KARACHI, June 18: The second lecture in the Parween Rahman series focused on education, a subject just as close to the slain social worker, urban planner and architect’s heart as helping people was.

As Parween’s elder sister Aquila Ismail pointed out before the lecture which was held at T2F on Tuesday, her younger sister with her late mentor Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan had started a home-schooling programme which couldn’t take off because it wasn’t really a structured school system. “It was then that Parween set up the Training Resource Centre to provide teachers training to youth more inclined towards education,” she said. “Meanwhile, private schools in Orangi also wanted something done for them and that was when she started channeling her skills to start an education support programme for them too.”

Ms Ismail explained that her sister’s perspective changed further after the 2010 floods when displaced people living in camps told her informed her ono being interviewed that their children had no access to education even in their villages. “While gathering funds to provide them with shelter, Parween also set up small schools for children living in flood camps. Her idea was to give them an inch above ground so that they could take off by themselves from there. Once she had their trust, she also arranged for whatever else they needed to run their schools such as teachers training and funding,” she said.

Ms Ismail who shared Parween’s own educational achievements, said that her sister had received as many as 10 gold medals including the Mehdi Ali Mirza (MAMA) Award as a student of architecture at the Dawood College of Engineering and Technology. “Then for her work in urban housing and development for the Orangi Pilot Project, she also got the Faiz Foundation Award, the UN Habitat Award for Best Practices, the World Habitat Award, life membership of the International Water Academy and other awards. And, of course, the Sitara-i-Shujaat was also conferred on her posthumously. But Parween never spoke about all these accolades,” she said.

In her lecture, senior journalist, researcher and author Mrs Zubeida Mustafa took over from where Ms Ismail had left off. “If we could address the issues of education, half of our problems will be solved,” she pointed out. “What struck me about Parween was her fine educational background. She understood the importance of imparting education to others in order to empower them.”

Ms Mustafa said that she had come to know about Parween’s education programme in Orangi after retiring from the Dawn newspaper. “She had been most helpful for me to visit the area and meet people doing educational work there.”

Explaining that private schools in Orangi were greater in number than government schools, Mrs Mustafa said, “People living in Orangi come from a migrant background and want good education for their children so they send their offspring to private schools as they can also see that the government schools are not doing as good a job. That’s why the rate of literacy in Orangi is much higher than the national literacy rate.”

She said that though the private schools in Orangi aren’t necessarily big, but they are sufficient for children of that area. “Parween’s support group also helped these small community schools since she arranged grants and visits from educationists to make them self-reliant. These schools couldn’t have lasted without this support.”

Mrs Mustafa then shared a few eye-opening statistics depicting the level of education in Pakistan and where it was headed. “Due to high birth rate in our country, out of the 180 million people in Pakistan, 80 million belong to the under-18 age group,” she said. “The net enrollment in our primary schools, mostly of children between five to nine years of age is 57 per cent and the dropout rate keeps growing. Of the ones who attend primary school, only 50 per cent will go to the secondary level. And even half of them will opt for college or university.”

She said that under Article 25-A of the constitution, children aged between five and 16 years were entitled to free and compulsory education. “But a big segment of our youth remains uneducated, which reflects on the state,” lamented Mrs Mustafa.

Pondering over the solution to the country’s education problems, the former journalist looked back into history to the indigenous educational system in South Asia which had been introduced by Thomas Babington Macaulay in colonial times. “Macaulay decided to educate only a small number of people belonging to the higher classes in order to fill the administration jobs in the subcontinent. He set up a structure for education that continues to this day since only a small class gets good education here now,” she said.

However, she said, the problem was that the entire country had to be educated and not a small percentage. She said that while the majority was denied quality basic education the privileged went to the few good English-medium schools and built contacts with people abroad.

“Earlier, there was a balance as the government schools used to be good as well. But though the policy of nationalising all schools in 1972 to make education uniform was acceptable, it turned out that after taking over the private schools the government didn’t have the capacity to take care of them, hence the standards of the government schools went down,” explained Mrs Mustafa. “The elite schools were not nationalised although the policy said that they, too, would eventually be brought under the fold. Meanwhile, colleges were nationalised but the children coming out of the elite schools didn’t need to go to these colleges since they pursued higher education abroad.”

Elaborating further, the former journalist said that though denationalisation began in the Zia era but disparity continued and balance of the system once lost couldn’t be brought back again.

“It has divided the country into two streams where language too has become a barrier between the two classes since elite schools are all English-medium and government schools Urdu-medium,” said Mrs Mustafa. “The government schools don’t have good teachers because they don’t understand English very well. So with the exception of a few institutions we are not producing a qualified work force.”

However, she said, good education should not be inaccessible to people who don’t understand English. This was how language was being used to debar people from accessing good education and in turn a good life, she said, adding that this language issue had to be tackled if the country was to be pulled out of its problems. “It is a vicious cycle that needs to be broken,” she concluded.

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