Education and class in Pakistan: The growth of the private sector-I

The education system in Pakistan is languishing in an abysmal condition. In the absence of appropriate and consistent policy, the continued depreciation of facilities and erosion of public credibility in the state system many parents are opting out of the state system and moving to the growing private sector.
The growth of the non-state sector in education has been steady since denationalisation in the early 1980s and has exploded in the last fifteen years. This growth of the private sector raises questions about quality and equity. The literature overwhelmingly finds in favour of the private sector when it comes to quality. There is also some qualified support for encouraging this trend from educationists. The literature however fails to deal satisfactorily with the social equality and justice implications of the rising private sector.
KEYWORDS: Educational equality, social justice, social class, social stratification, human capital and state, private and voluntary sectors.
INTRODUCTION: The education system in Pakistan is languishing in an abysmal condition. In the absence of an appropriate and consistent policy, the continued depreciation of facilities and erosion of public credibility in the state system, many parents are opting out of the state system and moving to the growing private sector. The growth of the non-state sector in education has been steady since denationalisation in the early 1980s and has exploded in the last fifteen years. This growth of the private sector raises questions about quality and equity.
The literature overwhelmingly finds in favour of the private sector when it comes to quality. There is also some qualified support for encouraging this trend from educationists. The literature however, fails to deal satisfactorily with the social equality and justice implications of the rising private sector.
Education is one of the central ingredients for progress that is rarely disputed. Depending upon the time and place, it has been used in various ways to provide for 'progress'.
During the industrialisation of Europe, state education provided a trained working force for factory owners. During the British Raj, the British education system provided trained clerks and lower staff for the bureaucracy that ran the highly profitable colony. During the 1960s, social democratic European educationists viewed education as the 'silver bullet' that would eliminate class differences: the great equaliser. In Pakistan, a lack of education is widely seen as the root cause of most, or all social, political and economic ills. There is general consensus, it seems, that education is the solution to all of Pakistan's socio-economic problems.
This 'consensus', however, has failed to translate into an extensive and equal state school system for Pakistani children. Extremely poor physical infrastructure, incompetent and absentee teachers and a woefully inadequate curriculum are commonly repeated complaints.
These factors, coupled with an agrarian economy involving entire rural households (including school-going age children) working on farms, and a lack of meritocracy, have led to low school enrolment and high subsequent dropout. At the same time, a minority of elite citizens are able to avail themselves of high quality education in expensive private educational institutions. On the other hand, children of the urban poor languish in decrepit state schools.
In the debate on the shortcomings of Pakistan's education, very little attention is paid to the interaction between education and social class. The little that is given is related to the medium of education and the parallel curricula. Very little is said about the impact of the movements in delivery in education between the three main sectors - state, private and voluntary - on social class and stratification.
On the one hand, the state education system languishes and grapples with problems of curriculum, medium of education and poor teacher quality and is aptly represented by the picture of the 'ghost school'. On the other, the private and voluntary sector is growing at an increasing pace. Contrary to received wisdom, an increasing proportion of new schools in the private sector are catering to the poor in both the urban and rural areas. This raises obvious issues of quality and equity within the education system.
There is an increasing amount of optimistic evidence about the private sector's ability to improve upon the quality of teaching over state schools. This evidence has brought with it optimism about the private sector in schooling. This paper reviews the literature on the growth of the private sector and its quality implications and attempts to analyse the implications of private schooling growth for social equality.
There is some evidence that private and NGO schools are providing qualitatively better education to Pakistani children than state schools in the literature. In the context that Pakistan's education system is already divided, based on the socio-economic backgrounds of students (social stratification), this represents progress. This paper suggests, however, that the full implications, on social equality, of a greater role for the private sector in education have not been fully reviewed.
METHODOLOGY, SCOPE & TERMINOLOGY:
This paper is an exploratory review of the literature already available and is by no means an exhaustive survey. The study is limited to the state-market-voluntary sector nexus for the provisions of a public service (in this case: education) and its interaction with social class.
Other concerns in education such as language and curricula are alluded to, but a detailed analysis of these does not fall within the purview of this study. The central questions therefore are: what is the relative role of the state, the private sector and the voluntary sector in the provision of education? And how will this distribution affect class divisions in Pakistani society?
The discussion limits itself to a review of primary and secondary schooling. The terms 'schooling' and 'education' are used interchangeably to mean primary and secondary schooling unless otherwise indicated. A number of the studies reviewed use conflicting classifications of schools.
Here 'state schools' refers to government run schools, 'private schools' refer to privately owned fee-charging schools and 'voluntary schools' refer to madrassas and NGO run schools. This classification is different from some other analysis as some of the studies bunch together private fee-charging schools with privately owned voluntary schools1.
The next two sections cover the economic and social arguments for state provision of education. The rest of the paper reviews the growth of the private and voluntary sector in the provision of education and its impact on society.
EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT:
Human capital theory provides the strongest argument for education as a public good from an economic perspective. Increased education enhances labour productivity (as highlighted by the fact that those with more education command higher wages/salaries in the job market) and the accumulation of human capital accrues to economic growth.
An example of successful use of the education-development causality comes from the so-called 'Asian Tiger' economies where the state linked education policies close to the needs of industrial development through three phases from the 1950s through to the 1980s.
Apart from human capital accumulation, that is measured by returns to education measures, there are considerable social externalities of investments in education, which are not measured. For a developing country these would include increased sense of civic and social responsibility, lower crime rates, etc. These also include lower fertility and mortality rates achieved through education of women.
The two arguments made for state intervention in education is based on the implicit assumption that the private sector will cater to the laws of supply and demand in the market, where those who can afford it, will be able to purchase it. This brings us to the discussion of education as a tool for social justice and equality.
EDUCATION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE:
Social injustice or inequality is defined in the form of socio-economic inequality represented by some manner of stratification between members of society (eg the class system), where members of one or more strata (of society) are viewed to enjoy a disproportionate amount of privilege relative to members of other strata. In the modern market economy, inequality in income and in wealth is the most commonly used indicator of socio-economic stratification.
Any conception of social justice and equality in citizenship would, therefore, require that the state provide its citizens with equal opportunity to earn (occupational attainment). The public service that has the greatest impact on occupational attainment is that of education. Therefore, the state must pursue 'equality in education'.
Social stratification is a dual concept, describing at the same time a condition (as the one described above) as well as a process "in which members of a population become stratified". Essentially, the term describes both the condition of class divisions, as well as the process of creating and/or strengthening these divisions. As a condition, stratification affects access to public goods (such as education, healthcare, etc) for members of various strata.
Therefore, the wealthy can purchase high quality education and healthcare even as less well off members of society cannot. One of the objectives of state provision of public goods (public services) is to reduce stratification (or at least reduce the impact of stratification). Stratification results in unequal access to education as wealthier members of society are able to purchase better education for their children.
Also, education systems - dependent upon their structures - can contribute to an entrenchment of stratification through their impact on equality of occupational achievement. In some cases "a society's educational institutions can be described as its "sorting machine" because they are a major part of the society's institutional arrangements that serve to stratify its population".
The western/northern understanding of educational equality as a concept has changed since the 19th century and passed through various states of development. Most western welfare states have gone through distinct phases of the development of education as a unique public service beginning with the explicit objective of providing a trained workforce to fuel the industrial revolution, through the era of equal opportunity, defined by the right of access to common facilities (1960s), and finally today, where educational equality is almost universally defined by attainment (or educational output) in education policy literature. Partly due to this evolution, educational equality can sometimes be difficult to conceptualise.
The recent debate on education has witnessed a push towards increased parental choice. This discourse in welfare states about the need for state intervention and the role of the private sector in education has been fuelled by an alleged failure of the state to eliminate educational inequality. Recent literature suggests that educational disadvantage, measured by socio-economic background, persists in most developed welfare states, whereas, the changes in ethnic and racial disadvantages are mixed and gender-based disadvantages have been removed.
This recent pessimism in the ability of education in reducing class disadvantage has coincided with tentative and minor moves towards the private sector in some western welfare states. A recently announced study [18] in the United Kingdom finds that "...the overwhelming factor in how well children do is not which school they attend, but social class."
It is clear, however, that this discussion is possible based on the background of a universally agreed upon notion of state responsibility for the provision of social justice. Therefore the debate, as outlined above, is limited to developed welfare states where there is an established state education infrastructure (including physical facilities, trained teachers, etc), and more importantly, the state education apparatus reaches most, if not all, school-going age children.
Additionally, the correlation between education and the opportunity to attain economic prosperity is established and is accepted by the public. Finally, most developed western/northern states do not have to deal with multiple languages and multiple parallel curricula in place. In other words, the discussion (of the kind elaborated above) as to whether education should be funded, supplied and /or regulated by the state or the market is possible in the context of modern western/northern states.
The above characteristics are not necessarily true in Pakistan (and other developing countries), where large agrarian, rural populations have traditional family structures and children involved in the role of earners. Firstly, therefore, it is not established for many families that education leads to greater economic opportunity. Microeconomic literature on private returns to education in developing countries suggests that there is an opportunity cost attached to sending children to school for many agrarian rural families. The two points made here suggest that demand for schooling (especially in poor rural environments) is not universal.
Second, the elementary education system in Pakistan has - traditionally - remained socially stratified along three dimensions. The three dimensions are the nature of the deliverer of education (state, private, or voluntary), the curriculum (A/O Levels or the so-called 'Matric system') and the medium of education (English or Urdu/provincial language). Combined, these three dimensions formed the basis of the relationship between Pakistan's education system and her socio-economic strata.
Therefore, the private, A/O levels, English medium school catered to the elite; the private, Matric system, English medium school catered to the middle class and the state Matric system, Urdu medium school catered to the working class. Hence, a Pakistani's socio-economic background determined, to a large extent, the kind of school he/she attended and consequently determined his/her future career path. Recent literature suggests that there has been an explosion of private schools in Pakistan.
This relatively recent phenomenon raises obvious questions about the causes behind this growth, the actual size of the private sector and whether the increase in the private sector affects educational opportunity for the most deprived in these countries.
(To be Continued)