Education system reforms in Pakistan "how & when"

Pakistan’s education system faces many well-known problems for decades now. At the primary and secondary level, both access and student achievement are low especially when we talk about government run institutes, it's even lower by international standards. The future outlook is pessimistic, with Pakistan likely to fall well short of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of achieving universal primary education by 2022. Teacher preparation and teacher attendance at schools are still inadequate. Even though biometric attendance system has been already introduced in almost all provincial government schools. The inequalities in access, quality, and educational outcomes remain across gender, across income, between urban and rural schools, and among the country’s four provinces. These inequalities create some staggering disparities: for instance, Punjabi urban males completed primary school in the early 2000s at a rate of 65%; but only about 10% of rural Bloch or rural Pa-than females did so. New data on these disparities provide some encouragement. There is still a long distance to go in eliminating them. The higher education system also no better, in spite of strides made in the past decade. Enrollment stands at about 8% (including two-year colleges) of the age cohort, a statistic that compares unfavorably with countries such as India at 18% and Malaysia at 42%. The problems in this system are way more. Low quality of faculty, low student motivation, rote learning, outdated curriculum, poor student discipline in public universities, lack of funding, lack of research, and so forth. As a result, a large majority of Pakistani graduates emerge from universities without the technical or social skills needed for them to be strong contributors in the workplace or society, either in Pakistan or on the global stage. Vocational education in Pakistan is even more marginalized. Less than 1% of the population has ever received technical education or vocational training. For those who have, quality has been uneven. More than 75% of the graduates have some foundational skills but no marketable skills for employment. Poor administration, lack of interaction with industry, and the outdated infrastructure of public institutions have been blamed. Such issues, along with those that bedevil the other levels of education, explain why Skilled Workforce Indicators such as ‘poor work ethic’ and inadequate education rank as two of the top 10 most problematic factors for doing business in Pakistan, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Competitiveness Report.  These problems are not new or unknown, and various Pakistani governments have tried, with questionable resolve, to respond. Pakistan in fact has a long history of failed reforms and educational development plans. As early as 1959, the National Commission on Education produced a report that outlined the problems in Pakistan’s educational system and recommended reforms. By and large, the problems identified in that report remained unaddressed and have persisted through the Government of Pakistan’s educational policies of 1970, 1972, 1979, 1992, and 1998. Given the rather dismal history of educational reform in Pakistan, a pragmatic question is if anything can be done, and if it has any reasonable chance of success. We believe the answer is a qualified yes, as several forces both within the educational system and in the broader polity in Pakistan have come together to create a window of opportunity for education reforms to materialize. A Single national curriculum (SNC) has been proposed by the government of Pakistan reveals that it has been constructed with a view to achieving the state’s ideological imperatives, rather than pedagogical aims and goals. The overriding theme is the construction of a majoritarian religious nationalism, underlined by the national security narrative. On the other hand, there is another opinion as well, that the proposed SNC has not been formulated in accordance with pedagogical imperatives of the development of a child’s cognitive skills or to promote intellectual growth and social and economic productivity. Instead, it has been designed to further religious nationalism, homogenization and centralism. So the question still remains how & when ?