Foundational cultural change

Deep rooted problems of our education sector

On the one hand we are promising that we will get every child in Pakistan, between the ages of five and sixteen years, in school (Article 25A) and provide free and compulsory education to them. On the other, we have 15 million plus children of school-going age out of schools and a government education system that is in tatters: it offers poor quality and limited access, a lot of schools do not have basic facilities, many do not have teachers, in some places teachers do not show up, do not teach or do not teach how they should be teaching, in other places we still do not have primary schools, and middle and high schools number a lot less, and teaching pedagogy leaves a lot to be desired, as do our examination systems. Most children drop out of public schools instead of finishing matriculation. And, although it has been two years since the passing of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the inclusion of 25A in the Constitution, there has been little effort to address the above issues too.

What should be clear from the above is that educating our children is not going to be simply a matter of more capital and human resources. Yes, they are needed and are important. But though they might be a necessary condition, they will not be sufficient. The real problem is the culture we have allowed our education system to settle into. Public schools are seen as providing services to only those who cannot afford private schools, teachers are seen as state employees who have permanent jobs and cannot be fired, but are ‘agents’ of the state who are to be used for other functions of the state: immunisation drives, conducting census, election duty, and so on.

MPAs/MNAs see government teacher jobs as a way of obliging constituents and as giving favours to be returned at election time (patron-client networks). This explains why there is so much interest, on the part of MPAs/MNAs, on hiring of teachers and posting/transfer and never on issues of educational quality and/or access. Teacher unions are also entrenched bureaucracies that have set roles in terms of protecting teacher interests alone, in terms of benefits, salaries, and job tenure. Provincial bureaucracies, usually managed by civil servants coming from district management cadres, have little or no understanding of education issues. They are usually just there to manage the labour force.

There are more than fifty thousand private schools in the country. Those who can afford to, and many who cannot really afford to but have no option, have shifted their children to private schools. The exit of the richer, usually more connected and more politically active citizens, has further weakened the pressure for provision of better educational services through the public system. So, how is the promise of 25A going to come about?

What is needed is a complete change of culture in the public education system of the country: a complete re-doing of the entire setup. But the problem is it is a huge system and changing basic culture, given such entrenched interests and positions of large lobbies and interest groups, is not easy. How is this to be accomplished?

Many colleagues think that it cannot be done and we should be looking to privatise everything and the state should just move to funding education and not providing it. But this is not really an option. The educational network we need is so large and in so many places where markets are not developed that it is just not practical to leave things to the private sector alone. And, empirically too, there is no example of any country which has done that for primary and high school education.

But if the state has to do it, we have to shake things up. And really shake them up. We have seen some examples of setting up of institutions that have defied the average low quality expectations that we have internalised about institutions in the country, private or public. From private sector we have examples like Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital and Aga Khan Hospital, Aga Khan University, and Lahore University of Management Sciences. And we have some examples from the public sector too. Motorway Police has a well-deserved reputation for efficiency, fairness, and efficacy.

Some of our well-established medical and engineering schools used to draw students from a number of countries till a couple of decades ago. Quaid-i-Azam University started out very well too. But these are all examples of institutions that developed their reputations when they were established. For these we can see a pattern to how a good institutional culture can be created: a clear mission and an initial group of mission-driven and dedicated people who are motivated with the mission can create the cultural ethos of a new institution that settles it into a certain pattern. It is not easy to continue with this pattern and many of our institutions have indeed lost their initial lustre, but still the way they are set up is clearer.

But we do not have many examples of turnarounds of poorly performing institutions and sectors. State Bank of Pakistan might have been an example but I do not think it is been sustained after the initial changes. Still it does point out some important factors. If the entrenched culture is to be challenged: a) incentives have to be changed, b) dominant interests have to be challenged, c) entrenched power has to be uprooted, d) new methods have to be introduced and installed, and e) new interests have to be entrenched so that new ways can become standard operating procedures. In other words, old powers have to be challenged and uprooted if they do not change and new ones have to be put in place that can support the new culture and expectations. This, when we are talking of bureaucracies of hundreds of thousands, is not easy. Maybe the way forward would be to devolve education management to district level and try to deal with the issue at that smaller unit rather than at provincial level.

Cultural change is the challenge in education. If that does not happen, things are not going to change and we will continue to limp forward. But cultural change, when institutions, organisations, and interest groups are entrenched, is not easy or costless. It can only happen by challenging the entrenched power structures. It will definitely not happen in an election year. But even post election, will any government have the incentive to do it? We will come back to the how of it in the next few weeks.

The writer is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS (currently on leave) and a Senior Advisor at Open Society Foundation (OSF). He can be reached at [email protected]