It is a war the government is losing. Sixty years after independence, more than six million children are not attending school. And that’s a conservative
estimate. Of those that are in school, something like a third drop out when they are just five or six years old. Most will become child labourers. Other children, a very small but growing number, will be radicalised into jihadists.
None of them will ever realise their full potential. Habiba is a former student of the madrassa at the infamous Lal Masjid -- the Red Mosque. She left the madrassa on July 10, hours before it was stormed by the military and police. “I say it was all done at the behest of America. President Musharraf is a stooge of the United States and he did it for them. This was against Islam, this was an attempt to finish Islam,”
she says.
The Red Mosque siege was intended to rein in belligerent religious extremists. Instead, it has ignited popular support for the students and the madrassa movement. Madrassas often provide education where the state does not.
Their primary mission is to teach the Quran. Many teach from the modern syllabus as well. Most are not extremist – they do not harbour jihadists or weapons caches and they are not run by mullahs, urging suicide actions. In other words, they are not all like the madrassa at Lal Masjid. But they are largely unregulated by the state and free to pursue their own curriculum.
That’s bad news for the Pakistani government, while it struggles to bring order to its own failing system and simultaneously cope with the explosion of madrassas that are rushing in to fill the education
vacuum.
Some steps have been taken to address the situation. In the province of Punjab, the World Bank has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to education.
And the provincial government has upped its spending substantially. But the system is riddled with inefficiencies. Teachers are poorly paid and many of them are unqualified. There are some 63,000 state schools in Punjab.
According to government statistics, nearly 5,000 have been declared dangerous, 26,000 have no electricity, 16,000 no toilets. Over a thousand have no building whatsoever. Children study on carpets in the shade of trees.
 And then there is the staggering drop out rate. The federal minister of state for education Anisa Zeb Tahirkheli said the most recent figures for children aged five to nine show that of the 13 million in school; nearly a third will drop out. She insists that matters are improving.
“New statistics will be out soon,” she said, “and they will show a sharp improvement.”
But this is all too little too late for children like Gulfan, who sells ice from a donkey cart. He dropped out when he was five years old to support his family. “My father ran this business but then he got sick and I had to leave school,” he says.
Asked if he can read or write, he shakes his head, “No.” “I can only sign my name, nothing else,” he says. And then there are students like Habiba, radicalised in a madrassa that gave her free education, room and board.
President Musharraf says he is committed to education reform. But Pakistan has still to raise its GDP commitment to the 4 percent UNESCO has called for. Right now it is hovering around 2.5 percent.
As political turmoil grips the country, the president who signed up to the war on terror may begin to ask if he got his priorities wrong. He may just wonder what Pakistan might have been, 60 years on from independence, if education had been placed where it ought to be: right at the heart and soul of the
nation.
BBC