Providing for education

In the last article we had argued for the position that all children in Pakistan should be educated. Even if parents cannot pay for their children's education, it is in the interest of the nation to get every child educated, and we can use other people's money to do that. Getting all children educated is important because an uneducated child imposes a negative externality on others, while an educated one produces a positive outcome for him/herself and others (functional argument). And it is important to get all children educated as a matter of right as well: our Constitution also acknowledges the right, though so far the state has not acknowledged it as such and the courts have not declared it and had it implemented. Whether one agrees with the above exact positions or not, the need for educating children is generally sufficiently acknowledged. For the remaining part of the article we will assume that there is agreement that all children in Pakistan need to be educated and then see how we can move towards achieving the objective.
The question is not a trivial one. For the last two decades the debate has been raging in Pakistan. For the first 30 years of Pakistan's existence it was believed that the state was responsible for funding education. In fact, the belief was reinforced by the Bhutto regime when it decided to nationalize education in the country. But though the actions of the state did reveal that the thinking was certainly such that it acknowledged the role that the state had to play in funding as well as providing for education in the country, the allocation of funds for education, the lack of importance that education was accorded in different plans also revealed that though the belief about the role of the state might have been there, the belief was not strong enough to outweigh other priorities.
A lot of things changed post 1977. The nature of the state underwent a significant change that has not been reversed over the last 30 years. From a developmental state of the first 30 years Pakistani state moved towards being a 'security' (the tags development and security state come from Dr. Kaiser Bengali, though he might not agree with me on how I am using them) state under General Zia , and the trend has not been altered at all. Under the security state, the priorities of the state changed even further. Though the belief that education should be provided to all lingers on, the belief that the government should provide funding for the education of all children has weakened.
Starting with allowing the private sector to enter the field of educational provision in a much larger way in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the privatization of some schools that had been nationalized in the 1970s, and the weakening of educational provision in the public sector, there has been a secular trend over the last three decades. Slowly most people have come to believe that the state cannot provide education to all the children in Pakistan, and it cannot provide quality education at all, and it is only through the private sector that we can hope to achieve provision of acceptable quality and, at best, the state should provide funding for education but actual provision should be left to the private for-profit or not-for-profit players. In fact, some people have a more extreme position: they argue that government involvement in the education sector is a guarantee of failure and they argue for complete privatization of provision, though accepting the need for a role of the state in providing funding for those children whose parents cannot afford to pay for private education.