I moved to Pakistan six years ago and
ever since I moved here people have
asked me so how long do you think you’re
gonna stay and I never really understood
this question because I don’t have any
plan to leave and yet and this question
people seem to be suggesting that I
should leave and this told me that
Pakistan is a country that people leave
and it’s not like other places where you
move and nobody ever you know people
assume that you’re gonna stay but I have
loved Pakistan every day that I’ve lived
here six years
even today I Drive around Islamabad
which is where I lived and I appreciate
it but there’s one frustration that I
have which is that I’ve always felt like
I’m behind some kind of a wall when I
was younger it was the walls of my
grandmother’s house and we’d visit from
the US and grew up in Tennessee and in
Florida and I couldn’t really understand
what was going on beyond a lot of
violence and a lot of poverty that
nobody ever bothered to explain and now
as an adult again I feel like I’ve
entered Islamabad as essentially someone
because of my class cannot really access
what’s happening in the country and
because of being in the development
sector we see a certain version of
Pakistan and often it’s the version
that’s presented to us so I left my job
that moved me to Pakistan a few years
ago and I spent two years trying to
figure out how to get more in touch with
the country and that landed me at dawn I
became a journalist and the reason I
became a journalist is because I wanted
to investigate what was really happening
with development money in this country
because I saw that if I was interested
in development then the corollary was
aid so I did my first stories with dawn
they went very well and then my editor
sat down with me and she said why don’t
you look into education and I thought
well why because everyone knows
everything about education and so I
wasn’t really interested in covering the
topic it’s one of the most over
discussed issues in Pakistan but I did
it anyways and I went into it with a
hunch because I knew two things one is
that people would say that doubling the
budget is the solution
to the education crisis in Pakistan but
there were two problems with that
narrative one is that on any given day I
knew that one in five teachers does not
show up to school and secondly that 80%
of the budget is going into the salaries
for these teachers so I can never
understand how doubling the budget was
going to solve this crisis it seemed
like we just needed to spend the money
better so I ended up spending a year
investigating education not because I
needed to but because everything I found
was a constant surprise and this Stila
happens to me today when I look at
education in Pakistan the reality is
completely different from what we are
told this is a picture of Michelle Obama
and the daughter of the former prime
minister this picture pretty much sums
up what we know about education which is
that a Pakistan needs to double the
budget to solve the crisis because what
Michelle Obama is saying to the prime
minister’s daughter is that if you
double the budget I’ll give you 70
million dollars in aid for girls
education so the story we have is that
boxa needs to double the budget that
this will resolve the crisis and that
donors are financing the gap the reality
is that since 2010 10 Pakistan has more
than doubled the budget for education
our budget in 2010 was 3.5 billion
dollars today it’s 8.6 more shockingly
our education budget is the same almost
as our defense budget and these numbers
are growing for education fast I
wouldn’t be surprised if education
overtakes the official defense budget
pretty soon what we have heard is that
Pakistan spends 2 percent of its budget
on education this isn’t true and the
reason why you’ve heard this is because
we all know devolution happened in 2010
education became a provincial
responsibility but nobody counted the
provincial budgets when they told you
what Pakistan spends 2% is the federal
budget if you add the provincial budgets
which is where the bulk of spending is
Pakistan spends 13% of its budget on
education
the US and the UK spent 14% the global
average is 14% you’ve also heard that
Pakistan spends 2% of its GDP on
education this is partially true it is
true that Pakistan spends that much but
GDP is not a good measure for us because
we don’t recover enough of our GDP in
the form of taxes to translate into
budget our GDP does not become money to
spend and this is why a small part of
our GDP is a big part of our budget and
our GDP is growing by five percent every
year if we keep chasing the growing GDP
figure we can easily reach a point where
this is just unsustainable in terms of
our budget and we do after all have
other priorities and things that
children in schools do need to function
like health roads security it’s also a
bad measure because parents spend
another eight billion dollars on
education the figures that you’ve seen
do not include private spending but in
Pakistan we’re an outlier 40 percent of
our kids are in private schools so how
the government is spending eight point
six billion dollars on education parents
spend another eight billion this easily
takes us past the four percent mark in
terms of GDP so what have we gone out of
this Pakistan has the second highest
number of out of school children in the
world and so success would mean that we
bring down the number of kids who are
out of school that we get kids into
school interestingly since we doubled
our budget the number of kids in school
has stagnated at 57 percent in 2010 we
had 57 percent of 5 to 9 year olds in
school today we still have 57 percent of
5 to 9 year olds in school and what is 2
percent 2 percent is foreign aid what
the US Pakistan has been boxin is today
actually the largest recipient of UK aid
in the world the Punjab education
program is UK’s biggest program in the
world in recent years we’ve been the
second largest recipient of US aid in
the world but the money that comes in
from the US or from the UK at its
largest has equaled only 2 percent
of what we spend ourselves from our own
budgets and by the way the World Bank is
a little bigger but those are all loans
and those are things that we pay back so
that’s not included so now this picture
doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore
you see Michelle basically asking Miriam
to spend another seven billion dollars
on education to double the budget
because that’s what the budget was when
this photo was taken and in return
she’ll give Pakistan seventy million
dollars the resources to solve this
crisis financially are at home so and
this is when I was doing my research
donors were completely baffled as to
what was going on why is it that we have
instituted reforms we’ve doubled
spending we ourselves have put in so
much money and yet we see no change they
called the reforms cutting-edge and they
say that financing has increased but
despite a decade of this nothing has
changed
so donors are baffled and they don’t
know what’s going on they’ve started to
figure it out I’d say two years ago but
meanwhile people in this country who go
to government schools know exactly what
is going on I have a columnist sidekick
but he was actually the office boy in my
office when I moved to Pakistan and he’s
kind of become a constant in my life and
he’s a friend and he helps me with all
the things that I would do for myself if
I lived in the US and which would make
my life very annoying and when he found
out I was investigating education he
said madam you must come to my village
and see the schools there so I said okay
because zephyr has been asking me to
come to his village ever since I moved
to Pakistan for six years so I said okay
fine let’s get it over with I’ll finally
come to your village and so we set out
early one morning from Islamabad for apt
Abad and we were heading for the
mountains and I finally asked him some
questions in the car and I asked him sup
her why are we going to your village and
he said bus you have to see the schools
there and so I was like okay Zafar but
you have schools right and he said the
most profound thing
that anybody said in all of my 50
interviews on education around the
country he said school a hey Darlene the
hangar we have schools we don’t have
education so I said okay it’s
interesting what scene so we went to his
village we drove up as far as we could
go and then we hiked for an hour
I think locals do it a little faster it
took me an hour and this is his village
you can see it’s a small village in the
mountains and the schools in his village
are taking place in these kind of
makeshift spaces because they don’t have
proper school buildings the schools were
destroyed by the 2005 earthquake this
school is happening in a mosque and this
school is happening on a rented in the
rented space it’s a room the kids are
outside because there was an earthquake
the day before but the remarkable thing
what these photos show is that is how
far back asan has come in the past five
years we’ve gone to the point where
teachers show up at least in Punjab and
KP our absentee rates in Punjab and KP
used to be twenty to thirty percent for
teachers today it’s down to about 14
percent in Punjab and about sorry 8
percent or 7 / 7 percent in Punjab and
14 percent in KP so these massively
absentee rates plummeted because the
teacher started the government started
sending monitors to every school to
check if the teacher was present
so in Punjab in keeping every month a
monitor visits the approximately 70,000
schools that these two provinces have to
check if the teacher is there because of
this teachers are showing up however you
can also see the wasted resources
because this school in every school is
supposed to have two teachers and a joke
either you have only one teacher here so
the majority of your budget and the
questions we need to ask are around
these teachers this is a joke either
interesting story with a joke either
so there are teaching forests in
Pakistan is enormous there are as many
teachers in Pakistan as there are people
in the military but
the education departments are even
bigger because of other staff like this
joke either or bureaucrats so half of
the governments of KP and Balochistan
come from the Education Department and
these Jogi guards were the people who
buy custom this is not policy when they
donated their land to the government to
build a school the government would hire
them and give them a government job as a
joke either so they would have a stable
government salary for life and these
jokey guards under there are essentially
the landlord’s and they’re easily the
richest guy in the village and they’re
all over town and really not at school
and this guy was on his way tap the BOD
I went to the first school sat down with
the kids and open up their textbooks to
a page that had a map of Pakistan on it
and I asked these kids what is this
geeky AAHA and they were quiet and I
thought they were shy so I waited for a
few minutes and they all sat around me
and I finally asked them again you got
him and finally one kid took a guess he
said baa
he couldn’t identify the map of Pakistan
in this school I was excited to see the
teacher holding a book that said US aid
on it because this is a very distant
village the teacher had a master’s
degree she had been trained by USA to
teach or do literacy eight months prior
she had been trained by beacon house to
teach English literacy eight months
prior or actually within a few months
before but when I asked her children to
spell Pakistan they don’t know the first
letter in any language these are third
graders now these stats are consistent
or these um what I’m telling you right
now are consistent with the stats over
less than half of third graders in
Pakistan can read an or do sentence
thirty percent can write a sentence with
the word school in it in or do an 11
percent can do it in English this
country does not have an out-of-school
children crisis or crisis of out of
school children and has a crisis of
children who are in school and who are
learning nothing it is very typical here
in Pakistan to be in school for three
five years and be completely illiterate
this is why kids are dropping out and
this is why it’s not worth it for
parents to send their kids to school if
they can’t afford a private school and
private schools teachers are paid far
less than a government sector they are
do not have the training they don’t have
the degrees but their kids are ahead
simply because the parents are
accountable
the teachers are accountable to the
parents so there’s a second story going
on here this is a school without a roof
and these are the two schools that are
supposed to be the school buildings for
these kids
I mentioned that the schools were
destroyed by the 2005 earthquake what
happened was that the earthquake in 2005
destroyed 6,000 schools in KP and
Kashmir the government to date has only
rebuilt half of them even though they
had all the money to do it today we
still have an earthquake reconstruction
agency in Assam Abad has 700 employees
and it’s not doing anything and the
reason this persists is because we don’t
know what’s happening we don’t know that
the earthquake reconstruction agency
called era still exists it’s not
supposed to and we don’t know that they
haven’t done their job and it is in this
ignorant that public resources are
wasted this is abandoned reconstruction
and by the way these schools have been
sometimes on and off for about 10 years
in terms of contractors showing a
building a bit and leaving so I was
excited when I did this work because I
thought you know finally I can get the
narrative on the right track but I had
my most depressing moment a few weeks
ago actually I had put the granddaughter
of a woman who works in my house into an
elite private school and when I and they
happily took her she’s very happy there
but when I tried to enroll the second
child the school said no and based on
nothing but the child’s background and
the reason this was so depressing is
because I knew the way that public
education happens in any country on the
world in Pakistan doesn’t have that
ingredient which is elite inter
in public education every country in the
world that is achieved universal public
education did it because elites pursued
it as a project to create citizens for
example in the u.s. the u.s. faced
immigrants that were coming to the
country that had to be socialized into a
common American identity
and so the u.s. used public schools to
assimilate people into a single identity
in Pakistan we have a very opposite
problem we all think we’re leaving
elites are emigrating or think that they
are and therefore we have no stake and
actually what happens and this shows up
in our disinterest and then the things
that are happening that we don’t know
I’ve already shared some things with you
but there’s a lot more for example we
don’t know that there’s a law in the
books in Pakistan that says that private
schools must take in 10% of their seats
and give them to disadvantaged students
for free we don’t know it exists and we
don’t know it exists because we copy
pasted these laws from India and so
there’s no local constituency to
implement these laws in Pakistan there
are other things happening we have
political will and KP and Punjab but
what’s missing is anyone that knows what
they’re trying to do these Education
Department’s are fighting losing battles
against powerful teachers unions who
have media on their sides they have the
courts on their sides the media covers
their protests because they’re easy to
cover and nobody seems to want to know
more the courts file stay orders
whenever the government tries to hold a
teacher accountable we need to know
what’s happening we need to understand
that these bills that are going to hold
teachers more accountable that
departments are trying to put them in
place in order for these things to be
realized and finally English is a huge
problem I told you 40% of kids in this
country go to English medium private
schools these are aspiring middle-class
families that are putting a large part
of their income into private education
but English medium means that textbooks
and tests are in English teachers don’t
speak English 94% of English medium
private school teachers in Punjab
94% of them don’t know English so these
kids are row learning because they just
need to get through tests in a language
they don’t know they’re memorizing
sounds and by this time these kids get
to university
unlike the government kids they can
function in English but all they can do
is plagiarize all around the world the
standard is that kids should learn in
the language that they speak this
doesn’t happen because we have
privileged English as the language of
the elite when it’s really just a mode
of communication finally we need a local
narrative for education right now we’re
running on a borrowed narrative that has
been created by donors who don’t have
the resources and don’t have the
interest that’s why it’s not realized
you guys might say well we do care about
education we give philanthropy
philanthropy is meaningful it’s worth
2.4 billion dollars which is four times
bigger than aid but it’s not enough
because it builds thousands of schools
this country has about two hundred
thousand schools that are falling short
we need a local narrative and we need to
privilege those in this country who
don’t speak English and we need to
respect what they have to say in order
to realize what needs to be done thanks
you
ever since I moved here people have
asked me so how long do you think you’re
gonna stay and I never really understood
this question because I don’t have any
plan to leave and yet and this question
people seem to be suggesting that I
should leave and this told me that
Pakistan is a country that people leave
and it’s not like other places where you
move and nobody ever you know people
assume that you’re gonna stay but I have
loved Pakistan every day that I’ve lived
here six years
even today I Drive around Islamabad
which is where I lived and I appreciate
it but there’s one frustration that I
have which is that I’ve always felt like
I’m behind some kind of a wall when I
was younger it was the walls of my
grandmother’s house and we’d visit from
the US and grew up in Tennessee and in
Florida and I couldn’t really understand
what was going on beyond a lot of
violence and a lot of poverty that
nobody ever bothered to explain and now
as an adult again I feel like I’ve
entered Islamabad as essentially someone
because of my class cannot really access
what’s happening in the country and
because of being in the development
sector we see a certain version of
Pakistan and often it’s the version
that’s presented to us so I left my job
that moved me to Pakistan a few years
ago and I spent two years trying to
figure out how to get more in touch with
the country and that landed me at dawn I
became a journalist and the reason I
became a journalist is because I wanted
to investigate what was really happening
with development money in this country
because I saw that if I was interested
in development then the corollary was
aid so I did my first stories with dawn
they went very well and then my editor
sat down with me and she said why don’t
you look into education and I thought
well why because everyone knows
everything about education and so I
wasn’t really interested in covering the
topic it’s one of the most over
discussed issues in Pakistan but I did
it anyways and I went into it with a
hunch because I knew two things one is
that people would say that doubling the
budget is the solution
to the education crisis in Pakistan but
there were two problems with that
narrative one is that on any given day I
knew that one in five teachers does not
show up to school and secondly that 80%
of the budget is going into the salaries
for these teachers so I can never
understand how doubling the budget was
going to solve this crisis it seemed
like we just needed to spend the money
better so I ended up spending a year
investigating education not because I
needed to but because everything I found
was a constant surprise and this Stila
happens to me today when I look at
education in Pakistan the reality is
completely different from what we are
told this is a picture of Michelle Obama
and the daughter of the former prime
minister this picture pretty much sums
up what we know about education which is
that a Pakistan needs to double the
budget to solve the crisis because what
Michelle Obama is saying to the prime
minister’s daughter is that if you
double the budget I’ll give you 70
million dollars in aid for girls
education so the story we have is that
boxa needs to double the budget that
this will resolve the crisis and that
donors are financing the gap the reality
is that since 2010 10 Pakistan has more
than doubled the budget for education
our budget in 2010 was 3.5 billion
dollars today it’s 8.6 more shockingly
our education budget is the same almost
as our defense budget and these numbers
are growing for education fast I
wouldn’t be surprised if education
overtakes the official defense budget
pretty soon what we have heard is that
Pakistan spends 2 percent of its budget
on education this isn’t true and the
reason why you’ve heard this is because
we all know devolution happened in 2010
education became a provincial
responsibility but nobody counted the
provincial budgets when they told you
what Pakistan spends 2% is the federal
budget if you add the provincial budgets
which is where the bulk of spending is
Pakistan spends 13% of its budget on
education
the US and the UK spent 14% the global
average is 14% you’ve also heard that
Pakistan spends 2% of its GDP on
education this is partially true it is
true that Pakistan spends that much but
GDP is not a good measure for us because
we don’t recover enough of our GDP in
the form of taxes to translate into
budget our GDP does not become money to
spend and this is why a small part of
our GDP is a big part of our budget and
our GDP is growing by five percent every
year if we keep chasing the growing GDP
figure we can easily reach a point where
this is just unsustainable in terms of
our budget and we do after all have
other priorities and things that
children in schools do need to function
like health roads security it’s also a
bad measure because parents spend
another eight billion dollars on
education the figures that you’ve seen
do not include private spending but in
Pakistan we’re an outlier 40 percent of
our kids are in private schools so how
the government is spending eight point
six billion dollars on education parents
spend another eight billion this easily
takes us past the four percent mark in
terms of GDP so what have we gone out of
this Pakistan has the second highest
number of out of school children in the
world and so success would mean that we
bring down the number of kids who are
out of school that we get kids into
school interestingly since we doubled
our budget the number of kids in school
has stagnated at 57 percent in 2010 we
had 57 percent of 5 to 9 year olds in
school today we still have 57 percent of
5 to 9 year olds in school and what is 2
percent 2 percent is foreign aid what
the US Pakistan has been boxin is today
actually the largest recipient of UK aid
in the world the Punjab education
program is UK’s biggest program in the
world in recent years we’ve been the
second largest recipient of US aid in
the world but the money that comes in
from the US or from the UK at its
largest has equaled only 2 percent
of what we spend ourselves from our own
budgets and by the way the World Bank is
a little bigger but those are all loans
and those are things that we pay back so
that’s not included so now this picture
doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore
you see Michelle basically asking Miriam
to spend another seven billion dollars
on education to double the budget
because that’s what the budget was when
this photo was taken and in return
she’ll give Pakistan seventy million
dollars the resources to solve this
crisis financially are at home so and
this is when I was doing my research
donors were completely baffled as to
what was going on why is it that we have
instituted reforms we’ve doubled
spending we ourselves have put in so
much money and yet we see no change they
called the reforms cutting-edge and they
say that financing has increased but
despite a decade of this nothing has
changed
so donors are baffled and they don’t
know what’s going on they’ve started to
figure it out I’d say two years ago but
meanwhile people in this country who go
to government schools know exactly what
is going on I have a columnist sidekick
but he was actually the office boy in my
office when I moved to Pakistan and he’s
kind of become a constant in my life and
he’s a friend and he helps me with all
the things that I would do for myself if
I lived in the US and which would make
my life very annoying and when he found
out I was investigating education he
said madam you must come to my village
and see the schools there so I said okay
because zephyr has been asking me to
come to his village ever since I moved
to Pakistan for six years so I said okay
fine let’s get it over with I’ll finally
come to your village and so we set out
early one morning from Islamabad for apt
Abad and we were heading for the
mountains and I finally asked him some
questions in the car and I asked him sup
her why are we going to your village and
he said bus you have to see the schools
there and so I was like okay Zafar but
you have schools right and he said the
most profound thing
that anybody said in all of my 50
interviews on education around the
country he said school a hey Darlene the
hangar we have schools we don’t have
education so I said okay it’s
interesting what scene so we went to his
village we drove up as far as we could
go and then we hiked for an hour
I think locals do it a little faster it
took me an hour and this is his village
you can see it’s a small village in the
mountains and the schools in his village
are taking place in these kind of
makeshift spaces because they don’t have
proper school buildings the schools were
destroyed by the 2005 earthquake this
school is happening in a mosque and this
school is happening on a rented in the
rented space it’s a room the kids are
outside because there was an earthquake
the day before but the remarkable thing
what these photos show is that is how
far back asan has come in the past five
years we’ve gone to the point where
teachers show up at least in Punjab and
KP our absentee rates in Punjab and KP
used to be twenty to thirty percent for
teachers today it’s down to about 14
percent in Punjab and about sorry 8
percent or 7 / 7 percent in Punjab and
14 percent in KP so these massively
absentee rates plummeted because the
teacher started the government started
sending monitors to every school to
check if the teacher was present
so in Punjab in keeping every month a
monitor visits the approximately 70,000
schools that these two provinces have to
check if the teacher is there because of
this teachers are showing up however you
can also see the wasted resources
because this school in every school is
supposed to have two teachers and a joke
either you have only one teacher here so
the majority of your budget and the
questions we need to ask are around
these teachers this is a joke either
interesting story with a joke either
so there are teaching forests in
Pakistan is enormous there are as many
teachers in Pakistan as there are people
in the military but
the education departments are even
bigger because of other staff like this
joke either or bureaucrats so half of
the governments of KP and Balochistan
come from the Education Department and
these Jogi guards were the people who
buy custom this is not policy when they
donated their land to the government to
build a school the government would hire
them and give them a government job as a
joke either so they would have a stable
government salary for life and these
jokey guards under there are essentially
the landlord’s and they’re easily the
richest guy in the village and they’re
all over town and really not at school
and this guy was on his way tap the BOD
I went to the first school sat down with
the kids and open up their textbooks to
a page that had a map of Pakistan on it
and I asked these kids what is this
geeky AAHA and they were quiet and I
thought they were shy so I waited for a
few minutes and they all sat around me
and I finally asked them again you got
him and finally one kid took a guess he
said baa
he couldn’t identify the map of Pakistan
in this school I was excited to see the
teacher holding a book that said US aid
on it because this is a very distant
village the teacher had a master’s
degree she had been trained by USA to
teach or do literacy eight months prior
she had been trained by beacon house to
teach English literacy eight months
prior or actually within a few months
before but when I asked her children to
spell Pakistan they don’t know the first
letter in any language these are third
graders now these stats are consistent
or these um what I’m telling you right
now are consistent with the stats over
less than half of third graders in
Pakistan can read an or do sentence
thirty percent can write a sentence with
the word school in it in or do an 11
percent can do it in English this
country does not have an out-of-school
children crisis or crisis of out of
school children and has a crisis of
children who are in school and who are
learning nothing it is very typical here
in Pakistan to be in school for three
five years and be completely illiterate
this is why kids are dropping out and
this is why it’s not worth it for
parents to send their kids to school if
they can’t afford a private school and
private schools teachers are paid far
less than a government sector they are
do not have the training they don’t have
the degrees but their kids are ahead
simply because the parents are
accountable
the teachers are accountable to the
parents so there’s a second story going
on here this is a school without a roof
and these are the two schools that are
supposed to be the school buildings for
these kids
I mentioned that the schools were
destroyed by the 2005 earthquake what
happened was that the earthquake in 2005
destroyed 6,000 schools in KP and
Kashmir the government to date has only
rebuilt half of them even though they
had all the money to do it today we
still have an earthquake reconstruction
agency in Assam Abad has 700 employees
and it’s not doing anything and the
reason this persists is because we don’t
know what’s happening we don’t know that
the earthquake reconstruction agency
called era still exists it’s not
supposed to and we don’t know that they
haven’t done their job and it is in this
ignorant that public resources are
wasted this is abandoned reconstruction
and by the way these schools have been
sometimes on and off for about 10 years
in terms of contractors showing a
building a bit and leaving so I was
excited when I did this work because I
thought you know finally I can get the
narrative on the right track but I had
my most depressing moment a few weeks
ago actually I had put the granddaughter
of a woman who works in my house into an
elite private school and when I and they
happily took her she’s very happy there
but when I tried to enroll the second
child the school said no and based on
nothing but the child’s background and
the reason this was so depressing is
because I knew the way that public
education happens in any country on the
world in Pakistan doesn’t have that
ingredient which is elite inter
in public education every country in the
world that is achieved universal public
education did it because elites pursued
it as a project to create citizens for
example in the u.s. the u.s. faced
immigrants that were coming to the
country that had to be socialized into a
common American identity
and so the u.s. used public schools to
assimilate people into a single identity
in Pakistan we have a very opposite
problem we all think we’re leaving
elites are emigrating or think that they
are and therefore we have no stake and
actually what happens and this shows up
in our disinterest and then the things
that are happening that we don’t know
I’ve already shared some things with you
but there’s a lot more for example we
don’t know that there’s a law in the
books in Pakistan that says that private
schools must take in 10% of their seats
and give them to disadvantaged students
for free we don’t know it exists and we
don’t know it exists because we copy
pasted these laws from India and so
there’s no local constituency to
implement these laws in Pakistan there
are other things happening we have
political will and KP and Punjab but
what’s missing is anyone that knows what
they’re trying to do these Education
Department’s are fighting losing battles
against powerful teachers unions who
have media on their sides they have the
courts on their sides the media covers
their protests because they’re easy to
cover and nobody seems to want to know
more the courts file stay orders
whenever the government tries to hold a
teacher accountable we need to know
what’s happening we need to understand
that these bills that are going to hold
teachers more accountable that
departments are trying to put them in
place in order for these things to be
realized and finally English is a huge
problem I told you 40% of kids in this
country go to English medium private
schools these are aspiring middle-class
families that are putting a large part
of their income into private education
but English medium means that textbooks
and tests are in English teachers don’t
speak English 94% of English medium
private school teachers in Punjab
94% of them don’t know English so these
kids are row learning because they just
need to get through tests in a language
they don’t know they’re memorizing
sounds and by this time these kids get
to university
unlike the government kids they can
function in English but all they can do
is plagiarize all around the world the
standard is that kids should learn in
the language that they speak this
doesn’t happen because we have
privileged English as the language of
the elite when it’s really just a mode
of communication finally we need a local
narrative for education right now we’re
running on a borrowed narrative that has
been created by donors who don’t have
the resources and don’t have the
interest that’s why it’s not realized
you guys might say well we do care about
education we give philanthropy
philanthropy is meaningful it’s worth
2.4 billion dollars which is four times
bigger than aid but it’s not enough
because it builds thousands of schools
this country has about two hundred
thousand schools that are falling short
we need a local narrative and we need to
privilege those in this country who
don’t speak English and we need to
respect what they have to say in order
to realize what needs to be done thanks
you
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