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Pakistan
Reform Efforts
Three initiatives characterized reform efforts in education in
the late 1980s and early 1990s: privatization of schools that
had been nationalized in the 1970s; a return to English as the
medium of instruction in the more elite of these privatized schools,
reversing the imposition of Urdu in the 1970s; and continuing
emphasis on Pakistan studies and Islamic studies in the curriculum.
Until the late 1970s, a disproportionate amount of educational
spending went to the middle and higher levels. Education in the
colonial era had been geared to staffing the civil service and
producing an educated elite that shared the values of and was
loyal to the British. It was unabashedly elitist, and contemporary
education--reforms and commissions on reform notwithstanding--has
retained the same quality. This fact is evident in the glaring
gap in educational attainment between the country's public schools
and the private schools, which were nationalized in the late 1970s
in a move intended to facilitate equal access. Whereas students
from lower-class backgrounds did gain increased access to these
private schools in the 1980s and 1990s, teachers and school principals
alike bemoaned the decline in the quality of education. Meanwhile,
it appears that a greater proportion of children of the elites
are traveling abroad not only for university education but also
for their high school diplomas.
The extension of literacy to greater numbers of people has spurred
the working class to aspire to middle-class goals such as owning
an automobile, taking summer vacations, and providing a daughter
with a once-inconceivable dowry at the time of marriage. In the
past, Pakistan was a country that the landlords owned, the army
ruled, and the bureaucrats governed, and it drew most of its elite
from these three groups. In the 1990s, however, the army and the
civil service were drawing a greater proportion of educated members
from poor backgrounds than ever before.
One of the education reforms of the 1980s was an increase in
the number of technical schools throughout the country. Those
schools that were designated for females included hostels nearby
to provide secure housing for female students. Increasing the
number of technical schools was a response to the high rate of
underemployment that had been evident since the early 1970s. The
Seventh Five-Year Plan aimed to increase the share of students
going to technical and vocational institutions to over 33 percent
by increasing the number of polytechnics, commercial colleges,
and vocational training centers. Although the numbers of such
institutions did increase, a compelling need to expand vocational
training further persisted in early 1994.
Data as of April 1994
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