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.
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