No short cuts here
Children today will eventually leave school to enter jobs which are not there -- to work on technologies which are not yet invented. Let's hope the curricula will address that demand
By Saadia Salahuddin
Curriculum is the guide that delineates the learning path of a student. Textbooks are one thing. Curriculum is more than just that. It's about preparing children for life. Whatever the curriculum, we have not been able to impart basic skills like reading and writing to our people which would enable them to express themselves well.

If wishes were horses…
The proposed education policy needs to be more realistic when asking for more funds
By Mustafa Nazir Ahmad
According to media reports, the proposed education policy, to be announced on March 23, includes among other things a suggestion to increase the country's education budget to 4 percent from the current 2 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) by the end of the current fiscal year (FY09), and to 7 percent within the next three years.

Too private an affair
Though NEP suggests regulatory measures for private sector it's silent on how to enforce them
By Shahzada Irfan Ahmed
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2009 prescribes that a system of checks and balances for the private sector shall be formed to oversee issues of fees, school standards, pays of teachers, conduct and hygiene etc. It says that registered private schools often charge more fees than they are authorised to take. The policy text also highlights the fact that the private schools are encouraged to offer admission and education services to 10 per cent needy but meritorious students free of cost, a regulation that is not followed by most private establishments.

The happy 'medium'
Simply crossing the language barrier for the purpose of acquiring scientific and mathematical knowledge is not adequate
The policies regarding the teaching of the subjects of Mathematics and General Science, as outlined in the National Education Policy draft, have been based upon the results of the 2005 and 2006 National Education Assessment System (NEAS) tests. The NEAS was established as a follow-up to the Education Sector Reforms (ESR) Action Plan 2001-2005 to evaluate the quality of education being imparted to elementary level students.

It is time for another policy on education. If the count is correct, this should be the eleventh education policy ever since this country came into existence. The earlier ones came in 1947, 1951, 1959, 1966, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1979, 1992 and 1998. The number of policies does not mean we are over-concerned about education; it means exactly the opposite.

The 1998 policy was to continue at least till 2010 as per the vision of the formulators. But as with earlier policies, the need to review it was felt much earlier -- in 2005 -- and, hence a National Education Policy Review programme was launched.

The White Paper issued by the team was a serious attempt to do what it was supposed to but, interestingly, the preamble by the authors is an apt reminder of what is wrong with our education. It begins by hinting at the "renaissance driven by Muslim scholars of the early centuries of the second millennium," goes on to quote Jinnah's speech on education, substantiates the argument with a verse from Iqbal and tries to emphasise the importance of education in Islam. This exactly is the problem. Each policy in this country begins with the assumption of forging a religious national identity as the basic purpose of education.

Why should we tell ourselves that the people of this country need education because Islam, Quaid-e-Azam and Iqbal said so? We should not because we have been saying this for over sixty years and it did not work.

It is time to move ahead. We should just mean business. We need a sound education policy because, in simple words, it is important for the survival of this country. We cannot farm, trade, industrialise, or think about our past, present and future if we do not provide meaningful education to all our citizens. We cannot produce responsible citizenry or skilled manpower without education.

Mercifully, the draft education policy 2009 does not talk about the vision of Islam or Jinnah and addresses the real challenges at the outset. Challenges, indeed, there are many. But we believe some of them must be dealt with as a matter of priority.

It is only fair to ask for a uniform system of education in the entire country, ensuring access to all. A decision, once and for all, about the medium of instruction is equally important. The teachers must command respect and inspire students and this cannot come by paying them well, as it is wrongly assumed. This shall come once we improve the quality of teachers and improve it constantly. Monitoring of educational institutions is where the key to implementing any policy lies. Market needs must correlate with the way the education policy is designed because that is how our neighbouring India has progressed. And lastly the role of private sector must be clearly stated. It did fill the gap as the state shirked from its foremost duty of providing quality education for all.

If we want to create equal opportunities through education and bring an end to this apartheid, we should ignore the Millennium Development Goals and projections about literacy rate for the time being and focus on the challenges first.

Pakistan was carved in 1947 as a separate nation-state out of British India and the territorial separation has been interpreted as an effect as well as a cause of other separations. One of these separations is the identity of the Pakistani citizen as imagined and promoted by different educational policies of Pakistan. This usually comes under a chapter titled 'Aims and Objectives' in all the policies before the National Educational Policy 2009 (draft) and, because of its absence in the current draft policy, we are tracing the history of the Aims and Objectives in our federal educational dreams here. Our position is that this exercise will help us how the "ideal Pakistani subject" has been constructed at various stages of our history.

In the First Education Conference of 1947, the objective of education is the production of "Islamic conception of universal brotherhood of man, social democracy, social justice, and the cultivation of democratic virtues, i.e. tolerance, self-help, self-sacrifice, human kindliness etc. and the consciousness of common citizenship as opposed to Provincial exclusiveness." It is our argument that Islam, as interpreted by the ideologues and educationists in 1947, was different from the way it was interpreted two decades later, especially after the war of 1965 and, later, during the Afghan jihad years. For example, in 1947, the official interpretation of Islam and the values to be cultivated in a student included "social justice," "tolerance," "human kindliness" and "self-sacrifice." It was also recommended that these "universal values" be inculcated through a language common to all provinces. The justification for this was sought from the Russian education system because "it shows how diversity has been encouraged without endangering the fundamental unity of common culture which has been ensured by the making of Russian as the first compulsory foreign language in all non-Russian schools."

The Russian example was cited to justify the promotion of Urdu as a lingua franca but, at that time, it was not promoted as a national (or qaumi) language. At that time, a tri-lingual citizen was the ideal product: someone who received necessary education in the mother tongues of his or her provinces, learnt Urdu as the lingua franca and English as the state/official language.

In 1951, the Second Education Conference recommended the use of Urdu not as lingua franca but as "the national and official language of Pakistan." At the same time, the aim of the educational system is to promote "the principles of Islamic ideology" but even at this stage religion is linked with social justice rather than aggression and jihad. In 1959, the Sharif Commission Report declared "a sense of unity and nationhood" as the idea product of the educational machinery. The sense of unity was, according to the report, to be created by promoting fine arts, natural history, science and industry, zoological gardens and planetariums. To our post-1965 mindset, this emphasis on the promotion of scientific, rational and artistic institutions as a necessary extension of Pakistani identity reads as something unusual. This trend continues till the war of 1965 with India, which is the point where the official construction of Islam and Pakistani identity acquired jingoistic overtones.

To illustrate our argument we offer two different views of the foreign missionary schools operating in Pakistan. In 1966, the Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report declared missionary schools to be a beneficial presence in the country:

"So far as the Christian missionary schools are concerned we were assured by the representatives of the Catholic Board Schools at Karachi, which runs as many as 24 primary schools, 11 secondary schools and 4 colleges, that it was a misnomer to classify them as missionary schools, for no missionary work was done at these schools and that education was imparted in their schools and colleges on the basis of the pupils and the parents religion. This, they claimed, was a "pontifical duty" imposed upon them by their Board. In fact, they asserted that they even taught Islamiyat in their schools and colleges according to the syllabus prescribed by the Government and that they did it 'better than others', as admitted by the Inspector of Schools himself."

The Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report cited the Constitution of 1963:

"Our Constitution by the First Amendment Act of 1963 provides it as a fundamental right under paragraph 12 (2) of Right No. IV that "no religious community or denomination shall be prevented from providing religious instruction for pupils of that community or denomination in any educational institution maintained wholly by that community or denomination." Again, under paragraph 12 (5), it is guaranteed that "every religious community or denomination shall have the right to establish and maintain educational institutions of its own choice, and the State shall not deny recognition to any such institution on the ground only that the management of such institution vests in that community or denomination.""

In 1969, the Proposal for New Educational Policy, which was signed by the then Federal Education Minister Noor Khan, maligns the foreign educational institutions operating in Pakistan and declares them to be against the national and religious identity of the ideal Pakistani.

Foreign missionary educational institutions in Pakistan tend to spread directly and indirectly the doctrines of religion and culture which are alien national values and Islamic concepts of life/and most of them are linked and affiliated to foreign educational systems.

Their continued existence in a free and independent state which is an Islamic Republic must be regarded as highly anachronistic. Not only do they perpetuate the barriers of distinction, their very existence in the educational system causes "endless complications for public policy." The policy should, therefore, aim at nationalising these institutions.

By 1979, the process of the militant Islamisation of Pakistani subjectivity has acquired an aggressive outlook towards everything it imagines to be "anti-Pakistan ideology." The purpose of National Education is declared to be the creation of:

"(The) awareness in every student that he, as a member of Pakistani nation is also a part of the universal Muslim Ummah and that it is expected of him to make a contribution towards the welfare of fellow Muslims inhabiting the globe on the one hand and to help spread the message of Islam throughout the world on the other …so that Islamic ideology permeates the thinking of younger generation and help them with necessary conviction and ability to refashion society according to Islamic tenets."

This aggressive definition of Islamic identity, as opposed to the 1947 conceptions of the ideal Pakistani citizen as self-sacrificing and socially just, is the result of the two wars with India and the promotion of a rigid Islamic identity in South Asia as a defence strategy against the increasing Soviet influence and aggression in Afghanistan. Just as the Soviet Union had tried to infuse Communist ideology in every discipline of academic inquiry, Pakistan also began Islamising the physical and biological sciences. We must emphasise here that Zia ul Haq's era was not the beginning of aggressive entrenchment of militant Islamism but a culmination of a process of building rigid identities which began in 1965 on the both sides of the India-Pakistan border. As far as Pakistan is concerned, the culmination of this process was ultimately detrimental to the growth of scientific inquiry. The Education Policy launched in 1992 snubs the spirit of independent inquiry thus: "No other worldview, certainly not of science and technology, would stand up to the social organisation designed by the worldview of Islam." This is the result of constructing national identity on mutually exclusive Hindu-Muslim binary on one side of the territory and the Communist-Muslim binary on the other side. The ideal Pakistani subject, then, is not an independent product but rather a product of resentment and reactionary rigidity.

Policy matters

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2009 hopes to present an ambitious and reasonably exhaustive agenda for education reform. But, though, it promises much, it ignores certain vital issues.

It is commendable that the Policy emphasizes the need for management trained in education and a ranking system to promote competition among district schools. More importantly, it addresses the need to train both students and teachers to respond to emergency situations and recognizes that the two years of Intermediate education should be administered through schools, not colleges. Such a step may prove pivotal in enhancing the financial and administrative autonomy of universities (and their colleges). Above all, the NEP advocates awarding a formal role to the Inter-Provincial Education Ministers' Conference (IPEM) within the Ministry of Education (MoE). This is an attempt to involve both the federal and the federating units in education policy. While it has positive implications for reviewing and implementing education decisions, it can also send out a strong political message without the cushion of which, education may never face uplift in Balochistan and parts of the NWFP.

On the other hand, NEP doesn't learn many lessons from the past. It proposes 5% of GDP for education in 2010 and 7% by 2015. It hopes for a 4.5% annual average until 2030. Pakistan's education sector has been allocated a meagre 2.4% of the GDP this fiscal year. It has already faced significant budgetary reductions in the first half. The Education Policy (1998-2010) promised the country a similar investment of 4% of the GNP by 2003; it was not met. So how viable are any of the statistics NEP 2009 bases its entire plan on? Even if funding is available, the time lag between the presentation of the federal budget in June and the release of funds several months later means funds are largely late, left unused or consumed in administrative hiccups.

The government has made it clear that expenditure must be reduced. Then why does the NEP want new bodies like the Ministry for Human Resource Development, the Standing Committee on Textbook Policy and the National Standards Authority? These add to administrative costs and coordination struggles. The same work can be done by the Ministry of Education (MoE) if the intention is sincere. Human resource development efforts at all levels of education can be managed by the HR Wing of the MoE. The setting of education standards can be delegated to a joint committee of the Curriculum and Planning Wings. After all, it is the combination of these two areas that determines the learning outcomes and the methods required to achieve them.

In addition, the Curriculum Wing should also consider a committee to select, prescribe and regulate textbook standards and provision. The MoE should firmly dismantle Textbook Boards, whose poor performance speaks for itself. Instead, such tasks can be contracted to publishing houses, bookstore chains and etc. Not only can this enhance competition, but also increase the diversity of content that schoolbooks should provide to students. At the same time, the NEP has neglected to address the need for copyright agreements on Higher Education texts to be introduced to publishers within the country. This could go a long way in helping Pakistan compete with, say, India for publishing rights.

The 64-page Policy wants to increase education access at all levels, yet fails to mention even once a plan of action for the disabled of Pakistan. Growing concerns like Braille teachers and writers along with upgradation of disabled infrastructural facilities are nowhere to be found. The document puts great faith in the National Education Management System (NEMIS) to provide accurate and updated data, but makes no case for an annual or even biennial school census. (The most recent one was conducted in 2005) The document believes universal primary education will be achieved by 2015, if only to satisfy the UN's Millennium Development Goals. The Education For All Framework produced in the 1990's believed the same goal would be accomplished by 2000, but in 2005-06, the Primary School Net Enrolment Rate in the country was only 66%.

So, just how well will even a revised version of the NEP 2009 fare? Unless legislative bodies at both the provincial and federal levels resoundingly affirm and pass a law resolving to prioritize education (over even defence), no policy, no matter how good, will ever become a reality. At this point in time, it would not be unfair of the Pakistani people to ask for constitutional protection of a minimum budget for education at 5% of the GDP. Having been severely neglected for over 60 years, real education in Pakistan now needs the highest law of the land to give it the attention it deserves. And that, if any, would make for a fine present to the people on the 23rd of March.

Curriculum is the guide that delineates the learning path of a student. Textbooks are one thing. Curriculum is more than just that. It's about preparing children for life. Whatever the curriculum, we have not been able to impart basic skills like reading and writing to our people which would enable them to express themselves well.

Bertrand Russell, in his book 'On Education', makes three broad divisions in last school years: 1)classics, 2)mathematics and sciences, 3)modern humanities. Have a look at what is being taught to children in class 9 and 10 English textbooks. What we have been giving to children are lessons in 'Form Filling' and 'Admissions Open' (Advertisement in a local English daily), where students are shown how to write telegrams and how to send money orders. The lesson on 'admissions' is to familiarise students with advertisements and how to apply in universities. Then there is a lesson on different kinds of letter writing and another on traffic education and civic sense. If the idea is to equip high school students with the basic practical knowledge and paper work, it can be said that these textbooks seek to achieve that. But whether they really achieve even these targets, is questionable. Who will teach the students the language, and when? There is no short cut to that.

Why is it that even after 14 years of education most of the population is unable to write a decent job application? The answer is, we have not equipped our youth to meet the challenges of real life because we never introduced them to the best writings available. Do we teach them classics? Not in schools. Let's hope the new curriculum will not make the same mistakes.

Sixty per cent of Pakistan's population does agriculture and a good part of rural population thrives on livestock. Do we teach our children these subjects in schools? No, we don't. We are a country rich in natural resources. Pakistan has the 4th largest coal fields and gas fields. We are rich in minerals and gems and the sea touches us from two sides. Can we give our children the skills to explore the natural resources in the homeland? The education policy announced in 1979 says that the curriculum should be inspired by Pakistan's national objectives and what is that, one may ask?

An education expert says that after the earthquake in the northern areas in October 2008, a National Disaster Management Authority was formed and the need to introduce disaster related issues in the curriculum of classes 8, 9 and 10 was raised but nothing has been done so far in this respect. He says most of the people find the curriculum foreign. All the energy of the people at the helm of affairs seems to be going into improving Pakistan Studies and Islamiyat curricula. We need to look at similarities rather than differences with our neighbours. So far we have been highlighting differences in textbooks.

The last curriculum was introduced in year 2000. Work on the next curriculum is going on since 2006.

Chiragh Din Arif, Additional Director Curriculum Wing Punjab, says, "Twenty eight curricula have been notified by the Ministry of Education so far."

Asked how much publishing is being done by the government sector, he says, "All the books are being developed by the private sector." So the government has outsourced all the textbooks – 100pc. It is not publishing even 15pc textbooks that it used to. Here I want to quote The Hamodur Rahman Commission Report on Student Problems & Welfare (1966): "The Textbook Boards also examine the possibility of themselves preparing, printing and publishing these books and distributing them through their own agencies." The policy (1992-98) says it's time to allow development of textbooks in the private sector.

The need to have uniform curricula for all the public and private schools was underlined in the National Education Policy 1998-2010 for the first time. "The new textbooks according to the new curricula, will be hopefully in market in April 2010," says Chirag Din Arif.

Nadeem Asghar who developed the national curriculum of Biology, says, "We have addressed conceptual gaps and repetitions and have made an effort to bring the national curriculum at par with O and A Level. The curriculum prepared in 2006 does compete with the curricula of other countries," he says. "The old curricula was overloaded. We have tired to decrease that load. Our curriculum is still heavy but certainly better because our dropout rate is 80pc so we have to give more information to our children till class 5."

"For example, in Biology curricula, in a chapter on behaviour, we have ensured that students learn about the local perspective and a child's personal experiences at home are called upon to explain things." Asked how the children are going to be taught Darwin's theory, he said "We have included the theory of special creation along with Darwin's theory in curriculum this time." Science was introduced in the in the elementary school in Pakistan in 1970.

He sees inclusion of publishers like Oxford and Ferozesons in the curriculum review committee under multiple textbooks system introduced four years back as a good augury.

Children today will eventually leave school to enter jobs which are not there - to work on technologies which are not yet invented. Let's hope the curricula will address that demand.

According to media reports, the proposed education policy, to be announced on March 23, includes among other things a suggestion to increase the country's education budget to 4 percent from the current 2 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) by the end of the current fiscal year (FY09), and to 7 percent within the next three years.

Pakistan's current GDP, according to 'Summary of Consolidated Federal and Provincial Budgetary Operations 2008-09', is Rs 13.384 trillion. This, in simple terms, means that the new education policy proposes that the government spends Rs 536.36 billion on the educator sector, under the heads of both current and development expenditures, in FY09.

It merits a mention here that the outlay of the country's federal budget for 2008-09 is slightly over Rs 2 trillion; thus the proposed allocation for the education sector constitutes almost 27 percent of it. In a country where domestic and foreign debt servicing and defence eat up more than two-thirds of the federal budget, this is simply unimaginable.

In fact, the proposed allocation for the education sector in the federal budget 2008-09 is Rs 49.192 billion (Rs 24.622 billion for current expenditure, 6.570 billion for development expenditure and 18.0 billion for the Higher Education Commission) and it is hardly likely that even this allocation will be fully utilised. The allocation of Rs 49.192 billion for the education sector currently constitutes 2.45 percent of the federal budget. However, the size of Pakistan's GDP is much larger: over six-and-a-half times that of the federal budget. What else can one call it except that this is an impossible expectation?

It is an established fact that Pakistan suffers from absorption capacity and the country has never been able to fully utilise the development budget for education. In short, development expenditure includes cost of opening of new schools, colleges, universities and other educational facilities, hiring of new teachers and other staff, sending students abroad for higher education (this component administered by the HEC), etc. On the other hand, current expenditure includes administrative costs for running existing educational facilities, paying salaries of existing teachers and other staff, etc.

It is mainly because of this reason that many offers of opening enough schools to ensure universal primary education in the country by donor agencies and other countries were withdrawn after feasibility studies that found out that the country lacks the absorption capacity for such mega projects. The lack of qualified teachers was the most cited reason in this regard. However, this has failed to move the concerned circles and the hike in the education budget since the last few years has been mainly due to the increased allocation for the HEC, not the primary education -- the major area of concern for the country.

Although the country has been never been able to spend the full allocation for the development expenditure head of the education budget, it has been regularly spending the full allocation for the current expenditure of the same. This has largely to do with increase in the salaries of government employees and the ever-rising inflation that makes increases administrative costs of running educational facilities.

On the other hand, opening of new schools requires qualified teaching staff, a neglected sector even within the education sector. Moreover, it is important to mention in this context that, in order to seek more and more funding for foreign sources, the government has in the past resorted to ugly practices like that of 'ghost schools', and getting funding for the opening and running of the same school from more than one sources.

Therefore, it is important that the framers of the new education policy adopt a more realistic approach. They need to bear in mind that quality matters more than quantity. The aim should be imparting quality education to students, rather than simply adding to their numbers and increasing the already vast pool of unemployed youth, besides creating more opportunities for corruption. The first and foremost objective should be to ensure the full utilisation of the existing development budget for the education sector. It goes without saying that only after this objective is achieved, the demand for the increase in the education budget would figure prominently on the policy radar.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2009 prescribes that a system of checks and balances for the private sector shall be formed to oversee issues of fees, school standards, pays of teachers, conduct and hygiene etc. It says that registered private schools often charge more fees than they are authorised to take. The policy text also highlights the fact that the private schools are encouraged to offer admission and education services to 10 per cent needy but meritorious students free of cost, a regulation that is not followed by most private establishments.

The suggestions look quite attractive on paper but in practice they are hard to follow. One reason for this is that the private education sector is controlled by the most influential amongst us and many of them are in a position to thwart any type of pressure coming from the regulatory bodies form to monitor their affairs. The policy also points out structural divides in private sector institutions and categorises them into the non-elite and the elite ones. For example, the cadet schools fall in the category of non-elite and the expensive ones like Chaueffat, American Schools and several chains of educational institutions in the elite ones. Though the former may follow some rules the latter are free to act according to their whims.

Mirza Kashif Ali, President of All Pakistan Private Schools Owners' Association (APPSOA) tells TNS that the regulatory mechanism can work only if it is implemented across the board. The NEP does stress the need for this mechanism but does not mention as to how it will be enforced on the elite institutions who accept no rules. Without citing names he says that there are chains that have leading politicians and influential bureaucrats on board who no one can dare to confront.

He says that a few years back a bill was proposed in the assembly suggesting that the private educational institutions should be put under categories A, B and C and allowed charge fees accordingly. The schools in A category could charge the highest and C the lowest but this could not work as the strong groups resisted the move and wanted their fees to be set by themselves, he adds.

Another point that the policy highlights is that the average student of the public sector education system cannot compete in the job market which leads to social exclusion of the already poor. The decline, according to the draft, has primarily resulted from political interference and corruption that has permeated the entire sector. It states that the recruitments, transfers and postings in public schools are politically driven and affect the quality of education adversely.

Therefore, it is believed that the shortcomings in the public sector had let to the popularity of the private sector institutions. But the policy draft does not mention that many of these ills plague private institutions as well.

This point can be elaborated by the findings of a study into the affairs of the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) Assisted Programme. Under this programme, private schools are supported by government funds. During the first three years of the programme, 1085 schools had benefited from this programme. But a disturbing fact was that less than 25 percent schools could meet the criteria regarding basic infrastructure and a Quality Assurance Test (QAT) sought by the PEF as a condition for providing the schools Rs 300 per child in lieu of the fee charged. The weakest links according to the findings were English and Science -- much the same situation as in public sector schools. So it is suggested that before declaring private education system superior it must intervene and strive at improving its quality as well.

A quality of the draft, however, is that it gives eye-opening figures about education in Pakistan. For example, it states that the public sector accounts for around 64 percent of all enrolments and dominates the structures of Primary Schools, Secondary and Higher Secondary Schools, Inter and Degree Colleges, and general Universities.

While the overall share of the private sector in total enrolment is around 36 percent, its enrolment share is 42 percent in pre-primary education, primary stage 32 percent, middle stage 33 percent, high 30 percent and higher secondary 18 percent, technical/vocational (52 percent), vocational/polytechnics (57 percent) and non-formal basic education (61 percent), the draft adds.

On higher education, NEP draft says there is lack of specialisation among universities as public universities compete in offering the widest variety of disciplines and spread their scarce resources too thinly. It says, "They are not selective in specialising in a few areas to develop the requisite critical mass of resources required for achieving higher quality."

As per draft the universities in the private sector, on the other hand, have tended to specialise in market-oriented disciplines like IT, Management Sciences and Business, and there are complaints, in this sector as well, about their quality.

One thing that seems to be missing here is that the government must suggest ways to raise funds for the private sector universities so that they can offer disciplines that are lesser in demand in the job market. This point is quite pertinent keeping in view the fact that the most resourceful of the private sector universities do not even have a fraction of the resources available with the public sector universities-like the vast tracts of land, building structures etc.

The policies regarding the teaching of the subjects of Mathematics and General Science, as outlined in the National Education Policy draft, have been based upon the results of the 2005 and 2006 National Education Assessment System (NEAS) tests. The NEAS was established as a follow-up to the Education Sector Reforms (ESR) Action Plan 2001-2005 to evaluate the quality of education being imparted to elementary level students.

The 2009 draft policy states that up to the class V, the medium of instruction with regards to teaching mathematics and science shall be the prerogative of the Provincial and Area Education Departments. Hence the language could be either English of course, or Urdu/official regional language. However - and here even the draft has a typo of either Grade IV or V - after 5 years only English shall be employed in imparting mathematics and science education.

In both consecutive testing exercises conducting in 2005 and 2006, the scores were compared to the scaled average scores from the 2003 TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) assessment. The TIMMS basically provides data relating to the mathematics and science achievement levels of 4th and 8th grade students in the US in comparison to their counterparts in other countries. The average score in mathematics achieved by Grade IV Pakistani students in 2005 (421) and 2006 was well below that of 495 out of 100 borne out by the 2003 TIMMS as the international average. Even the average scores achieved by Grade VIII students in 2007 well below the 50% worldwide average.

The outcomes of the tests conducted under the NEAS depict a very dismal scenario. When only 25% to 50% students are able to demonstrate an understanding of mathematical concepts or have a grasp over geometry and spatial elements, the problem is much deep rooted. With the majority of teachers using only textbooks as a teaching resource, the learning and cognitive abilities of the students are significantly hampered, especially with regards to developing a tangible comprehension of scientific phenomena.

Moreover, the NEAS assessment of teacher training revealed that with regards to improving students' critical thinking and problem solving, the learning achievement of the latter did not significantly increase. In fact, what did have an effect conducive to enhancing the performance of the students was a positive school environment that centres on a friendly and caring attitude of the teachers. A simple strategy of focusing on rewards instead of punishments also seems to go hand in hand with fostering a progressive class atmosphere.

If the policy of incorporating English as medium of instruction in the curriculum of mathematics and science is being recommended from the 4th grade onwards, why it isn't being done from day one simply boggles the mind. English is already going to be taught across all schools from class I, and is recognized in the draft as being "important for competition in a globalised world order".

--Aziz Omar