Present situation and role of irrationalities

An examination of present educational culture highlights incongruent and irrational practices. Firstly, “our literacy rate is 50% as 50% population lives below the poverty line. The literacy rate is high in urban areas and low in the countryside which are the home of 70% population”, shared R7. Media reports and economic surveys explicitly showed a fall in literacy rate as reported in daily English newspaperThe Nation 18 January 2018. Education privatization, internationalization and entrepreneurial policies are focused on corporate culture (Zolfaghari et al. 2009). Advisers propose to recruit internationally educated faculty which is a bolt from the blue. Expensive education business has brought the 200 million people down to their knees. We have 52 million 5–16 years old children out of whom 25 million are out of school due to high education fees (Ransel 2011). One participant R8 criticized that “academic entrepreneurial culture is appealing, but superstructures cannot be built in the air, they need foundations and middle infrastructures”. According to him, academic entrepreneurship in a nation with 50% literacy rate is a false premise with phony promises. Another participant R5 called the present situation as pitiful, as he said
“the present situation of higher education in Pakistan is very pathetic and I think it’s merely on account of increasing the numerical strength of enrolments in higher education that they have ignored the quality of education. The capitalists, they are trying to maximally engage a higher number of students in higher degree programs and I think it’s the capitalists who are behind this scheme and they think that buildings are empty when students leave at 4 o’clock. And they just want to use those building by introducing evening programmes and weekend programmes and they are compromising the quality of higher education in Pakistan in that way”.
A widely held view is to ask university managers and leaders for steering in the right direction. Poverty and education are implicitly interlinked entities, but luxurious smart schools are not the answer. Pricey education would drive the nation into a deep dark well without any exit window as was pointed out by earlier studies (Browne, Shen 2017; Renehan 2015). “We are facing an unprecedented human crisis of 25 million children who cannot afford pricey education” as R6 further called it an alarming situation under which expensive education business is mandate to nowhere whereas the height of irrationality is that our Chief Minister of Sindh and Chief Minister of Punjab are more concerned with buying helicopter and metro/bullet train projects respectively (Punjab Social Protection Authority, Government of the Punjab 2016). Our 25 million children (13%) are out of school as they cannot pay the hefty fees. It is akin to American United States Agency for International Development (USAID) scholarship program under which the need/merit-based financial grants are given to those students whose parents have an annual income less than 35 000 Pakistani rupees (PRs). Parents with a monthly income of 15 000 PRs cannot afford to pay school and college fees to enable their children to reach university to avail USAID scholarship. Insular administrators reroute the grants to their race students to complete the formality (Higher Education Commission, Pakistan 2016). Millions of children unable to pay the school fees might reach madrassas funded by Islamic countries; 10% of these madrassas were speculated to be involved in extremism activities. Besides, lack of opportunities in job market drive some of the graduates to terror groups who use them to deploy communication technologies in suicide and remote control bomb explosions as discussed in our earlier work (Khan, Abas 2015).
Secondly, as participants pointed that no three schools have similar courses and fee structures. Business, nationalism and religion focused educations in private, public and religious schools are leading youth to different directions as R2 reported,
“If we continue teaching A for assets, B for budget, C for command, E for economy, G for government, S for state and T for treasury to elite children in private English medium schools; alph for anar (pomegranate), bae forbakri (goat), pae for punkha (fan) and lamfor lota (utensil) in Urdu medium public schools; and alphfor Allah (God), bae for bismillah (begin with name of Allah), tae for talwar (sword), sae forsawab (reward), geem for jihad (Holy war) or Jannah (heaven) and zae for zakat (Alms) in religious Madrasas then they will grow with different mindsets”.
Our education system reflects the 3D perspective of utter failure. Incoherent Arabic, English and Urdu education systems with rambling syllabi pull and push students in opposite directions as depicted in Fig. 1.
Figure 1.
An epitome of the gainsay education system.
Source: created by authors.