THE POLITICS OF EDUCATION REFORMS

Abstract

Pakistan’s education system has seen numerous structural and cosmetic reforms ever since the newly born state inherited an inadequate system from its colonial heritage. This paper attempts to probe into the nature of these successive reforms in order to assess how far these reforms attained their avowed objective of devising a modern teaching-learning scenario suited to the academic and socio-economic milieu of the independent nation. The paper adopts a chronological perspective to investigate the influence of political motives, ideological slant and vested interests of various regimes behind these attempts at modifying the education system. It is a qualitative analysis by the author in the light of his personal experience of more than a decade with educational policy and planning. It observes that Pakistan’s numerous education reforms are mostly motivated by political considerations and objectives instead of aiming at a didactic process for meaningful and utilitarian transfer of knowledge to succeeding generations, without taking into view the evolving socio-economic needs, modern educational environment, internationally prevalent best teaching practices, futuristic curricular designs and modules, consistency, uniformity and progression of syllabi, provision of requisite infrastructure and resource allocation and pragmatic need analysis on the basis of economic or technological transformation of the client society. It also identifies radical but realistic steps needed to suit the existing educational practices and infrastructure with the modern pedagogy and highlights the key considerations lacking in the prevalent mechanism which hinder its universal, uniform and optimal utility in the light of the country’s special cultural and economic needs.