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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Pakistan
Index
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.
Data as of April 1994
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