Laraib Nisar
Of the many challenges that the Pakistani society is facing currently, one of the biggest is the rising inequalities in the society. The economic inequalities have led to the formation of a deep divide in almost all the domains of societal life. One of the sectors in which this classification and inequality is evident is the education sector. Despite education being crucially important for the prosperity of Pakistan, a lot of problems are faced by the education system. One of those issues is the inequalities in the education sector. Different socio-political segments of the society have got access to different types of education, the elites go to elite schools, and the children of the poor usually get to attend public schools. So the inability of the government to implement a uniform education system is a critical issue for Pakistan.
The PTI government often commended for its efforts to pay attention to social issues, and finding long term solutions to these problems, came up with the idea of a Single National Curriculum (SNC) to ensure uniformity of education in the country, but unfortunately, even after the implementation of a SNC across the country, many loopholes persist.
Basically, the government is trying to create equality, and believes that in order to end discrimination between one child and the other, they should all be subjected the same curriculum. Though the idea seems to be fantastic and the best way to achieve academic homogeneity but the issue is that the concerned department is formulating a SNC by bringing down the standard of the curriculum. The first problem is the superfluity of the curriculum. Since the whole country has to adopt the same curriculum, efforts have been made to incorporate everything into it, which instead of making it more comprehensive, has made the curriculum overly complex and at times confusing. This problem leads us to the second problem i.e. the capabilities of teachers. Unfortunately, our teachers don’t have the capacity to deliver such a heavy curriculum effectively because they are not trained accordingly.
Moreover, the new curriculum is designed in such a way that all the students are being brought down to the average-student level instead of taking the average students to the brilliant student level. Values like critical and logical thinking, cognitive and developmental aspects are being taken out and only ideologies are being put into the curriculum. So the curriculum is becoming more ideological rather than pedagogical, making it ignorant towards a child’s cognitive and intellectual requirements and electoral growth. It simply takes into account what we want to tell our generation in terms of our dominant ideology coming from a dominant version of religion and nation, which might lead to extremism, lack of acceptance, and intolerance in the society.
Though it is essential to eliminate inequalities and class-wise segregation of the education sector, but we must also keep in mind that this cannot work alone. As long as classes remain in the society, education will remain unequal, as the elite will find ways of getting their children treated better anyway, they will exert pressure to have their own schools or private schools and do other things.
So in order to end this inequality, it is essential to attack the root-cause of the problem, achieving a uniform education sector isn’t possible without eliminating the deep divide that our society has. The perfect analogy to explain the process is: picking up the steering wheel of a car isn’t enough to drive somewhere, because you have to tackle all parts of the car simultaneously. It will take a functioning engine, tires, seats, steering wheel, and you to drive somewhere. And the same thing applies here, we have to remove all the other inequalities in order to achieve a uniform education system. Moreover, we should also understand that we as members of society, share an incredibly interconnected, convoluted and complex relationship. And if we come together, there is no societal issue that can’t be solved. Instead of using a reductive logic to explain such issues and trying to whittle or legislate them away, we should do something more substantial, and change will surely come.
The author Laraib Nisar is a Defense and Strategic Studies’ graduate, working as a Research Associate at Center for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) Islamabad.
