Karachi Basic education is imperative to the economy for growth, stated Haris Gazdar while delivering a lecture at the Habib University, titled, “The Individual or the Collective: Querying Assumptions about the Literacy Gap”. “Education should have a public policy and, at the basic education level, public schooling is simply indispensable,” He said, adding that besides public schooling, community monitoring of schools was also essential in any sustainable model. Gazdar, a noted social scientist and researcher, dispelled the impression created by the oft-quoted statistic of Pakistan having a literacy rate of 20 percent, “the lowest in the world”, and said that, while our literacy rate was low in comparison with developments the world over, it was not all that bad. Collectively, he said, that it hovered at 55 percent, while among men it was 66 percent and 43 percent for women. The literacy gap in Pakistan as a whole, said Gazdar, stood at 45 percent He also pointed out the lack of uniformity in the pattern of the literacy percentage, and said that a survey in Toba Tek Singh verified that almost 80 percent of the men and women there could read and write. Distritcts in Balochistan, however, have a dismal picture to present with rarely a rate higher than 10 percent. Gazdar also cited the example of district Sanghar in Sindh, where he said it was found that there was 66 percent literacy and the affairs of the school managed by the community. Besides, he said, that paradigms of education today were shifting fast. In this context, he quoted the study by Nancy Bertholt of the World Bank, wherein, she had talked of under-investment in Pakistan’s education sector and questioned how we could get along with this state of affairs. He said that 1970 onwards, both in the US and Pakistan, the emphasis was on investment and human growth but, of late, the element of terrorism had crept in, a menace that must be eradicated. The lecture was held under the auspices of the university’s Yohsin Centre for Social Development.
