Posts Tagged ‘System’
Pakistan’s Education System ? Problems and Reasons for Policy Failure
After more than a half century of independence, nearly half of Pakistan’s population is still illiterate. According toHathaway (2005), Pakistan’s education system is regularly cited as one of the most serious impediments preventing the country from achieving its potential.
Poorly produced and inadequately implemented educational policies and plans have been major hurdles in the development of the education sector in Pakistan. Throughout our history, new policies and plans have often been prepared without giving due consideration to the causes of failure of previous policies and plans.
In order to address these problems, there is a need for the formulation of rational policies and plans as well as an adequate system for their implementation. The objective of this paper is to scrutinize the problems being faced by the education sector in Pakistan. It also seeks to highlight the reasons for the failure of the national education policy.
Background of Pakistan’s Education System
According to several international assessments, Pakistan is far from achieving the goal of Education for All (henceforth, EFA). The EFA was set to be attained by all developing countries under the Dakar Framework decided at a meeting held in Senegal in 2000. UNESCO attributes Pakistan’s placement at a lower EFA development Index (EDI) category to low primary school participation, adult illiteracy, gender disparities, inequalities in education and poor quality of education. The adult literacy rate in Pakistan is under 50 percent, while less than one-third of adult women have a functional reading ability. Pakistan is unlikely to achieve the adult literacy target by 2015. Progress is slow, while gender parity goal is at risk of not being achieved in 2015. Moreover, more than 6 million children are out of school. (UNESCO 2007)