HUMAN CAPITAL OR SOCIAL CAPITAL, COMMUNITY

PARTICIPATION OR COMMUNITY CONSTRUCTION?

Sources of Demand for Schooling

Haris Gazdar

Pakistan’s Quantitative Paradox  Gross primary enrollment ratio

  1965 1986 2000

Pakistan 40 44 75

India 74 92 102

China 89 129 106

Senegal 40 55 75

Bangladesh 49 60 100

Mozambique 37 82 92

Chad 34 43 73

Ghana 69 63 80

ZambiaSource: WDR various

53 104 78

Pakistan’s Qualitative Paradox

• Contours of the language debates– English versus Urdu; Urdu versus vernacular

• Militancy versus developmentalism• All opt out

– Curriculum, which curriculum?

• Authoritarian state and a free-for-all• Explore connection between the two types

of paradox

Economics of Education Approach

• Individuals and households demand schooling

• State and private sector supply schooling• Education deficit due to low demand• Education deficit due to low/poor quality

supply• Human “capital” accrual as motivation for

education demand and supply

Political Economy Approaches

• People optimize on political alternatives and not just economic ones

• Many different levels of collectivities (class, ethnicity, unions, factions) are important not just individuals and families

• Outcomes are shaped by conflict and contestation and not just by harmonious efficiency-improving interaction

Political Economy of Education

• Low priority view: state prioritises other goals

• System failure view: collusion, corruption in system keeps people uneducated

• Class-based view: elites actively holding people down

• Culture-based views:imposition of particular languages, cultural patterns

Instrument for Nation-Building

“Nation is not a racial, ethnic, geographical, political or voluntary group or association. Nation is a group composed of men and women who have gone through the same education, who have received the same acquisitions in language, religion, morality, and aesthetics" (Ziya Gok Alp)

Swedish Experience

• Church Law 1686

• All could read by 1750s

• Public Education Law 1842

• All could read and write by 1880s

Church as Driver of Reading Ability

• Protestant Lutheran Church in opposition to Orthodox and Catholic Churches

• Linked to politics of proto-national assertion against Rome

• Christian men and women must have knowledge of the Bible in their own languages

• Rigourous pursuit of Lutheran project

State as Driver of Writing Ability

• Public schools and public schooling

• Compulsory schooling

• Linked explicitly to nation-building

• Political ideas shared with the French Revolution

• Modern state and a unified national community

Schooling for Community Construction

• Instrument for producing and reproducing shared culture and values

• Pre-dates nation-building (e.g. Sweden)

• Much evidence of this role within Pakistan

• Political source of demand for schooling from higher level collectivities

• Radically overturns current orthodoxy

Cases of Community Construction

• Karachi Grammar School

• Quaid Public School TTS

• City School Shahdadpur

• “Kadet Saaz Idara” Alipur

• GPS Farid Marri in Goth Nawaz Marri

• Madrassa in Chak 385

Types of community construction

• Simple fight for resources

• Parochial communities reproducing themselves

• Aspirational communities – but not citizenship-focused

Aborted Social Engineering

• National Education Conference 1947

• Controversy over chemistry teaching 2002

• Still groping around in the darkOr

• The survival strategy of a weak and fearful state?

Change of Paradigm

• Human capital or social capital

• Community participation or community construction

• Educational objectives or universalist objectives?

• Back to ideology and the vision thing