The Plight of Education In Pakistan

Education in Pakistan is closely linked with brain-drain. “Brain drain” refers to competent people leaving their country of living in order to search for better opportunities abroad As the world progresses further and further, it is an unfortunate sight to witness that we as a nation have time and time again been left behind. There is no better significator of this then the “brain drain issue” that we as a nation face, that has shown a significant rise as middle-income households gain access to opportunities that allow them to shift abroad. According to the global innovation index, as of 2024, Pakistan ranks as the 91st country on the global innovation index. Seeing this, it is no surprise that the nation only spends 2.8% of it’s total GDP on funding education, which is well below the standard bottom-line of 4% that is encouraged by the United Nations. Apart from the pressing issue of education, which will be explored further in-depth later on, the obvious next step of seeking employment also faces many short comings. According to Imarat Institute policy studies as recently as 2022-23, likely more than 61% of the unemployed population of Pakistan is comprised of the youth (ages 19-29 As recently as 2023, the number of skilled workers opting for employment abroad according to the economic survey of year 2023-34 showed a steep increase from the previous year by 26.6%

With the aforementioned proof, it is not a far-fetched to assume we have failed to match up the facilities we provide to our own people with those provided by international competitors which deeply affect our ability to sustain our own cultural heritage and systems of governance as opposed to relying on foreigners. How do we claim to be able to self-sustain, when our own people find us to untrustworthy to be supported by?

As mentioned earlier, let’s circle back to a more specific enabler of the issue, our lack of focus on education, and how foreign entities surpass us in providing educational opportunities for our people. Pakistan has a prominent informal schooling cultures through “Madrassas” that act as a replacement for secular schooling. The teachers within these Madrassas usually have expertise in Quran and hifz, though they do not have the credentials to act as substitutes for proper schooling, this leads to the students of these madrassas to grow up as dead weight unable to enter the workforce, as they don’t have the required qualifications to act as productive workers. As of late 2024 out of the estimated 30-35000 madrassas, only 17,000 are registered. Without oversight of the government these madrassas also become a sort of breeding ground for extremist indoctrination, thus ironically, the same informal systems held in place that were meant to support the nation end up destroying it. These informal systems are not enough to act as a foundation for a launch-pad for the nation to lose foreign dependency regarding education
The federal ministry of education overseas the education system in Pakistan, as for secondary or intermediate education, they award a secondary school certificate (SCC), also known as a matriculation certificate and later on the higher secondary school certificate (HSSC) say F.Sc (Science), F.A(Arts) or ICS(computer science)

The most apt case-studies to understand our short-comings would be of the provincial boards of Sindh and Punjab, the two largest provinces of Pakistan (it would not be wrong to say that these systems are not managed in the best way, just this year, in this, many reports of cheating were uncovered, despite efforts from the national and regional board to stop them in). In the previous year, the exams were inefficient and mismanaged in Sindh, with mismatch in the amount of students taking the exams and the amount of centers available and other such problems (This year in Punjab, proper staffing was dangerously delayed, which caused urgent directives to be issued by the government for immediate staffing, showing lack of foresight). All of these problems lead people to look towards more organized and credible educational facilities which often include well-established foreign education system such as Cambridge schooling. In fact, in 2024 alone, the number of candidates for Cambridge examination exceeded 100,000 and with Cambridge following an internationally reputed syllabus, it would not be far off to assume that most of these students have ambitions to move out of the country, especially considering the fact that as they have studied an international syllabus, mismatches in expectations of what they would be required to do in a professional setting would be frequent without government schooling. Being separated from their national culture and identity, this is only another example of how our failure as a nation to step up and support our people has led to the slow incubation of foreign soft-power within our own premises and how our refusal to strengthen our own national systems has slowly eroded our national identity by sending away the youth that could have helped create a better future for the nation.