Pakistan has almost 5.5 million children that are out of school, the second highest number in the world only after Nigeria. Pakistan also has the highest number of illiterate adults in the world, after India and China.These are just some of the findings of UNESCO’s latest report on the state of global primary education that puts Pakistan’s current educational crisis in a glaring, damning light.Pakistan is among the 21 countries facing an “extensive” learning crisis, according to the report. This encapsulates a number of indices, such as enrolment, dropout rates, academic performance and literacy. Pakistan scores low in every index.Broadly, global standards of primary education seemed particularly severe in South and West Asia, and Western Africa. The countries in these regions, including Pakistan, are behind in virtually every index. Pakistan features along with 17 countries from sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritania, Morocco and India.Children in a low-fee private school outperform those that are enrolled in the top tier of government schools, laying bare the government’s crumbling educational infrastructure. However, even in private schools, 36% of grade 5 students cannot read a sentence in English, which they should have been able to do by grade 2. The number of students out of schools are too hight and resources available are too short.For years we have struggled to find answers as world leaders meet and experts gather at symposiums. But could the answer be far simpler than we had thought? Teenage Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, who returned to the city of Oslo for the first time after collecting her award, has suggested this may indeed be the case. Based on calculations made by the Malala Fund, she said at a UN education summit that if all nations cut a mere eight days of defence spending, the amount raised would be $39 billion – enough to educate every child on the globe for 12 years. Malala, not yet 18, will also be discussing funding for education with the president of the World Bank and UN experts.Of course it would be unwise to think that the formula can be replicated exactly as Malala suggests. The world’s defence machinery will never literally stop its massively lucrative work of producing weapons that kill and maim. But then this was not what Malala intended. The figures she put out are those we hear about too little. Politicians do not speak of them, and very few, if any, of us realise just how little money is involved in putting a child through school. These figures should make us think about our priorities and the kind of world we have created. In many ways almost every country is responsible for playing a part in creating the warped thinking by which we lead our lives.
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