Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire”, (William Yeats) beautifully describes the core principle of an ideal education system. From Turkey and Singapore to USA and Japan, education has been the fertilizer for the fruition of a progressive nation, marked by low rates of unemployment and minimal poverty.

Regrettably, Pakistan’s fate has not been so pleasant, as it suffers from alarmingly high poverty and unemployment levels.The quagmire begins at the grassroots level and builds up over time. At the school level, there is an unquestionable quality gap between the public and private education systems. But is the apparently superior private system spotless on its own? The entire paradigm of education is embroiled in the culture of learning to answer and pass rather than learning to learn and think.

The highly applauded CIE system itself encourages students to copy paste answers over and over again, and to figure out monotonous patterns across examinations. A furtive look at Pakistan Studies papers over 10 years reveals how students are expected to copy down the same reasons for the fall of the Mughal Empire in over half of the papers. Even the Chemistry and Economics papers standardise answers in ways that students can now simply serve them to the examiner off a silver platter of resource books such as Redspot.

This promotes the delusion that academic problems have standard solutions and curbs independent thinking, which is so crucial to job success nowadays. By restricting cognitive development at an early stage, school education does not prepare students for the jagged rocks along the competitive job market shores. Consequently, the system ejects a small minority of individuals capable of surviving the job arena, where critical thinking trumps A*s and fickle memorization.

The world’s most developed nations also have significant levels of self-employment and entrepreneurship, which is crucial to high living standards and dealing with overpopulation. However, our education system fails to promote individualism or entrepreneurial spirit. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, Pakistan’s business ownership rate stands at an abysmal 2.7% and the aspirations of growth are significantly lower than most other countries.

A Working Paper by Pakistan Institute of Developmental Economics emphasizes that the system fails to promote essential entrepreneurial skills and research abilities. The education system therefore creates an environment that is not conducive to self-employment and the unemployed remain dependent or accept underemployment, which amplifies indigence.

At the heart of the problem lies the failure of the education system to provide enough exposure and practical experience to the student. At a school level, there is an alarming paucity of internship opportunities and insufficient awareness to involve students in the right kinds of work to enhance their pragmatic abilities. At higher levels, internship opportunities become more accessible, but are still undermined by geographical concentration in a few areas, exploitative nature of the tasks and a general failure to address novel interests such as history and literature, which deters interested people who could potentially gain this crucial experience.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the majority of Pakistani businesses reported a mismatch between demand and supply because of unskilled labour, without necessary practical exposure. The problem is entrenched in a system which fails to incorporate the practical work into the learning curve, while several Canadian universities take this approach by enabling students to work actively with organizations while learning. This approach enhances preparedness of graduates, who would otherwise fail to gain employment or be sacked because they are thoroughly inexperienced or inefficiently dilatory.

The education framework also often fails to account for pivotal exposure that broadens the students’ horizons and empowers them to explore diverse perspectives. For most schools, students have become their caged birds and classrooms their dungeons. Schools continue to undervalue the importance of field trips, research activities and volunteer work and prioritise the traditional academic curriculum, which eventually restricts the innovative potential and economic versatility of the student in a workplace.

At higher levels, exposure is largely restricted to a local or at times, a national level. Some organizations like AIESEC have propelled the inception of international internships and interconnectivity between students around the world but this is not particularly popular across the system and financial and cultural problems remain a tangible obstacle. Without this exposure, graduates remain uncompetitive and less useful in the job market and ultimately face acute poverty.

The curriculum is inherently flawed across the entire system. The Centre of International Educational Benchmarking applauds the Singaporean education system as one of the best. Upon close examination, one can observe how the syllabus teaches ideas at least 3-4 years before they are taught in Pakistani schools and colleges. Singapore also focuses greatly on the foundation of English and Mathematics that allows impressive integration into job environments and ultimately mitigates poverty levels.

This is not the case with the Pakistani system, which is at times unfocused and at other times, too restricting because it does not allow students to explore uncharted waters such as Astronomy and Environmental Sciences. It also consistently fails to integrate the use of technology into the learning process. This all snowballs into job market failure which requires stronger foundations yet wider skillsets.

The academic structure fails to be modern in the sense that it continues to ostracise women, who constitute 50% of our population. The teachers, the syllabi and the often, unisex environments continue to promote stereotypical ideas of conjugal roles of the woman as the housewife and the man as the breadwinner. This explains why unemployment is particularly high among women.

Many women support entire families due to the lack of a male provider or poignant financial conditions, and the failure of the education system to focus on women degrades their potential productivity and ultimately enflames the poverty. As a result, 1.2 million women are unemployed and male entrepreneurs are 9 times that of female ones, since the system does not foster that economic independence in women.

However, it is instrumental to realize that even the best education system cannot alone eliminate the ills of unemployment and poverty. These two correlated dilemmas are intricately linked with many factors outside the control of the education system, including but not limited to lack of political will and out-dated cultural perceptions. It is also not just a question of the education system being modern or practical enough because it is difficult to define what modern and practical means for different people.

An ideal education system must be holistic and while it must cater to the needs of the job market, it must also water the seeds of intellectual development, novelty, innovation and buttressing of self-esteem and confidence. All these lineaments will be present in a brilliant employee and a powerful leader in the employment arena. However, even if education cannot solve the problem, it can play a time-altering role in the entire process and movement towards a more stalwart nation-state.Our pails are filled, but our fires are buzzing to be lit. And without that fire, our education system shall fall flat, and pull our country along with it.