Despite modest improvements, Pakistan’s education system remains structururally unbalanced, gender-biased, and administratively bloated. This is a call for bold reform: a shift to female-led primary schooling, decentralisation through maternal engagement, curriculum downsizing, and the accreditation of non-formal education pathways.
By placing mothers and female teachers at the heart of school education and reorienting education toward life and occupational skills for sustained livelihoods, Pakistan can reshape its destiny and political economy.
### The Education Challenge in Pakistan
Thirty-nine percent of Pakistan’s 241 million people are illiterate. Despite modest gains, the education sector is critically underperforming. With a Human Development Index (HDI) value of 0.540, the country ranks 164th out of 193 nations, underscoring pervasive deficits in literacy, life expectancy, and income.
As a signatory to the Dakar Declaration, Pakistan pledged ambitious targets including universal primary education, gender parity, and quality education for all. A full decade later, these promises remain largely unfulfilled.
According to the Economic Survey (2024-25), 38 percent of children aged 5-16 remain out of school, and educational outcomes trail behind South Asian peers on nearly every metric.
### Gender Gap and Learning Inequity
Girls account for 43 percent of total enrolment. However, their numbers diminish sharply across education levels: 37 percent in primary, 20 percent in middle, and fewer than 10 percent in higher secondary education. Completion rates are dismal—only 42 percent of girls complete primary education compared to 51 percent of boys.
Literacy among women stands at 52.8 percent, trailing the 68 percent literacy rate for men. This gap is even wider in rural areas, where female literacy averages 38 percent compared to over 60 percent for men.
### Structural Imbalance in Public Education
Public spending on education has risen modestly to 1.91 percent of GDP—an improvement from previous years but still far below the UNESCO-recommended 4 percent. Recurrent expenditures dominate this allocation, sustaining bureaucratic structures rather than enabling catalytic reform.
School budgets continue to favour pre-existing infrastructure due to costing methodologies, leaving girls’ schools under-resourced and underserved. While a boys’ school exists within one kilometer of 77 percent of villages, girls’ schools meet this criterion in only 69 percent—reinforcing barriers to access and contributing to dropout rates.
### Buildings, Bureaucracy, and Barriers
Infrastructure remains a glaring bottleneck: 17 percent of primary schools lack appropriate buildings. Many schools also lack furniture, toilets, blackboards, and basic instructional tools.
Many parents, especially those of daughters, mistrust the schooling environment. Although teachers are now relatively better paid, they are hamstrung by a system that prioritizes scale over substance. Recruitment remains skewed, training is patchy, and support is nearly nonexistent.
The teaching experience is often punitive, disconnected, and uninspiring. The education bureaucracy is overstaffed in administration but lacks sufficient technical staff to support pedagogy, regulate quality, and assess learning outcomes. Most districts lack capacity for instructional coaching or curriculum delivery oversight.
A recalibration is imperative to reduce administrative bloat, expand technical staffing, and focus on direct academic support.
### A Feminized Frontline for Education
Among Pakistan’s most underutilized assets in the education ecosystem are mothers—present, engaged, and consistently invested in their children’s well-being. In rural and peri-urban areas, fathers often travel for work or remain detached from schooling concerns, leaving mothers as frontline guardians of children’s rights.
The child in the village, the teacher in the classroom, and the mother at the doorstep must all be woven into a shared story of learning.
To harness this untapped reservoir of advocacy and support, primary schooling must be assigned exclusively to female teachers, especially in underserved regions. Female educators can better engage mothers as partners—not just in academic learning, but also in child protection, attendance monitoring, and community-led support systems.
Together with community teachers, mothers can become potent champions of education continuity and safe learning environments. Such a gender-sensitive shift can catalyze trust and traction. Children, especially girls, are more likely to attend schools where maternal figures have a visible role.
This approach also creates a feedback loop where female teachers and mothers co-create solutions, monitor school conditions, and advocate for improvements.
### Revitalizing School Management Committees
School Management Committees (SMCs) must be revitalized with maternal inclusion. Over 90 percent of SMCs exist only nominally, lacking operational clarity or ownership. The revamped Punjab SMC Policy, 2024, has seen inconsistent implementation.
Women-led, community-rooted governance must become the foundation for sustainable reform.
Rather than expanding government control, primary education should be privatized—especially in underserved areas—with robust regulatory oversight. Carefully structured and monitored public-private partnerships can diversify options, stimulate innovation, and relieve the public sector of its unwieldy operational load.
### From Access to Autonomy
Girls’ education must transcend enrolment targets to become a strategy for transformation. Safe environments, female teachers, flexible pathways, and curriculum relevance remain pivotal to girls’ access to education.
For girls to thrive, they must not only attend but also engage, excel, and envision futures beyond inherited constraints.
Non-formal education (NFE) models should be accredited through centralized assessments, allowing marginalized children—especially girls—to gain certified completion of primary schooling.
For rural and culturally constrained communities, NFE pathways must be extended to higher secondary levels, offering continuity, credibility, and mobility to girls aspiring to overcome barriers to education.
### Curriculum for Livelihoods, Harmony, and Humanity
The current syllabus is cognitively overloaded and socio-politically skewed. At primary and secondary levels, the number of subjects must be slashed, prioritizing comprehension over memorization and relevance over repetition.
These factors have contributed significantly to the widespread perception that education remains irrelevant to livelihood prospects for most underserved segments of society.
To align learning with future livelihoods, technical content and occupational skills must be embedded across disciplines. Promoting do-it-yourself (DIY) learning—craftsmanship, repair, digital literacy, and entrepreneurial thinking—can nurture both competence and confidence.
Equally urgent is the inclusion of life skills education: financial literacy, socialization, hygiene practices, ecological awareness, and civic responsibility. These should replace religiously prescriptive content, which is better cultivated at the household level.
Where religious instruction is retained, it should be reframed as civic ethics rooted in humane, tolerant behaviors and interfaith harmony.
### A New Political Economy of Learning
Pakistan’s education crisis is not merely a sectoral issue; it is a political economy dilemma rooted in priorities, institutional design, and ideological discomfort with decentralization.
Reform cannot be incremental; it must be structural—beginning with a reassessment of how education is defined and who it serves.
If Pakistan is to achieve inclusive growth, social stability, and democratic resilience, education must be treated as infrastructure—not charity.
The current system must be reimagined and transformed: privatized at the base, regulated at the core, and liberated from bureaucratic grip.
The child in the village, the teacher in the classroom, and the mother at the doorstep must be woven into a shared story of learning—a story not of quotas and expenditure, but of dignity, autonomy, and aspiration.
Let Pakistan’s next decade of education be not just a revision but a reinvention.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/1346843-re-imagining-the-political-economy-of-learning
