The Single National Curriculum (SNC) was promulgated with the promise to provide “one system of education” for all in terms of curriculum, medium of instruction and a common platform of assessment so that “all children” have a “fair and equal opportunity” to receive “high quality education” including those in madrassahs. Let’s analyse if the SNC is on track to achieving this, and what new challenges a single-minded hegemonic approach has brought forward.

In order to proceed with this analysis, we must first determine what “high quality education” means. According to the UNESCO, quality education specifically entails issues such as appropriate skills development, gender parity, and provision of relevant school infrastructure, equipment, educational materials and resources, scholarships or teaching force.

In a statement issued in support of UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) for inclusive and quality education and lifelong learning for all, two leading educational organisations that represent over 30 million educators globally, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and the Education International, expounded on the meaning of quality education and stated that: “A quality education is one that focuses on the whole child – the social, emotional, mental, physical, and cognitive development of each student… It prepares the child for life, not just for testing”. It added that “quality education provides resources and directs policy to ensure that each child enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle; learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults; is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community; has access to personalised learning; is supported by qualified, caring adults; is challenged academically and prepared for success in college or further study and for employment and participation in a global environment.”

Quality education, therefore, is one that is pedagogically and developmentally sound and educates students in becoming active and productive members of society. It is not enough therefore that education be accessible to all, it must also add value and skills to a child’s learning process enabling them to excel as professionals as well as people in a global environment. There are three key pillars on which quality education rests. These are access to quality teachers; provision and use of quality learning tools and resources; and the establishment of safe and supportive quality learning environments.

The question before us is whether the SNC meets these benchmarks or not, and whether its implementation is in line with the high standards it claimed to set such as development of 21^st Century skills, alignment with SDG 4 and other emerging internal trends in relation to education.

Narrative wise, the website of the Ministry of Education and Professional Training, which has a dedicated section on SNC, checks all boxes in terms of using the correct buzzwords such as “inclusive education”, “21^st Century skills”, “project-based learning” etc and makes effective use of populist slogans such as “one nation, one curriculum” and supplements this with touching on the chords of ideology and nationalism.

Once you dig deeper and access the document containing curriculum for different subjects, you are introduced to the anti-colonial sentiment that fuels the entire exercise and gives it and other forces the legitimacy in their arguments to posit private schools offering foreign qualifications as a form of educational apartheid in a bid to what seems like a deflection from focusing on the shortcomings of the public education system in all these years. The tirade against foreign qualifications and projecting them as a cause of class inequality rather than a consequence appears to miss the point that till such time that means of production and resources continue to be unequally divided in the society, no amount of standardisation in education can eradicate the class differences that prevail. For that, an economic overhaul with a redistribution of land and resources will have to happen backed by strong institutions and rule of law, on which hardly any work has been done.

In terms of implementation and on ground assessment of whether the SNC meets its stated aims or not, it has to be said that the SNC set itself up for several competing objectives and ended up focusing on those that serve a political goal. The state can either assume a parental role and proclaim itself a guardian of the moral values, stifle parents’ choice and impair their right to choose the education they want for their children in a bid to impose state-sanctioned books and curriculum, and thereby control what children can know and what they cannot; or it can let education be premised on pedagogical goals determined by subject and field experts and play a facilitative role to focus on the infrastructural and other resources needed for an accessible and quality education for all.

The promoters of the SNC chose to see themselves as guardians instead of facilitators. The result, especially in the Punjab, has been limited access to resource and learning materials as model textbooks have been prescribed. Even though on paper private publishers can apply for an NOC, the process is cumbersome, three-tiered, undemocratic and costly, as a result of which many publishers have been unable to get NOCs in time for this academic year. Not only has this hegemony and control over books impacted livelihoods of smaller publishers, it has also inhibited access to different learning resources for students which is contrary to the notion of quality education. For education to truly flourish, the state must focus on equipping public schools with better resources and must surrender the policy and curriculum from the ideological and political capture that it is currently engulfed in.

The author is a diversity and inclusion advocate. She can be reached at nida@learnpak.com.pk