Pakistan or abroad, and so education has slipped off the political agenda.

The taskforce estimates an extra £725m a year is needed to gets the school system into shape. But money is not the main issue. At least 26 poorer countries send more children to school, but Pakistan's system has been eviscerated by decades of cronyism and mismanagement.

Politicians use schools as patronage, and although public teachers are relatively well-paid, 15%-20% are absent from class on any given day.

"There's very little accountability," said Wazir Ali, whose co-chair is Sir Michael Barber, a former education adviser to Tony Blair.

Critics said the campaign fails to focus on the outdated curriculum in Pakistani schools that promotes a narrow view of Islam, hatred of Hindus and other bigotry.

"The emergency is not that there's too little education but that there's an excess of miseducation," said Pervez Hoodbhoy, an academic and campaigner. "Decades ago there was less literacy and fewer students in schools. But children were not fed their daily diet of hate, and open minds were more welcome than today."

Under constitutional changes introduced last April, education became a right for all Pakistanis under 16. But the country is lagging far behind its south Asian neighbours. India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka say they are on track to meet their education commitments under the UN's millennium development goals programme by 2015; Pakistan has already admitted failure.

Last week UK development secretary Andrew Mitchell announced a huge aid injection to provide Pakistan with an extra four million school places and 90,000 new teachers by 2015. But a large proportion of the money will go into the booming private education sector, especially in Punjab province, in the hope of bypassing the creaking public school sector.

The campaign hopes to invigorate debate by publishing British-style education league tables, broken down by constituency. But it has stoked controversy over its claim to debunk myths about the country's controversial madrasa sector.

Just 6% of Pakistani children attend such religious schools, the campaign says – a figure critics say is too high.

"It's a staggering number," said Hoodbhoy, calling for an education system that "demands questioning, teaches skills and downplays indoctrination in favour of knowledge and enlightenment".