* Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Sometimes it’s more comfortable just to tune out bad news. Then something so awful happens that you simply have to sit up and take notice.
On December 16, just such an atrocity took place in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Militants entered the Army Public School and killed 145 people, including 132 schoolchildren.
Slaying so many students and teachers in the very school that was supposed to be their sanctuary is impossible to ignore, whether you’re living in London, Los Angeles or Liberia.
The children’s parents saw them off to school that morning, perhaps with a hug or a reminder not to forget their homework. But they were all our children that day and their fate haunts every one of us.
It is imperative that Pakistanis look into the eyes of the extremists and say categorically, “No more.” The persecution of schoolchildren must stop now and education must be protected as a right of every Pakistani child.
Even when the headlines move on—as, inevitably, they already have—our resolve to be agents of change must remain.
The very thought of opposing learning is an anathema to right-minded people of any race or religion. The terrorists do, nonetheless, fear education for the very reason that it is an antidote to their extremism.
Knowledge brings with it the opportunity to challenge, to think for oneself. It offers an escape from the ignorance that leads too many bright young impressionable Pakistani minds away from reason and into the dogma of hatred and intolerance.
Pakistan is a vibrant, beautiful country with a burgeoning population full of expectation and potential. Its problems have nothing to do with faith and everything to do with the intolerance of a small minority of violent extremists who find perverse glory in a school attack as a means of settling scores or another ridiculous effort to prey on the minds of gullible youth, the uneducated and the misinformed. There is a deep pool of vulnerable youth to pull from and it’s getting deeper.
Of Pakistan’s almost 200 million people, nearly 25 percent cannot read or write at more than a basic level. National statistics report that only 70 percent of children are enrolled in primary schools, and an alarming 50 percent drop out before reaching the fifth grade. The state of the public school system is bleak, to say the least.
Poor education is a huge part of Pakistan’s problem. Education also holds many of the answers to overcoming its problems.
Knowing there’s only a small window for educating young children, my business friends and I formed a non-profit, The Citizens Foundation (TCF), to build and manage schools in less privileged areas of Pakistan. We started with five schools in some of Karachi’s poorest slums 20 years ago. There are now more than 1,000 TCF schools across Pakistan and over the next few years, we will dedicate another 141 schools in memory of the victims at the Peshawar school. This is how we express our rejection of the violence, by staying on course towards our goal of education for all children.
In the aftermath of Peshawar, Irfan Muzaffar, an educator, researcher and education reform activist with the UK-based Educational and Social Research Collective, doesn’t see Pakistan as a country without hope and dreams, but as a nation “in which ‘seeds of change’ have been planted.”
“The only true homage to those who laid down their lives is a transformation in the state of our education. No child should be left alone to drift into the abyss of terrorism. None of them should have their life choices curtailed by being placed in religious seminaries at a tender age,” he adds.
But then Muzaffar is acutely aware that a broken education system is at the root of Pakistan’s troubles. He understands what that means for security issues that extend far beyond its borders.
But I worry that the rest of the world will overlook the importance of educating Pakistan’s youth. The recent horrific events in Paris are symptomatic of the issues we are facing with extremism. The Peshawar massacre was at the very root of the problem. Too much is at stake to take the easy way out and look for short-term solutions.
At an education reform conference in Washington, DC, last October, co-hosted by TCF and the Wilson Center, former US national security advisor Bruce Riedel warned that Washington had allowed Pakistan to slip off the foreign policy agenda. “That’s not a policy. Giving up is not a policy,” he added. “This country is far too important to just neglect.”
A second TCF-hosted conference on education reform at UC Berkeley in California in February will now take on added urgency. We believe that the only way forward is focused dialogue on solutions to the grave social malaise that grips Pakistan.
The world cannot tune out Pakistan any longer. Our common future could depend on educating Pakistani children.
Mushtaq Chhapra is Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the The Citizens Foundation.
