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Pakistan
Index
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.
Data as of April 1994
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