CONTRARY to popular perception Pakistan’s education crisis is not a core problem of access. It is a problem of incentives. Until that reality is grasped, the system will continue to expand without delivering either learning or opportunity. The dominant narrative, shaped by well-meaning experts and echoed by commentators, is simplistic, intellectually lazy and politically convenient. Its prescriptions are predictable: build more schools, expand universities, pour in more public money. The oft-repeated figure of 26 million out-of-school children is invoked to fabricate moral urgency, resting on a flawed assumption that parents who keep their children out of school are behaving irrationally. They are not. They are responding, with considerable clarity, to the incentives in front of them.

Education, in this framing, is treated as an unquestionable moral good. And needs to be ex­­panded irrespective of context, incentives, outco­m­­es or returns. Interrogating this assumption is treated as near-heretical. The result is the substitution of sentiment for analysis, and advocacy for understanding. Political responses reflect this sha­­l­lowness. For many policymakers, education is not about learning outcomes but patronage — an instrument for distributing jobs to teachers and low-skilled staff within their constituencies. Acc­ess is invoked; quality is ignored. The system exp­ands in form while hollowing out in substance.

Before demanding that families sacrifice more and governments spend more, a fundamental question must be confronted: why should anyone invest in education at all? This is the central economic question that the discourse avoids. Gary Becker’s theory of human capital is unambiguous: education consumes real resources today — time,........

© Dawn