Assignment # 7

“Educational Development”

Made by:
Syeda Damiya Kafait
BSIT (Evening)
1st semester
Foundation of Education
 “NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT”
The key to success for any nation lies in their concern and development of
education sector. As the education is promoted in the nation, this reduces the
illiteracy rate that ultimately reduces the unemployment, which is one of the
biggest curses on any nation (Ahmad, Arshad, & Ahmad, 1991). The education
sector in Pakistan is overlooked by the government ministry of education and the
provincial government, whereas the development of curriculum and financing is
done with the assistance of federal government. In the past few decades, Pakistan’s
education has been developing continuously, which eventually helps the
development of the entire nation.

The real situation of education in Pakistan is very different in context to the laws in
Constitution of Pakistan. ). The government launched a nationwide initiative in
National Education Policy (NEP) 1998-2010, with the aim of eradicating illiteracy
and providing a basic education to all children. But not much could be achieved as
expected. Most people of our region are actually unaware of different variables
such as completed years of schooling, age of starting school, literacy and numeracy
skills, quality of schooling, and technical training. Therefore, development of
education in our homeland, Pakistan is either very gradual or totally absent.

The major causes of neglect and poor performance of education are following:

False direction of attention:

Every year, government provides large sums to finance scholarship programs and
grants to higher learning institutions, while the running of primary education is left
to the local districts, provinces, and federal government authorities. Due to scarcity
of funds, public sector primary schools are far less than the requirement and
become non-functioning, and there is a wide spread corruption in the
administration of public sector schools. Due to lack of management and
competence to run public primary school network, the quality of education and
course curricula is poor. Students’ dropout rate is very high. The non-availability
of adequate number of teachers and their unsatisfactory qualification and training
made it difficult for primary school to qualify students to get admission in good
secondary schools or jobs.
Misallocation of resources:

There is a serious contradiction between the policies declared on paper by the

government and the actual steps taken to achieve the objectives of the
commitments made in those policies. In the education policy of the government,
the importance of giving full attention to compulsory primary education to all at no
charge is strongly emphasized and targets of achieving literacy and 100%
enrollment of students at primary school level are prescribed, but no appreciable
results are achieved. Whereas, all the attention is devoted to speed up higher
education and all those programs are highly subsidized. The higher education
program is largely for the rich and those who can afford, while the primary
education program is largely for the welfare of the common person. This is a case
of misallocation of resources and the poor man is the victim. Furthermore reasons
are there, as a long list is waiting to be discussed but these were significant.

Hence, intensive research is needed to bring out the factors that account for such
high dropout rates, and measures should be taken to increase the attractiveness of
schools and reduce the need for households to keep their children at home or at
work. Furthermore, surveys on the extent and quality of private school education
need to be carried out. There is a need to offer incentives to girls and
disadvantaged groups, like income incentive, provision of books, uniforms and
mid-day meals, etc. There is a need to invest in proper infrastructure and
strengthen teacher’s training. Other obstacles identified by various studies include
the non-availability of teachers, schools, especially for girls in the vicinity,
insecurity (to and from schools, as well as within schools), lack of female teachers
in rural areas, gender-sensitive and clean learning environment, secondary level
education in the communities, and early marriages. Private education is surely here
to stay, and it should be allowed to flourish and expand. However, private
education should not be seen as a solution for the education sector problems that
Pakistan is facing now. Moreover, the fact that private education is better than the
current public sector education should not be taken as a reason for abandoning
public sector. Rather, it should be seen as a challenge for the public sector. Federal
and provincial, both governments have to get the public sector in order. If we are to
address the problems of the education system in Pakistan, there seems to be a need
of advocacy for creating a movement to demand quality from the public sector
education system.
 “INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT”
“Syrian higher education during conflict”
The Syrian civil war began in 2011 and morphed into a protracted, high intensity
internationalized conflict that ranks amongst the most destructive since the Second
World War, with over 400,000 killed, half the country’s population displaced, and
three decades of developmental progress reversed just within the first three years
of conflict. The Syrian higher education system has over the course of seven years
been subject to many negative stresses and threats. On this basis, it may be
expected that the higher education system would collapse in a manner comparable
to the cases of Somalia or Afghanistan. This assumption has informed much
international media coverage, which commonly frames Syrian higher education as
having collapsed or teetering on the brink of collapse.

Similarly, an article in the Times Higher Education states that:

“Syria’s higher education system is in meltdown. Students and academics have

fled the country in droves, and higher education institutions are being targeted by
both sides in a civil war that has claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people to
date (Clarke, 2014).”

While not challenging the claim that Syrian higher education has been affected in
often devastating ways by years of conflict, this narrative of total collapse is
empirically inaccurate. Syrian higher education institutions (HEIs) continue to
operate, even under conditions of highly destructive warfare involving multiple
parties, foreign intervention, and the territorial fragmentation of the Syrian state.
This is in contrast to the situation in basic education, which has suffered much
more severely than Syrian higher education, thus making Syria an important
anomaly within the expectations of education in emergencies research which finds
that higher education is affected more severely than other educational levels during
conflict.

The lack of research on higher education inside Syria results, in part, from
methodological challenges in collecting accurate data. One finding of the research
literature on education in emergencies is that the impact of conflict on education
tends to be greater for higher levels of education. Higher education is also more
vulnerable to attack than lower educational levels during conflict. Conflict does
often have a severe impact on higher education whether through physical
destruction, deaths and injuries to staff and students, mass displacement, and
severe under-funding. As a result of such stresses, higher education is often
assumed to collapse in very fragile contexts (Tierney, 2011).

There are many factors that could in theory predict variation in the impact of
conflict on higher education and other educational levels. These could include: the
level of international assistance to particular sub-sectors, with countries receiving
substantial higher education aid better protected; stronger protections for basic
education in international law than for higher education thus influencing the
behavior of conflict parties; or the temporal dimension under which protracted
conflict may be expected to affect higher education more adversely as isolation
from global academia erodes quality. While myriad factors could in theory
influence the relationship between impact of conflict and higher education, several
have strong intuitive or empirical grounds for being considered of particular
relevance.

Syrian higher education exhibited a range of weaknesses including inadequate

research funding and lack of academic freedom inhibiting research culture (Yahia,
2011); low performance regionally in adopting student-centered learning (World
Bank, 2008, p.184); and declining quality due to rapid expansion. These structural
weaknesses contributed towards Syria’s graduate unemployment rate of 27%, high
even by regional standards.

Various reform initiatives were launched during the 2000s seeking to ‘modernize’
Syrian higher education and make the sector an integral part of the national
economic liberalization strategy. These include ‘open learning’ through weekend
fee-based classes in public universities, parallel programs, and establishment of at
least 16 private universities (Buckner and Saba, 2010).

Since the eruption of protests in Syria during March 2011 HEIs have been subject
to multiple stresses in a complex and fast-changing conflict-affected environment.
High levels of insecurity, mass displacement, war economy, and siege warfare are
just some of these stresses. This section examines the impacts of conflict on Syrian
higher education in regime-held territories, which account for the vast majority of
functioning HEIs. It begins by considering the effects on the educational factors of
access, equity, and quality before analyzing the social and political transformations
of the sector in face of attacks and competing demands for protection of higher
education and regime survival.

Syrian higher education – contrary to claims that it has collapsed – is struggling to

operate in a very challenging conflict-affected environment characterized by high
levels of violence, mass displacement, and intense politicization. Despite these
stresses that have confronted the daily operation of higher education and led to
massive disruption, the system has not collapsed and many campuses continue to
function albeit at a lower capacity than in pre-war Syria. This is remarkable in that
the case of Syria inverts the assumption of the education in emergencies literature
that the impact of conflict is more intense at top of the educational pyramid. Syrian
higher education has shown signs of resilience and has adapted in many ways to
maintain the quantitative provision of university services yet quality has been
massively eroded while the political control exercised over campuses has
increased.

The case of Syria has shed light on the various factors influencing the impact of
conflict on higher education relative to other educational levels, with the three
factors of state strength, conflict context, and systemic complexity posited as of
particular theoretical importance. The empirical analysis has confirmed the
importance of the Syrian state maintaining institutional capacity and the territorial
nature of the conflict context for explaining the finding that higher education in
Syria has suffered less than basic education. Yet it has also revealed that whilst the
continuation of state institutions has enabled the higher education system to remain
open, strategies of regime survival have instrumentally utilized higher education
with serious adverse consequences for the sector.