Education is organized into five levels: primary
(grades one through five); middle (grades six
through eight); high (grades nine and ten, culminating
in matriculation); intermediate (grades eleven
and twelve, leading to an F.A. diploma in arts
or F.S. science; and university programs leading
to undergraduate and advanced degrees. Preparatory
classes (kachi, or nursery) were formally incorporated
into the system in 1988 with the Seventh Five-Year
Plan.
Academic and technical education institutions
are the responsibility of the federal Ministry
of Education, which coordinates instruction through
the intermediate level. Above that level, a designated
university in each province is responsible for
coordination of instruction and examinations.
In certain cases, a different ministry may oversee
specialized programs. Universities enjoy limited
autonomy; their finances are overseen by a University
Grants Commission, as in Britain.
Teacher-training workshops are overseen by the
respective provincial education ministries in
order to improve teaching skills. However, incentives
are severely lacking, and, perhaps because of
the shortage of financial support to education,
few teachers participate. Rates of absenteeism
among teachers are high in general, inducing support
for community-coordinated efforts promoted in
the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1993-98).
In 1991 there were 87,545 primary schools, 189,200
primary school teachers, and 7,768,000 students
enrolled at the primary level, with a student-to-teacher
ratio of forty-one to one. Just over one-third
of all children of primary school age were enrolled
in a school in 1989. There were 11,978 secondary
schools, 154,802 secondary school teachers, and
2,995,000 students enrolled at the secondary level,
with a student-to- teacher ratio of nineteen to
one.
Primary school dropout rates remained fairly
consistent in the 1970s and 1980s, at just over
50 percent for boys and 60 percent for girls.
The middle school dropout rates for boys and girls
rose from 22 percent in 1976 to about 33 percent
in 1983. However, a noticeable shift occurred
in the beginning of the 1980s regarding the postprimary
dropout rate: whereas boys and girls had relatively
equal rates (14 percent) in 1975, by 1979-- just
as Zia initiated his government's Islamization
program--the dropout rate for boys was 25 percent
while for girls it was only 16 percent. By 1993
this trend had dramatically reversed, and boys
had a dropout rate of only 7 percent compared
with the girls' rate of 15 percent.
The Seventh Five-Year Plan envisioned that every
child five years and above would have access to
either a primary school or a comparable, but less
comprehensive, mosque school. However, because
of financial constraints, this goal was not achieved.
In drafting the Eighth Five-Year Plan in 1992,
the government therefore reiterated the need to
mobilize a large share of national resources to
finance education. To improve access to schools,
especially at the primary level, the government
sought to decentralize and democratize the design
and implemention of its education strategy. To
give parents a greater voice in running schools,
it planned to transfer control of primary and
secondary schools to NGOs. The government also
intended to gradually make all high schools, colleges,
and universities autonomous, although no schedule
was specified for achieving this ambitious goal.
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