With a lot thrashed out about issues like energy, fiscal anomalies, inflation and infrastructure, human dimensions to development such as health, food security, good governance which are in fact more important to masses in Pakistan, barely receive anyones attention.
Sadly but surely, education sector tells a similar tale.
The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) published earlier this year points out some dismal realities about conditions of schools, teachers and the sector as a whole in the country. The survey underscores that less than 42 percent of the children it evaluated can read at least a sentence in Urdu or their respective regional languages. Far fewer could read a story. Just over 40 percent of the children could solve a two-digit subtraction sum while half of them could crack a three-digit mathematic problem.
Province-wise details reveal that over 30 percent of children aged between 6 - 16 years in Sindh and Balochistan are out of school. In Punjab and KP, the proportion is relatively lower, but the absolute numbers are massive. With public expenditure on education hardly reaching 2.5 percent of GDP since the countrys inception, grave realities as such put forth by ASER and other international studies upset, but don astonish.
A cursory look at the past eras reveal that authorities tend to jump at the bigger problems such as economic development and fiscal normalization, while leaving core issues such as education in the lurch.
According to Unesco, the government of Pakistan spends more on subsidies to PSEs than on education. It further estimates that it would take only one-fifth of Pakistans military budget to pay for every child to complete primary school.
Pre-election surveys conducted in Pakistan revealed a majority of voters termed education as their top priority while voting. Accordingly, almost every party in its manifesto showed its utmost urgency in addressing the education emergency.
With PML-N taking over after the first-ever transition from one democratically elected government to another, a lot is expected to be accomplished in the field of education.