To educate our rulers

Again and again, we are reminded of the mess we have made of our education. The statistics, compiled by a number of global outfits, remain unrelievedly depressing. And a recent focus is on how a new UN report has attested that Pakistan is 50+ years behind in its primary and 60+ years behind in its secondary education targets.

This does not mean that our rulers sit up and take notice of any evidence about our lack of capacity to deal with emerging challenges to our survival as a modern and sustainable polity. The merry-go-round of politics pauses not for a little while to allow a glance at the surrounding wilderness. After Eid, the game is set to be revived with the familiar, feverish anticipation of some kind of change in the offing.

As an aside, I would like to refer to the sorry spectacle served to the nation by our news channels on Friday. Here is an utterly frightening example of how frivolous our popular media is even when reality is shrieking for attention.

A suicide bomber had blown himself in a crowded village mosque in the Mohmand tribal region, killing around 25 persons and injuring others. This happened during Friday prayers, early in the afternoon. But our news channels remained shamelessly engaged with the arrest of Khawaja Izharul Hasan, the MQM’s leader of opposition in the Sindh Assembly. The role of villain in the piece was played by a colourful police officer, SSP U.

Irrespective of the news value of the unfolding drama that was provided by the Karachi incident, the blast in the Mohmand mosque, with its heavy loss of life and significance in the context of our war against terror, was totally set aside – along with all other stories. As a journalist, I watched it all with a sense of bereavement over what I see as the decline in professional judgement and social responsibility in the media.

Be that as it may, my reference here is to Unesco’s Global Education Monitoring Report (GEMR) 2016. What is significant is that the report, taking note of a worldwide deficit in primary schooling, stresses the need for human dignity, social inclusiveness and equity in education so that economic growth does not intensify inequalities in society but empowers everyone.

This would mean that Pakistan’s social and intellectual development, given the present performance of the country in the field of education, is seriously at stake. With its pronounced youth bulge, Pakistan has to contend with a large out-of-school population. As many as 5.6 million children are out of primary schools; this is the most absolute number of children out of school anywhere in the world. A British ranking agency had some months ago worked out that Pakistan had the world’s weakest higher education system.

Against this backdrop, one finds it difficult to celebrate the achievements that the present government has projected in the economic sphere. I am prompted to highlight this point because the Unesco report has specifically spoken about the impact of economic growth on social development and empowerment of the ordinary citizens.

Consider this newspaper’s headline on Friday: ‘Pakistan’s equity market beats Chinese, Indian markets’. We are told that Pakistan’s equity market has been outperforming China’s and India’s markets by a big margin in recent years. There are some statistical details quoted in an article published in Forbes, an American business magazine.

Yes, Pakistan has been afflicted with incidents of violent extremism. But the article argues that “terrorist attacks don’t usually affect financial markets unless they are disruptive to trade which hasn’t been the case in Pakistan”.

In recent weeks, I have joined a number of conversations in which senior executives and business leaders would spiritedly eulogise the advances that are being made in the economic sector – and the stock exchange figures repeatedly in these assessments. It would appear that a lot of money is being made by an increasing number of entrepreneurs and investors. There is a glimpse of Dubai in some of our shopping malls. I am told to cheer up and not be distracted by dark prognoses offered by some foreign agencies’ reports on education and health.

Frankly, economics has never been my strong suit. I am easily baffled by the figures that are cloaked in a particular jargon. Hence, I sometimes begin to have doubts about my own formulation about our social and intellectual deprivations. But every time I am persuaded to look at the silver lining, there is some cloudburst to inundate the entire landscape. Like this Unesco report and the messages it has underlined.

In her introduction to the report, Unesco Director-General Irina Bokova has urged that we must fundamentally change the way we think about education and its role in human well-being and global development. “Now, more than ever”, she said, “education has a responsibility to foster the type of skills, attitudes and behaviour that will lead to sustainable and inclusive growth”.

What would sustainable and inclusive growth mean for Pakistan? Since I am not an expert, I cannot answer this question in any detail. I do suspect that windfall profits made in stocks or business as well as the glitter of a shopping mall would not provide sufficient indicators for such growth. But our rulers will find it difficult to understand these things.

There has been some talk about how about half of our children have stunted minds because of lack nourishment. I wonder if we could say the same thing about our rulers, though in an inverted sense. Their mental capacities are apparently diminished by their lack of intake of what may be described as the realities of our existence. They live in their own security bubble. They cannot walk on the streets or go visit a primary school in a poor locality.

This means that something has to be done to educate our rulers. Even electoral politics has not enabled them to breathe the same air, laden with the toxic fumes of deprivation that circulates in the lower depths of our society. They live totally insulated lives.

The pity is that some people, apart from us poor scribes, do tell truth to power. Two weeks ago, I had quoted the outgoing country director of UNDP, who had warned that “you cannot have a political class in this country that uses its power to enrich itself”.

And I conclude with a recent observation of the Supreme Court. It has asked the rulers to discontinue their opulent, monarch-like lifestyle and instead focus all their energies and resources on elevating the condition of the underprivileged and downtrodden people.

The writer is a senior journalist.

Email: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com