Reasons for Low Literacy Rate in Pakistan

Literacy rate is low in almost all the developing countries like Pakistan. However, Pakistan, unfortunately, has the slavish and feudal spell of colonialism in which education was only the privilege of the well-to-do, and the poor were not considered worth educating, as their only fate was the manual labor and blue-collar jobs. It is a pity that 97% of the population of our country is Muslims whose religion has declared literacy compulsory for every man or woman irrespective of his/her social, physical, financial, or cultural status. This shows that we are at such a terribly pathetic stage of our history where we are
backward on educational, religious, secular, moral, and rational grounds... we have forgotten that education not only assists in making a living but also shows the right, peaceful and happiest path of lie.

It is a pity that soon after independence; our county was savagely and brutally exploited by the opportunist, time-server and selfish politicians at home, and by the imperial powers abroad. The despotic and greedy feudal lords, the greedy ruling elites and the corrupt and money-grubbing bureaucracy made every attempt to keep our nation intellectually backward so as to gather as much of the Mammon as possible. If politicians in a case spoke about the opening of schools, the schools were often suggested in the constituencies of his rivals. The snobbish and lusty ruling elite always considered the masses to get as much education to be able to just serve in their enterprises in the best benefit of these inhuman tycoons. The commission-agent and money-spinner bureaucrats advocated and implemented the policies that could raise them from the status of rank officers to billionaires. The role of the big guns of Army was also domineering, impersonal and apartheid. All these elements followed the dictations, devised by the foreign imperialism, of keeping our nation ignorant and if in any case literate but intellectually bankrupt.


The role of local intelligentsia and intellectuals has also been very disappointing. They wasted most of the government’s and the nation’s time, labor, and intellectual and financial resources in just arguing, debating, advocating and analyzing the medium of education, the system of education, and the aims, objectives, goals, methodologies and practical applications of the kind of education that they preferred.


It is a fact that a common Pakistani family, irrespective of its social, physical, financial or cultural status allocates 10% to 50% of its finances to. This shows its seriousness and sense of the value of education in contrast with the government who has never increased the education in contrast with the government who has never increased the education budget to just 1%. Thus, it is not the nation that does not want or strive to be educated but the government along with all of its different facets. Therefore, a worrying consequent of this is that the 40% of the population of our country, who finds it very hard to make both ends meet, and could not find time out of the labor of its nerd living, remains illiterate. Thus millions of our countrymen, who are compelled to work at workshops, hotel, showrooms, shopping arcades, service stations, transport, different markets of various commodities, farms and fields, mines, harbors and ports, and domestic and industrial enterprises, wander throughout their precious lives in the chaos of ignorance, unawareness and illiteracy.


As it’s as general rule that if you don’t spend much, in the sense of time, labor and intellectual and financial resources on something, to can’t produce quality in that thing; so is the deteriorating, backward, outdated, unpragmatic and inefficient education system of Pakistan. Our educational policies and systems, institutions whether public or private, teachers and consequently the students, all are pathetically and tragically unproductive.

English Essays