There has been no dearth of commentary on the Kerry Lugar Bill. It has been hotly debated inside our parliament, on every T.V. channel in Pakistan and in every nook and corner of the country.
Much of the debate has focused on the political dimensions of the bill and rightly so. Our relationship with the sole superpower of our times indeed exists within a lot of context and that context needs to be factored into any conversation regarding a Pakistan facing legislation in the United States.
The final fate of the bill and how the finances are utilized will get decided in the corridors of power and then eternally debated for our lifetimes but it might be beneficial as an intellectual exercise to look at what the bill entails in absence of the conditions, rules and the political assertions contained in the bill. So let’s commence this intellectual journey in a parallel universe where the Kerry Lugar bill is politically context-less and is merely a document on educational reform.
I personally feel that Kerry Lugar aid or no Kerry Lugar aid, but the crumbs scattered all over the bill that point to a comprehensive approach to education and the thought that has gone into authoring this approach to education has elements that should definitely get factored into our national education and socioeconomic development policy.
It felt very strange to me reading the bill closely that a document written by an outside nation can cover the breadth of our problems so well and ends up focusing on just the right set of socioeconomic fundamentals that must be addressed to cure those problems that our own leaders have failed to address time and again. Or perhaps the ailments that afflict our nation or for that matter every third world nation are way too obvious. The impressive laundry list of the referred fundamentals is way too long to cite here but even a cursory browsing of the bill makes the breadth and comprehensiveness evident.
We can deep dive as part of this intellectual journey in any of the problem areas highlighted in the bill and find tidbits scattered across the bill relevant to that problem but no other subject gained as many words of text as did education.
Looking at education, there are a number of key pieces of this comprehensive approach to education that gets highlighted in the bill. I would look at it as three parallel streams that feed off each and also contribute to each other. This is not a statement of how the authors view the bill but a statement of how I would like to tie all of the pieces in the bill together to form a comprehensive whole given my personal understanding of our dilemmas. The first stream would be a focus on both tiers of education i.e. primary/secondary and higher education. The second is an understanding that no approach to education exists outside the realities enforced by economics. The third is an appreciation for the fact that in a nascent democracy such as ours civic education becomes as important or even more important than literacy type education.
Within the primary/secondary tier of the first stream, the focus is rightly on enhancing access to education by expanding the outreach of public education making it as broadly available as possible and helping out NGOs already making a difference in this space. At the same time the bill calls for improving the other variable in the education by "support (ing) the strengthening of core curricula and quality of schools". There is additional stress on "initiatives to increase women’s literacy, with a special emphasis on helping girls stay in school" and on looping in violence prone youth. On the other hand, for higher education the focus is on imparting professional skills that are needed in our environment, "support for institutions of higher learning with international accreditation"," programs relating to ensure a breadth and consistency of Pakistani graduates, including through public-private partnerships, "expanded exchange activities" and "expand(ed) sister institution programs between United States and Pakistani schools and universities".
For both these tiers, the economic imperatives have been kept in mind. There are references to relevant vocational education and imparting technical training to the expanded pool of literate youth emerging from the primary/secondary education so that they can be part of the infrastructure developments being suggested elsewhere in the bill. For the other end of the spectrum, public-private partnerships have been suggested as a way to feed the economy as well as absorb the highly skilled workforce coming out of higher education institutions. The bill also talks about "access to microfinance for small business establishment and income generation" to provide economic opportunities for a more educated nation. Together these three facets provide at least the beginnings of the tie-in that needs to be there between education and economic prospects in an impoverished nation like ours.
I was pretty happy to see that there was repeated talk all over the bill about civic education. That is one aspect of our education that we frequently ignore at our own peril. Introducing concepts of civic responsibility, voter responsibility, respect for human rights, realization of the impact of violence with or without uniform, religious freedom and tolerance, and women rights should be as much a part of education in Pakistan as anything else. Violence has been a part of our national psyche in one way or another and if we can just address that, we will doing ourselves great good in the long term. An even more refreshing aspect of civic education that was suggested was "enhancing the capacity of committees to oversee government activities", as well as "enhancing the ability of members of parliament to respond to constituents" and adequately represent their electorate.
Things are always easier said than done but coupled together, these three streams form a holistic approach to targeting the complexities of our educational problems. I am sure our political, military and media luminaries have read the bill extensively to criticize its political connotations. My hope is that it also became clearer to them, while reading the bill, that our list of problems is long and complex. Under these circumstances, a broad comprehensive approach grounded in our socioeconomic reality rather than the random array of schemes that pop up and disappear with each government is a necessary condition in tackling any one of those problems including education.
