Eurocentric Ideas in the National Education Policy of Pakistan

It is assertive that Pakistan’s National Education Policy brings in little benefits because of the domination of Eurocentric biases that dominated our development thinking through Western-centric research and pedagogical arrangements. The education policy landscape has been revamped by globalization. Education development in Pakistan is seen as a hegemonic form of representation of international development institutions and their prevailing ideologies. Globalization and global thinking are pertinent factors that serve to block the missing local cultural context in the education policies of Pakistan. Sharing knowledge across the border comes under the umbrella of globalization. But the international institutions are forcing local institutions to operate from the lens of the global perspective. Missing local cultural context leads to the further strengthening of underdevelopment in developing countries.

Western science and its knowledge are just an instrument of the cultural violence in Pakistan. Missing the local context undermines the visualization of the relationship between the local and the global. Western values are devaluing the local culture. There is a need to protect the indigenous culture in the national education policy of Pakistan and redefine the representation by including the interest in the local knowledge and culture. Therefore, it is requisite to change the global Westernized outlook of the policy to the local traditions. The donor countries’ intervention in shaping the education policy of Pakistan is subverting this change.

The canvas of donor funding agencies’ intervention in Pakistan is much more than just donating for its advancement in the name of development. These institutions have agenda-setting capacities. There is a direct influence of donor agencies on Pakistan’s education policies. Such global institutions are willing to donate such heavy investments to implement their dominating neoliberal ideology. For evidence, the World bank commenced 427 projects in Pakistan till July 2018. And the highest single project of the World Bank is for US $400 million (World Bank, 2018). Moreover, they are the key agents that define what problems are to be tackled if the member states want to be integrated into the competitive global knowledge economy. These institutions are economically dominated by the North and politically controlled by the West. Therefore, the educational outcomes have been consistently poor. After more than a half-century of independence, nearly half of Pakistan’s population is still illiterate. Even with so much developmental assistance, still, a significant proportion of Pakistanis are illiterate, which shows that these foreign aid donors are to sustain their vested interests. The fundamental goal of development is not a human improvement but human domination and control through multiple discourses. The participation of international policy actors, mainly from donor agencies, also implies a gateway from where global neoliberalism collides with national education policy.

Educational policies in our country can be effective only by having minimal capitalist traits in it. Educational discourses worldwide focus more on economic growth, creating more job opportunities, and teaching work-related skills only. Joel Spring — author of the book ‘Globalization of Education’— coined the term “corporatization of education.” This term refers to multinational corporations shaping global education policies and human behavior in the corporate workplace. These corporations pressure the national school systems to adopt policies that are favorable to their interests. The concept of public-private partnerships in education is framed in such a way that this concept, along with the institutions that are funding it, makes it an illusion of education policy innovation. This is because we see western education policies as more ideal and capable of bringing a change. Pakistani policymakers often adopt global policies, for they look at these western frameworks as more rooted in stable ideational international structures. Moreover, foreign aid has become an instrument through which reforms and west-centric ideas get space in the national education policy.

To analyze how global educational policy seeps into the national education policy of Pakistan, one should understand what global education policy emphasizes. It focuses on the role of knowledge in the economy, emphasizing competition and promotion of governing education through decentralization and privatization. This is done through harmonization, dissemination, standardization, interdependence, and imposition. The frequent buzzwords used in the National Education Policy of Pakistan are ‘uniformity in education provision,’ raising the ‘quality,’ inclusive, globalized, globalization, global, equitable, public-private ‘partnerships’, and ‘upgrading’ teacher education’ (National Education Policy, 2017). These words are not neutral; they are used as tools by the West to justify their neoliberal ideology. We need to pay more heed to the carriers of these ideas. This privatization agenda is more about bringing a pragmatic shift in the educational system goals and the state’s role in education. Our education policies have gone through four phases toward incorporating this idea.

From 1947 to 1958, our government showed a positive attitude towards private education. In the next phase, until 1970, private education was deemed to be a problem. Therefore, in 1972, the state nationalized all schools because of having a negative stance towards the privatization of education. The next phase began with the 1979 policy, which reversed nationalization and promoted the privatization of education. In the fourth phase, we see the 1992 and 1998 education policies focusing on giving incentives to the private sector for establishing private schools. The policy shift is because of the exchange of ideas by bureaucrats, elites, donors, NGO representatives, and other consultants that resulted in building a discourse and the birth of consensual ideas like public-private partnerships in the education policies of Pakistan. The primary rationale behind such education policies is economic competitiveness. Higher education seems to play a catalytic role in it, and education is creating competencies that would lead to a more sort of cycle. This is why the government has pondered the vital importance of economic sectors like engineering, university-industry linkages, and agriculture The propagation of neoliberal western ideals and modernization theories is the justification for controlling us and exploiting us to the fullest with the idea of developing us in disguise.

Western cultural hegemony is being carried out through educational institutions resulting in the production of biased westernized thinking. They have impacted the development of the local community. To focus on how the circulation of knowledge works itself through this policy, we see that it is organized around globalized policy discourses, i.e., ‘quality,’ ‘access to education,’ and ‘equality.’ These are the discourses that are found in the policies of contemporary education systems all across the globe. Many specific issues linked to education, including the environment, population growth, democracy, and health, are also listed. These are, ultimately, related to the development policies of international agencies. So, we do see discursive framing of education policy talk in the Pakistani context of the policy concerns of the international organizations. The matters dealt with are those that are of concern to the donor agencies that are funding the educational development framework in Pakistan. UK and US are dominating research and academia in the development fields. The hegemony of Western literature is perpetuated through education in Pakistan. English is still the de facto language of power. The language of the policy document resembles the language of aid programs of international organizations to keep the audience of its donors and lenders satisfied. As the 1998 Education Policy asserts that “the government alone couldn’t carry the burden of the whole education process and hence the private enterprises will be encouraged to open education institutions, particularly in rural areas.”

The policy itself spoke the language of new allies and served the interests of local elites as well. Western hegemony and its discourse further perpetuate English language imperialism and clash with the Urdu language as a medium of instruction. Indigenous languages carry indigenous knowledge. There is a crucial need to frame indigenous languages and local historical culture as equally representative of all existing cultures in Pakistan to be stated within the education policy, and practice as (Donald, 2009) stressed upon the idea that if colonization is a shared condition, then decolonization should be equally a collective endeavor.

To conclude, education as a moral endeavor has to be protected on top of all personal freedoms whose policies are not to be infringed upon by other major powers. To reap more benefits from our development policies and to remove biased westernized thinking, critical discussions on what beliefs and practices among all cultural traditions in Pakistan and delineate what is valuable and how to abide by those values in any environment. Global education policy seeps into the national education policy through discursive means, which is essentially assisted by material means as well. Therefore, such policies are not targeted at those who are affected but use as a standard around which donor countries keep donating and keep their hegemony at the highest order because these labels are created for the powerful by the powerful as a stand for the powerful.