By Tom

I’ve been in Pakistan now for almost a week, conducting workshops and attending an international education conference. The conference was hosted by Beaconhouse Schools, a private school system based in Lahore that has branches all over Pakistan, as well as several other countries. In the past week I’ve learned an amazing amount about Pakistan in general and their education system in particular:

•  There is no pre-service teacher training in Pakistan. None. You learn it all on the job. Nobody goes to college to become trained as a teacher. In fact, teachers may or may not have gone to college. Most likely, they’ve only been through high school.
• You cannot support a family on a teacher’s salary in Pakistan, which is about $75-$100 per month. If you’re a teacher in Pakistan, you’re a woman who’s either married to a guy who makes good money, or you’re living at home with your parents.
• Unless you teach in a high school. High school teachers make a living wage. But there aren’t very many of them, because there aren’t a whole lot of high school students.
• There are basically two school systems in Pakistan. There’s the private system, which is fairly progressive, or at least heading in that direction, and the public system, which is apparently vastly inferior.
• The public school system is not free. It doesn’t cost much, maybe five bucks a month, but it is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. Either 5% or 30% of the children go to private schools, depending on who you talk to and the point that they’re trying to make.
• There’s also the Madrassa school system, which nobody likes to talk about.
• Only about 40% of Pakistan’s children actually go to school. Forty percent. It might be twice that high in the bigger cities, but Pakistan is primarily a rural country.
• I met a guy named Muhammad Ayub. He started a school in Islamabad. He teaches at night, after work, during his free time. He was sick of watching kids with nothing else to do, digging through the garbage, trying to help their families survive. His school has no buildings, no desks, no chairs, and no books. It’s a teacher standing in front of a bunch of kids who are sitting outside in the dark, on the ground, writing information onto notebooks. And they’re happy to be there. Some of them have gone on to college. When he spoke at the conference I started to cry. If you want to join me in donating some cash to this guy, his email address is muhammad_ayub13@yahoo.com.
• The Prime minister also spoke at our conference. The attendees were polite and attentive, but they were primarily waiting to hear about the government’s support for education. Nobody cried.
• Writing bulleted lists is a lot easier than real writing; you don’t have to worry about connecting ideas with transitions.
• Teachers complain about the same things in Pakistan as they do in the US: The kids don’t pay attention, the curriculum is too prescriptive, the curriculum isn’t prescriptive enough, there’s not enough time for collaboration and there’s too much time spent collaborating.
• The biggest concern among the teachers at this conference was finding a balance between accountability and a teacher’s freedom and responsibility to teach lessons that are meaningful to his or her specific students. Hmm.
• The food in Pakistan is delicious. Absolutely delicious. Imagine Indian food, only better and slightly spicier. My favorite was the goat brain stew. Be careful, though, because it doesn’t taste nearly as good on the way back up. Trust me.
• The traffic in Lahore is unreal. It consists of cars, trucks, three-wheeled taxis, bicycles, motorcycles and donkey carts engaged in a 50 MPH free-for-all. It literally took me several minutes to figure out which side of the street the traffic was supposed to be on. (It’s the left) I have never seen bolder driving. I actually saw a guy getting a ticket, and I can only imagine what he did to attract that kind of attention.
• I have never worked so hard in my life. Before the conference even started, I spent three full days training 30 teacher leaders. During the conference, it got even more hectic: I presented a two hour session on brain-based learning, I hosted a two-hour discussion session on the future direction for the school system, and I was involved in three panel discussion, one of which I moderated. It was exhausting. But fun.
• Pakistanis are the most beautiful, warm-hearted, hospitable and generous people I have ever met. They are appalled and sickened by the recent violence in their country.