Education: The line between poverty and prosperity

Written by | Abdul Saboor

By the same Author:System and Hypocrisy and Cheating Culture

E

       ducation plays a vital role in the making of great nations, cultures and ideologies and is a source of awareness; awareness about our social, political and ethical ideologies. There is no precedent of any nation which has developed without education. Whether they are Americans or Britishers, they all are ruling the world on the basis of education.

A few centuries back we, the Muslims, were dominant upon the whole world because then we had great philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, scientists, doctors, architects, astrologists and scholars. Then what was the reason due to which today, we lag behind. There is only one answer to this question and that is we left our education, and the consequences were that we were dominated by others.

A look through the statistics, and we see that our literacy rate is 29% of total population which means, only 50 million Pakistani’s are literate, and here I must mention that a ‘literate’ is someone who can write or read his name. However the adult literacy rate is only 14% which places us in the list of 5 least educated countries on earth as per EFA data shown below:

But we should be glad that we are still better than Burkina Faso.If we try to find the causes due to which, despite being 61 years independent, we are unable to increase our literacy rate, we narrow down to one reason, and that is poverty. It has been observed that in our country people are not aware about the importance of education and this is due to the poverty which in turn directly depends on population rate. And according to the CIA and UNESCO, in June 2006, Pakistan’s population was 166 million and in 2007 it rose to 170 million. That is a growth rate of 2.4% per annum which shows that in next 10 years it will exceed the 200 million mark and hopefully will overtake Brazil to become the 5th most densely populated country. And this high velocity population increase rate is already playing its role to keep the people in this country away from education.  (Click Map see population density).

In a nut shell, we have now only one option to get our respect back in the world, and that is possible if and only if we get education by overcoming poverty. Also, in my opinion, being an agricultural country, we can overtake poverty only if we exploit our endowments in better manner.

Now it is up to us. What do we want? Prosperity or poverty?

..............................................................................

In your opinion, what is it that has deteriorated our education?

Who is responsible for Pakistan's illiteracy?

Which system of education is better for Pakistan. Cambridge or Intermediate?