One of urgent tasks facing the political leadership and the government of Pakistan lies in the area of educational reforms. Pakistan wants to increase its economic worth in the world and wants to improve its economy but an economic growth in Pakistan cannot be realized or sustained without the supportive base of an educated population. Currently, there are two distinct educational systems in Pakistan. One is based on the government of Pakistan’s state funded educational institutions and modern curricula and other one is based on the centuries old system of madarassas’ religious education and both are woefully inadequate to support Pakistan’s educational and economics needs in the future.

The job of the madarassa is to teach religion and not preach a religiously based political ideology. This trend started in the late 1970s and since then, it has continued unabated because the state has actively supported it; supported it in the sense that it has appeased to indoctrination of the students in the madarassa system in Pakistan. As said before, implementing a modern curriculum into the madarassa system will fail because the people who teach are filled with a hatred that is generated from ignorance, bias, bigoted opinions and a social prejudice reinforced within an economic apartheid. The madarassa network of schools can have the modern subjects taught and even if they teach the history of region from onset of the Indus Valley civilization, it will still depend on what interpretation the teacher will give to his students.

In the end, the interpretation matters more than the subject and if the teacher is determined to preach hate and rancor, the whole attempt to reform the system will fail. What is needed is not only to bring new modern and contemporary subjects, but also to make sure that those teaching are not prone to myopic visions of the world and are educated themselves to understand the nuances of the religion they claim to teach to others. This will amount to outrage but the education of the students in the Pakistani madarassas, has to be secularized. In the sense, that political ideologies should not be taught but only religion and the religious political parties of Pakistan should not offer political patronage to the madarassa education. Sadly, these seminaries are not educating young minds in religion but are creating mindless political cadres, who will act as the vote banks of the religious parties in Pakistan and earn them political leverage.

Furthermore, the education in the government schools and colleges has to be drastically improved, because though the government funded educational institutions do offer the appropriate courses, they are incapable of teaching the right values to their students. The government funded schools and colleges might be dismal in disseminating education, but they cannot compete against the madarassas. A student who goes to a government college or school learns about nepotism, corruption, cheating, social and political patronages, breaking the laws, interacts with teachers who are disinterested in teaching and are only interested to collect their salaries. In other words, s/he learns to be lazy, parasitic, unreliable and a free rider in society.

A madarassa, despite its poor image, has teachers who may be ignorant but are honest and are committed to their students, though that commitment might be open to question. There is a structure in a madarassa and it might be old and outdated, but it produces results and the students who attend religious seminaries might be ill educated and not know about the world, but they tend to be devoted to their cause, honest, disciplined and motivated in their beliefs, which is more than can said for the secular minded schools of Pakistan that produce the educated elite which monopolizes politics and economics in Pakistan.

This is where the polarization in Pakistani society originates. The people who are graduates of the government education institutions and are corrupt and crooked end up dominating Pakistan and those, who are honest and hard working do not because what matters in Pakistan is not what a person learns, but what politically correct and economically viable subjects they have studied. Hence, these two separate but unequal systems of education in Pakistan are creating a potential time bomb and they need to be ended and the educational system in Pakistan formalized into a uniform code of instruction, with the state paying a closer attention to what is being taught.

There are nearly 50 million Pakistanis under the age of 10, who are illiterate and there is a similar corresponding number of adults, who are illiterate. This in simple terms means that nearly 100 million Pakistanis out of a total of 150 million are educationally and functionally illiterate. To put the equation in a different context, if Pakistan implements an educational reform today, it will still take two or more generations before the results will start to realize and that means that for the next 50 years, Pakistan’s rate of illiteracy will continue to climb before it starts to decline (and only if there is an educational reform implemented in an immediate sense).

Pakistan is presently toying with a policy to privatize education not because it makes sense, but in a real sense because the government has finally admitted its failure in educating Pakistanis. Privatization of education will mean that schools and education will progressively slip out of the hands of the majority and unless the government of Pakistan can rationalize how education, in the private sector, is going to be made economically feasible, the trend to send students to the madarassas will gain more momentum. The privatization of education will also mean that Pakistanis will be exploited as educational institutions become money-garnering concerns and a lack of effective governmental regulations will foster a negative image, which again will benefit the madarassas.

Hence, reforming the madarassas of Pakistan is meaningless unless the entire system of education is reformed in Pakistan. The only reform of the education in Pakistan, which will work is the one that is affordable to the middle class. Education, which benefits a nation is the one that its middle class can afford, because the middle class will provide the future leadership. The rich are not interested in providing leadership as much as they are eager to benefit from their social and economic positions of political exclusivity and the poor are already marginalized economically and politically to offer anything to Pakistan’s immediate and long-term future. The people, who have the most to gain and lose in Pakistan are its middle classes and any educational reform, which ignores them is bound to create future problems in Pakistan.

The outlook for educational reforms are hopeless in Pakistan, because the government is not interested and as long as the government of Pakistan ignores the field of education in Pakistan, Pakistan will never amount to anything worthwhile internationally.

Pakistan’s long-term salvation lies in promoting education and creating an educated middle class, which can develop the economic resources to sustain Pakistan’s growth. This middle class, which will benefit Pakistan will only be capable of doing so if the social, political, economic and religious apartheid in Pakistan’s educational system is ended and Pakistani education is made secular. There should be no madarassa or government funded educational institutions. They should be replaced with educational institutions, which are privatized and offer affordable but quality education to their students.

The future of Pakistan lies in a solid educational base for its people and not in having nuclear deterrence, or regional free trade arrangements or trade quotas. The future of Pakistan lies in its youth and in its people and if the state has failed to provide them the tools to cope with an increasingly competitive world of the future; the state will fail in its sovereign obligation to its population and it will have broken its social and sovereign contract with the people of Pakistan. It will have lost its raison d’etre.